1824, he died at Sandusky, Ohio, May 8, 1899. His father, Gen. Peter Force (born 1790, died 1868), Mayor of Washington City, was a life-long historical student, book-collector, and editor, whose nine folio volumes, The American Archives, devoted to our Revolutionary history, are his best and most permanent monument. The Force family were of French Huguenot descent, and distinguished for patriotic devotion to principle.
Manning F. Force had the good fortune to receive his early education in the classical school founded at Alexandria, Va., by Benjamin Hallowell, that distinguished scholar and leader in the Society of Friends. He entered Harvard College at seventeen, graduating in 1845 and from the Law School in 1848, and settled in Cincinnati in 1849, where he practised law as a member of the firm of Walker, Kebler, & Force until 1861. He was a prominent member of the Cincinnati Literary Club, to which belonged Salmon P. Chase, Stanley Matthews, M. D. Conway, Murat Halstead, Charles P. James, A. R. Spofford, and others, and which celebrates the half-century of its existence the present year. To this society he contributed some of those scientific and historical essays of marked value, which have since been published.
Early in 1861 he enlisted in the Union army as lieutenant-colonel of an Ohio regiment, served bravely at Fort Donelson and Pittsburg Landing, marched with Sherman in Georgia, was severely wounded, but returned promptly to the front, was promoted to be a colonel and brigadier-general, and received a major-general's brevet "for especial gallantry before Atlanta."
Returning to Cincinnati, General Force was elected a Judge of Common Pleas in 1867, and reelected in 1871. In 1877 he was chosen Judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati, and reelected to the same high office in 1882. Among other honors which came to him, he was President of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, member of many historical and scientific societies, and professor in the Cincinnati Law College. When declining health compelled him to withdraw from arduous judicial labors, he was appointed commandant of the Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Home, at Sandusky, an office which he held until his death. Always high-minded and chivalrous, he had a contemplative bent, and a certain coolness of temperament, free from that ardor which often outruns the judgment. The bibliography of General Force's writings includes the following, besides other papers which cannot here be enumerated:
"The Scholar: an Address at Kenyon College" (1855). "Prehistoric Man: the Primitive Inhabitants of Western Europe" (1868).
