Class of 1815

Clement Alexander Finley was born on May 11, 1797 in Newville, Pennsylvania. His family moved very soon after to Chillicothe, Ohio when his father, a cavalry hero of the Revolutionary War, received a sizable plot of land for his war service. Young Clement was educated in local schools and then returned to Cumberland County to enroll at Dickinson College with the Class of 1815. A tall and reputedly handsome young man, he graduated with his class and then studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his M.D. in 1818. That August, he entered the United States Army's First Infantry as a surgeon's mate.

Service in this regiment took him to Louisiana and Arkansas, first at Fort Smith and then at Fort Gibson, and later to Florida, Missouri, and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After more garrison duty at Fort Dearborn in Illinois and Fort Howard in Wisconsin, he was assigned as chief medical officer for the operations in the Black Hawk War of 1833 and saw campaigning again during the years of the Seminole War. Peace in 1838 brought him back to garrisons in Virginia and New York, as well as a four year assignment "at home" at the Carlisle Barracks. During the Mexican War, he served as medical director for General Zachary Taylor in Texas and then for General Winfield Scott in the Mexico City campaign. His work on both these assignments was curtailed by illness.

George Sweeney was born on November 1, 1796 near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, twenty five miles to the north, and graduated with the class of 1815. Following his graduation, he studied law in Gettysburg and was admitted to the bar there in 1820.

For ten years Sweeney practiced law in Gettysburg and then moved west to Bucyrus in Crawford County, Ohio in 1830. He was named as the prosecutor of Crawford in 1837 and then was elected in the fall of 1838 as a Democrat to the Twenty-sixth Congress from his district, the 14th of Ohio. Although Sweeney was re-elected to the Twenty-seventh Congress in 1840, he was not a candidate in 1842. He moved for a time to Geneseo, Illinois to practice law in 1853, but returned to Bucyrus in 1856. Sweeney was once again elected as district attorney for Crawford County before he retired.

Sweeney gave up his profession in later years to concentrate on the literary and scientific pursuits that had interested him his whole life. On October 10, 1877, George Sweeney died in Bucyrus, Ohio and was buried in the Oakwood Cemetery there. He was eighty years old.

Editor's note: His surname appears in the Congressional Biography as "George Sweeny" and in the College's 1877 announcement of his death as "George Sweney." Reed's 1905 Alumni Record names him as above.