time doing engineering work for railroads and serving as the county surveyor in Crawford County. Political career About 1888 Daniels became involved with politics. In 1890 he purchased the Girard Herald newspaper in order to advance his views, such as that the Republican party should "destroy the trusts" and institute better methods of taxation, such as a graduated estate tax. After his views were endorsed by the local People's Party and County Alliance, he sold the newspaper, considering his job done. He served as a delegate to local and national nominating conventions of the People's Party, including the 1892 Omaha Convention that nominated James B. Weaver. In June 1892 he was nominated in absentia for lieutenant governor by the People's Party and was elected to a two-year term. While lieutenant governor he attracted national attention for his proposed graduated tax on estates. Daniels had been appointed a brigadier general in the Kansas militia (1873-4) by Governor Thomas A. Osborn and while lieutenant governor was made a major general and overall commander by Governor Lorenzo D. Lewelling. In that capacity he commanded units that ended a strike by coal-miners in southeastern Kansas in 1893. Daniels' political career largely ended with the swift decline of the People's Party after the national election of 1896. He is buried in the Girard Cemetery in Girard, Kansas. Political writing Daniels' A Crisis for the Husbandman, self-published in 1889, was the first of a number of works on issues of the day that Daniels wrote. These included A Lesson of Today and a Question of To-morrow (1892), A Sunflower Tangle Over Problems of Taxation (1894), Cutting the Gordian Knot (1896), The Midnight Message of Paul Revere (1896), Man Versus Mammon (1897), Swollen Fortunes and the Problem of the Unemployed (1908), and Graduated Property Taxation (1911). Many of these were published versions of lectures by Daniels. Family Daniels and his wife Eliza Eddy had five children: Frank Leonard (1869–70), Frederic Percy (1871-1950), Walter Horton (1873-1950), Elizabeth Buttrick (1877-1965), and Earle Newton (1880-1970). References External links 1840 births 1916 deaths People from Woonsocket, Rhode Island People from Girard, Kansas Lieutenant Governors of Kansas Kansas Populists People of Rhode Island in the American Civil War Writers from Kansas 19th-century American politicians