Grover Cleveland: Biography of His Life, His Policies, and His Governance

Stephen Grover Cleveland was born on March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey, to Richard Falley Cleveland and Ann Neal Cleveland, the fifth of nine children in a family that embodied the values of hard work, moral rectitude, and religious devotion that characterized middle-class American life in the mid-nineteenth century. His father served as a Presbyterian minister, providing the family with social respectability but limited financial resources that would shape young Grover's understanding of the dignity of honest labor and the importance of fiscal responsibility. The Cleveland household emphasized education, moral instruction, and civic duty while maintaining the modest lifestyle appropriate to a minister's family in an era when religious leaders were expected to set examples of simple living and ethical behavior.

The family's move to Fayetteville, New York, when Grover was four years old placed him in a small community where his father's pastoral duties exposed him to the practical challenges of community leadership while his mother's management of household affairs demonstrated the importance of careful planning and resource management. The Presbyterian emphasis on education and moral development provided Grover with a foundation of learning that emphasized both intellectual development and character formation, while the family's financial constraints taught him valuable lessons about the necessity of hard work and the dangers of extravagant spending that would later influence his approach to both personal and public finances.