Edward Everett

Everett, Edward

Born:  April 11, 1794 
Died:  January 15, 1865

Edward Everett was a U.S. representative and senator from Massachusetts, diplomat, secretary of state, university professor and president, and vice-presidential nominee of the Constitutional Union party in the 1860 election.
Everett was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Lucy Hill Everett, daughter of a wealthy family, and Oliver Everett, a judge and cleric, who died when the boy was eight. In 1811, young Everett graduated from Harvard College with highest honors. After completing his divinity degree in 1814, he began ministering at the Brattle Street Unitarian Church, Boston's most distinguished clerical position at the time. The next year, however, Everett accepted an endowed chair of Greek Literature at Harvard. The college paid him full salary to study at Göttingen University in Germany, where he received his Ph.D. in 1817. He studied and traveled throughout Europe for two more years, then returned to Harvard in 1819. Everett also became editor of the North American Review, the nation's leading literary journal, where he helped inspire the American Romantic movement. He married Charlotte Gray Brooks in 1822; they had six children.

Already a renowned public speaker, Everett won a Congressional seat in 1824, as a member of John Quincy Adams's National Republicans. During his five terms in Congress (1825-1835), Everett promoted industrialization, trade protectionism, a national bank, and opposed the forced removal of the Cherokees and other tribes from the South to the West. Because of the economic ties between the Massachusetts textile industry and Southern cotton plantations, he did not criticize slavery.

Everett helped found the Whig party in his home state, and was elected to the first of four, one-year terms as governor of Massachusetts in 1835. As governor, he supported funding for internal improvements and public education, including the establishment of America's first teachers' college in 1839. That same year, he was defeated for reelection by one vote.

In 1841, President William Henry Harrison, a Whig, named Everett as minister to Great Britain, where he served until 1845. In that post, he helped ease Anglo-American tensions over a border dispute and other issues, resulting in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. Everett served as president of Harvard from 1846 to 1849, during which the Lawrence Scientific School was established, and black men were allowed to take the college's entrance exam (none was admitted).

In 1850, Everett returned to the state department under Secretary Daniel Webster, authoring the Hülsemann Letter which stated American sympathy for the Hungarian revolution. Upon Webster's death, President Millard Fillmore tapped Everett to head the state department during the administration's remaining four months. In his short tenure as secretary of state, Everett was involved in negotiations which led to a commercial treaty with Japan (1854), and he issued a strongly-worded renunciation of a British-French proposal to guarantee Spain's permanent control of Cuba.

In early 1853, Everett was elected to the U.S. Senate by the Massachusetts legislature. He denounced the Kansas-Nebraska bill which opened the territories to slavery, but an absence caused by illness prevented him from voting against the bill. Constituents, angered over his failure to vote against the pro-slavery measure, forced his resignation after only 15 months in office. As the slavery issue increasingly polarized opinion during the 1850s, Everett tried to stake out a moderate position, particularly through public speeches delivered across the country. His orations emphasized the patriotic and nationalistic themes of union, most notably in his speech "The Character of Washington."

In 1860, Everett was nominated for vice president by the Constitutional Union party. He and presidential nominee John Bell of Tennessee, representing the conservative remnant of the former Whig party, vaguely called for adherence to union and the constitution over the divisive issue of slavery. They did well in the border states but lost to the Republican ticket headed by Abraham Lincoln.

Once the Civil War began, Everett became a leading public spokesman for the Union military cause. On November 19, 1863, he was the keynote speaker at the dedication of the Gettysburg national cemetery, where he delivered a two-hour oration. Everett's words, however, were eclipsed at the time and ever since by the brief closing remarks of President Lincoln's famous "Gettysburg Address." A humbled Everett remarked to the president afterward, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself, that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." In 1864, Everett strongly supported Lincoln's reelection, but did not live to see the president's second inauguration.

Sources consulted: American National Biography; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

Source consulted: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

Francis Blair

 Blair, Francis Preston, Sr

Born:  April 12, 1791 
Died:  October 18, 1876 

Francis Blair was an influential journalist and behind-the-scenes politico who was a leading force in Abraham Lincoln’s presidential nomination in 1860. Blair had earlier been a Democrat and a member of President Andrew Jackson’s unofficial group of advisors known as the "kitchen cabinet." He established the Washington Globe (1830-1849), which he edited, as an organ of the Democratic party. In 1834 he was one of the developers of the Congressional Globe, which continues today as the Congressional Record. Blair became involved in the free-soil movement in the 1840s and helped found the Republican party in the mid-1850s. During the Civil War he gained President Lincoln’s approval to conduct peace negotiations with Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The talks were unsuccessful. After the war the elder Francis Blair found himself in opposition to the Reconstruction policies of the Radical Republicans, so he rejoined the Democratic party.

One of Blair’s sons, Montgomery, served as Lincoln’s postmaster general. Montgomery Blair was a conservative and former Democrat from Missouri. In 1864 he was forced to resign as part of an informal deal that saw Radical Republican John C. Frémont, Blair’s bitter enemy from Missouri, withdraw from the presidential race. The younger son, Frank (Francis Jr.), served in the Union army in the Missouri theater (for a time), where he was at odds with General Frémont. Frank Blair rose to the rank of major general. In 1868 he was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for vice president.

Sources consulted:Harper’s Encyclopedia of United States History; FunkandWagnalls.com; “Francis Blair,� Richard Latner, “Crisis at Fort Sumter� Website, Mark M. Boatner, The Civil War Dictionary; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln.

Hannibal Hamlin

Hamlin, Hannibal

Born:  August 27, 1809  Died:  July 4, 1891

Hannibal Hamlin was a U.S. representative and a U.S. senator from Maine and U.S. vice president (1861-1865) under President Abraham Lincoln. Hamlin worked at a variety of jobs before being admitted to the bar in 1833. As a Democrat he served in Maine's lower house (1836-1841), occasionally as its speaker (1837, 1839, 1840), in the U.S. House of Representatives (1843-1847), and in the U.S. Senate (1848-1856). In 1856 he switched to the Republican party and was elected as Maine's first Republican governor. After less than two months in office he was elected to the U.S. Senate (1857-1861).In 1860 he was selected by the Republicans to be the vice-presidential running-mate of Abraham Lincoln. Because of his darker complexion, rumors circulated that he was part black. In 1864, hoping to gain the support of War Democrats, the Republican party replaced Hamlin with Democrat Andrew Johnson, who ran with Lincoln under the National Union label. After the Civil War Hamlin again served in the U.S. Senate (1869-1881) where he supported the Reconstruction policies of the Radical Republicans. He ended his political career as U.S. minister to Spain (1881-1882).

Source consulted: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress; The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, ed. William A. DeGregorio.

Herschel Johnson

Johnson, Herschel Vespasian

Born:  September 18, 1812  Died:  August 16, 1880

Herschel Johnson was a Georgia governor, judge, and U.S. senator, who was the vice-presidential nominee of the Northern wing of the Democratic party in 1860. In 1834 he graduated from the University of Georgia and was admitted to the bar. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1843 and for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1847. He completed the U.S. Senate term of Walter Colquitt (1848-1849). Thereafter he was a superior court state judge (1849-1853) and governor of Georgia (1853-1857). After the Democratic party divided in 1860, primarily Northern delegates selected him as Stephen Douglas's vice-presidential running-mate. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president and the secession of Georgia, Johnson remained loyal to his state. During the Civil War he served in the second Confederate congress (1862-1865). In 1866 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, but Radical Republicans in Congress refused to seat him. Subsequently, he practiced law and served as a circuit court judge (1873-1880) in Georgia.

Source consulted: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

James Buchanan

James Buchanan

Born:  April 23, 1791  Died:  June 1, 1868

James Buchanan was a Democratic politician and diplomat whose single term as U.S. president (1857-1861) saw seven states from the Deep South secede from the union. He is often considered to have been among the worst presidents in American history.

James Buchanan was born near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, to Elizabeth Speer Buchanan and James Buchanan, a storekeeper. He attended school at a local academy then nearby Dickinson College, graduating in 1809. He studied law in Lancaster and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1812. He proved to be a successful lawyer and an astute investor, quickly accumulating substantial wealth.

Buchanan entered politics at an early age, serving in the Pennsylvania legislature (1814-1816) as a Federalist and in the U.S. House of Representatives (1821-1831). He eventually became a Democrat and a supporter of Andrew Jackson, who as president appointed him to be the U.S. minister to Russia (1832-1833). After he returned to America at the end of Jackson’s second term, the Pennsylvania legislature elected Buchanan to the U.S. Senate. His closest friends were Southerners and he took a pro-Southern position on most sectional issues, including slavery. He believed that the institution of slavery was legally and constitutionally protected, and he endorsed the exclusion of abolitionist materials from the U.S. mails, the gag rule that tabled antislavery petitions to Congress, and the annexation of Texas as a slave state.

In 1844 Buchanan was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, but a deadlocked convention turned to dark horse candidate James K. Polk. After Polk became president, he appointed Buchanan as his secretary of state, but, dismayed with the Pennsylvanian’s indecisiveness, the president largely administered foreign policy himself. In 1848 and 1852 Buchanan again unsuccessfully sought his party’s presidential nomination. Although he hoped to serve as secretary of state once more under President Franklin Pierce, he was assigned to be minister to Great Britain.

Buchanan gained notoriety in his new position when he and the American ministers to Spain and France met in Ostend, Belgium, in 1854 to draft a policy recommendation for President Pierce. They suggested that the United States try to buy Cuba and, if Spain was unwilling, to seize the island by force. When the Ostend Manifesto, as it was dubbed, was leaked to the press, it created an uproar, with supporters and detractors dividing primarily along sectional lines.

In early 1856 Buchanan resigned and returned to America in order to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. This time, he was successful. He went on to win the presidency with a plurality of the vote against two other candidates. Some southerners had threatened to secede if the Republican nominee, John C. Frémont, won the election. During his presidential term, therefore, Buchanan attempted to appease southern concerns in order to preserve the union. His policies, however, only contributed to more sectional animosity.

In the interim between election and inauguration, Buchanan tried to exert undue influence on one of the Supreme Court justices who was deciding the Dred Scot case. The decision, announced two days after his inauguration, affirmed in sweeping terms the southern view that neither the federal nor territorial government could ban slavery in the territories. Although the president thought the decision would settle the matter, it further exacerbated sectional tensions, including within the Democratic party, and strengthened the Republican party.

Buchanan’s handling of the slavery issue in the Kansas territory also widened the divide between northern and southern Democrats. To the dismay of Stephen Douglas, leader of the northern wing of the party, Buchanan endorsed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution. Submitted to Congress by a rump legislature, it would have allowed Kansas to enter the union as a slave state, against the wishes of the anti-slavery majority in the territory. The Buchanan administration did everything it could to ensure passage, including a resort to bribery. While the Senate approved the Lecompton Constitution, it was narrowly rejected by the House after a bitter fight. The damage done to the Democratic party and national unity was almost irreparable.

President Buchanan pursued an expansionist foreign policy, stoking Republican fears of a political conspiracy to expand slavery. His administration failed in attempts to purchase Alaska and Cuba and to impose a protectorate on northern Mexico, but did secure trade treaties with China and Japan. The Buchanan presidency was plagued by a series of scandals, making his administration one of the most corrupt in American history. An economic depression also undermined the president’s popularity.

Douglas had broken publicly with Buchanan over the Lecompton Constitution, so the president worked behind the scenes to derail the senator’s reelection in 1858. Douglas prevailed, but discord with the Democratic party increased. The final break came at the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Buchanan aides joined forces with southern radicals to stop Douglas’s nomination for president. After the convention failed to endorse a federal slave code for the territories, the southern delegates walked out and reconvened in Richmond to nominated Vice President John Breckinridge for president. The northern Democrats met in Baltimore and nominated Douglas. The split in the Democratic party allowed the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to win the presidency.

When seven states of the Deep South left the union after Lincoln’s election, Buchanan condemned northern antislavery agitators. The lame-duck president denied both a constitutional right to secede and the constitutional authority of the president to intervene and stop the process. Instead, he called for a constitutional convention to draft amendments protecting slavery in the South and in the territories. Yet, Buchanan remained a unionist and would not recognize the Confederate seizure of federal property. After the Star of the West, an unarmed

Henry Raymond was the first and long-time editor of the New York Times and a Republican politician.

Henry Raymond was born in Lima, New York, to Lavinia Brockway Raymond and Jarvis Raymond, who were farmers. A precocious child, young Raymond was reading at age three and reciting speeches at age five. He studied at a local Methodist prep school, then at the University of Vermont, where he was a standout speaker and a contributing writer for the New Yorker, edited by Horace Greeley. Raymond graduated summa cum laude in 1840. That same year he entered politics by campaigning for William Henry Harrison, the Whig presidential candidate.

Raymond moved to New York City hoping to gain full-time employment with the New Yorker. After a brief apprenticeship, he was made an editorial assistant, but had to augment his low salary by writing items for out-of-state newspapers and ad copy for patent medicines. In 1841 Greeley launched the New York Tribune, a penny paper that served as the organ of the Whig party, and Raymond followed the editor as his chief assistant. Although both men were Whigs, Raymond disagreed with his boss’s affinity for reform schemes, especially socialism. In 1843 he left the Tribune for a better-paying position as associate editor for the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, published by James Watson Webb. In 1848 Raymond joined forces with representatives from five other New York newspapers to form a cooperation news-gathering service, the Associated Press.

In 1844 and 1848 Raymond campaigned for the Whig presidential candidates Henry Clay and Zachary Taylor, respectively. He also ran for public office himself, gaining election to the New York state legislature in 1849. Reelected in 1850, his Whig colleagues in the majority selected him to serve as speaker. In that same year he also began a six-year stint as the first managing editor of Harper’s Monthly. At this time he began to speak and write against the immorality of slavery and its expansion into the western territories. When Webb censored one of Raymond’s Courier and Enquirer editorials, he quit. In 1851 Raymond and George Jones founded the New York Times, with Raymond serving as its first editor. It quickly enjoyed high circulation and became one of the nation’s leading newspapers.

In 1852 Raymond was a major force behind the Whig nomination of Winfield Scott for president. The editor gained renown for an anti-slavery speech he delivered at the convention, even though the delegates crafted a platform that waffled on the issue. In 1854 New York Whigs nominated Raymond for lieutenant governor. During the campaign he spoke against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory. He and the Whig candidate for governor, Myron Clark, were elected by a slim margin.

The days of the Whig party were numbered, though, and like many northern Whigs, Raymond gravitated to the new Republican party. In fact, he was one of the founders of the Republican party in New York and helped draft its original charter. He transformed the Times into a solidly Republican newspaper, although it was officially independent of the party apparatus. In 1857 the Times moved into a new five-story building on the corner of Nassau Street and Park Row. In 1859 he personally covered the Franco-Austrian War for the paper, sending back realistic battle reports.

Raymond traveled to the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago as a delegate for fellow-New Yorker, Senator William Henry Seward, but loyally endorsed the party’s eventual nominee, Abraham Lincoln. During the campaign Raymond published a series of open letters to former Representative William Yancey, a southern fire-eater who was traveling through the North arguing for the constitutionality of secession. The Times editor countered with the theory that the constitution created a perpetual union that could not be dissolved, and that secession would provoke war.

During the Civil War the Times was a staunchly pro-Union paper, and it shifted from its prewar anti-slavery-expansion stance to endorse abolition as a war aim. Raymond attended some of the battles himself, including First Bull Run (Manassas) at which he prematurely telegrammed of Union victory. For protection during the Draft Riots in New York City, he installed Gatling guns on the roof of the Times building. Under his direction, the Times expanded its circulation and influence and was barely able to keep up with the demand for its papers.

Raymond was elected to the state legislature in 1861 and was again chosen as speaker. In early 1863 he hoped to take Preston King’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate, but Edwin Morgan was selected, instead. Raymond was in accord with Lincoln’s policies and authored a campaign biography of the president in 1864 and drafted the National Union platform. That same year the Times editor was elected to Congress by a margin of less than 500 votes. He strongly supported Lincoln and, initially, his successor, Andrew Johnson, against the Radical Republicans. After voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1866, though, he voted for the 14th Amendment that granted citizenship and federal civil rights protection to black Americans. Critics accused him of inconsistency.

In 1866 Raymond organized a National Union convention, which Radicals condemned for its control by Democrats. His involvement cost the Times readership and, therefore, revenue. Within a few months he concluded that the Radicals were correct about the National Union party, and the Times endorsed the Radical Republican candidate for New York governor and began criticizing President Johnson. In Congress, however, Raymond voted against both the impeachment resolution and the Radicals’ military Reconstruction bills. After Raymond’s term ended, Johnson nominated him to be minister to Austria, but the Senate tabled the nomination indefinitely. He remained as the editor of the Times until his death in 1869.

Fort Sumter, Buchanan took no further provocative action and handed the precarious situation over to the incoming president, Abraham Lincoln.

Buchanan retired to his "Wheatland" estate outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Reviled by critics, the former president published his memoirs in 1866 in which he defended his public actions as constitutional and proper.

Source consulted:American National Biography

James Gordon Bennett

James Gordon Bennett, Sr

Born:  September 1, 1795  Died:  June 1, 1872

James Gordon Bennett was the founder and the editor of the New York Herald, a leading New York daily of national influence and importance. He was one of a core group of publishers and editors who transformed and modernized journalism in the mid-nineteenth century.

James Gordon Bennett was born in New Mill (Keith), Scotland, to a Roman Catholic farming couple (names unknown). He attended public school, as required by law, then at fifteen he entered Blair College, a Catholic seminary in Aberdeen, to train for the priesthood, as his family desired. He had been having doubts about Catholicism and organized religion in general, so he left the seminary after four years. He later renounced his faith and was stridently critical of the Catholic Church in his editorials. Although evidence is limited, he apparently spent the next five years traveling to historical sights in Scotland, reading, and occasionally writing for a periodical.

In 1819 Bennett emigrated to Nova Scotia where he taught bookkeeping, then moved to Portland, Maine, and on to Boston by January 1820, where he was enthralled by the historical sights of the Revolutionary War. He worked for three years in Boston as a proofreader and a bookseller for a printing house, then was hired by the Charleston Courier in South Carolina. He translated news from Spanish newspapers for the Courier, and was able to observe the slavery system for which he gained sympathy. After ten months he moved, in late 1823, to New York City where he worked as a freelance newspaper writer and editorial assistant.

In late 1826 he was hired by Mordecai Noah as the Albany and Washington correspondent for the New York Enquirer. Bennett has been credited with introducing the French style of writing with panache and verve into American journalism which had been predominated by a more stolid, argumentative English style. In 1829 the Enquirer merged with James Watson Webb’s New York Courier and Bennett became the associate editor covering political and banking issues. The Courier and Enquirer was the nation’s highest circulation newspaper and placed its power behind the Andrew Jackson administration, with Bennett writing editorials defending the president’s attack on the National Bank. When the paper abruptly switched allegiance, he quit.

Bennett failed in attempts to start his own paper, the New York Globe, and to buy Francis Blair’s Washington Globe. In 1833 he started a new daily, the Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, as a pro-Jackson Democratic paper, but he lost financial support when he criticized Martin Van Buren. He returned to freelancing in New York City, where he noted the phenomenal success of Benjamin Day’s New York Sun, the first penny paper, sold daily by newsboys on the street rather than relying solely on annual subscriptions.

In May 1835 Bennett began publishing the New York Herald, which combined public interest stories, sensational reports of crimes and disasters, and coverage of national and international news. In April 1836 the Herald shocked readers with front-page coverage of the murder of a prostitute, Helen Jewett. During this episode, Bennett is credited with conducting the first newspaper interview. That same year the Herald initiated a cash-in-advance policy for advertisers, which would soon become standard newspaper practice. By the end of the decade the Herald and the Sun were the two highest-circulation dailies in America, a distinction the Herald carried until Bennett’s retirement.

In December 1836 Bennett added a weekly edition of the paper, the Weekly Herald, which was a precursor of 19th century weeklies like Leslie’s and Harper’s and 20th century newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek. He was quick to use new technology or methods for news transmission—railroads, news-boats, carrier pigeons, pony express, telegraph. He added interest to his paper with illustrations produced from woodcuts. The newspaper’s sensationalism and Bennett’s eagerness to attack other editors in print, led to the "Great Moral War" of 1840 in which rivals organized a boycott of the Herald by vendors, advertisers, and subscribers. The boycott was partially successful since the Herald lost circulation which was not regained until 1844.

The Herald was officially independent of party ties, a fact reflected in its presidential endorsements of Whigs Harrison and Taylor, Democrats Polk and Pierce, and Republican Frémont. In his editorials, Bennett advocated America’s expansion into all of North America and the Caribbean as its "Manifest Destiny." In New York state and municipal politics, he usually supported challengers against incumbents. He defended slavery and Southern states’ rights, but balked at slavery’s expansion.

Although he had backed Frémont in 1856, Bennett threw his support to the Buchanan administration as sectional tensions rose. In 1860 the Herald at first endorsed John Breckinridge, then in August shifted to John Bell. Even though he opposed Lincoln’s election and presidential policies, Bennett backed the Union cause in the Civil War. He promoted General George McClellan, but the Herald endorsed no candidate in the 1864 presidential race. After Lincoln’s assassination, Bennett took a lead role in transforming the late president into a martyr. The editor favored most of Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction proposals against those of the Radical Republican congressmen.

In 1866 Bennett handed the reins of the Herald, still the highest-circulation and most profitable newspaper in America, over to his profligate, 25-year-old son, James Gordon Bennett Jr., under whose control the paper declined steadily. On his deathbed Bennett Sr. returned to the Catholic faith and received last rites in 1872.

Sources consulted: American National Biography; Dictionary of Literary Biography; James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s “New York Herald� and the Rise of the Popular Press.

John Bell

John Bell

Born:  February 18, 1796  Died:  September 10, 1869

John Bell is best remembered as the 1860 presidential nominee of the Constitutional Union party, one of four candidates vying to become the nation's chief executive in that critical election.John Bell was born in Mill Creek, Tennessee, to Margaret Edminston Bell and Samuel Bell, a blacksmith and a farmer. In 1814 he graduated from Cumberland College (Nashville) and two years later began to practice law. In 1817 he was elected to the state senate, then after serving one term he became a prominent attorney in Nashville. In 1827 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he would serve seven consecutive terms. Although he personally opposed President Andrew Jackson's veto of the charter renewal for the Bank of the United States, Bell felt politically compelled to support the president's popular gesture. The congressman did, however, oppose efforts to remove bank deposits from the national bank. Bell was several times a losing candidate for speaker of the house, developing a rivalry with fellow Tennessean James K. Polk.

In the late-1830s Bell began affiliating with the nascent Whig party. In 1841 he was appointed by the first Whig president, William Henry Harrison, to be secretary of war, but served only a few months. Upon Harrison's sudden death, the new president, John Tyler, sided with the states' rights Democrats, provoking Bell and other cabinet members to resign in September 1841. For the next six years Bell invested in railroads and manufacturing, while working in Tennessee politics against Polk. Although his rival was elected president in 1844, Bell helped the Whig party deny the Democratic nominee victory in his home state.

In 1847 Bell was again elected to the state legislature, whose Whig majority promptly promoted him to the first of two terms in the U.S. Senate. He reluctantly supported the Compromise of 1850, which sought to quell the controversy over the expansion of slavery that the war with Mexico had reanimated. Although initially vacillating on the issue, Bell cast the only Southern vote in the Senate against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Democrats took over the Tennessee legislature and denied Bell a third term, ending his Senate career in March 1859.

A remnant of the defunct Whig party reorganized as the Constitutional Union party and held a national convention in Baltimore in May 1860. Delegates nominated Bell for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president. Their strategy was to win enough electoral votes to send the election into the House of Representatives, which, with four parties competing for the presidency, was a distinct possibility. In the final tally, though, Bell carried only three states-Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia-while Lincoln swept the north to win an electoral college majority.

During "secession winter," Bell at first remained silent, then issued a letter tepidly disavowing the legitimacy and value of secession. In late January Bell denounced secession before a large Nashville audience, then traveled to Washington to meet with President Lincoln. Tennessee voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum on secession, but the state finally left the Union after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops. At that point, Bell endorsed secession unenthusiastically and removed himself from public life. The war did substantial damage to his mines and mills, and he died in 1869.

Source consulted: American National Biography

John Breckinridge

Breckinridge, John Cabell

Born:  January 21, 1821 
Died:  May 17, 1875

John Breckinridge was a U.S Senator from Kentucky, the vice president under James Buchanan, the presidential candidate of the National Democratic party (Southern Democrats) in the critical 1860 election, and a Confederate general and (briefly) the Confederate secretary of war.
John Breckinridge was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to Mary Smith Breckinridge and John Cabell Breckinridge Sr. The family had a tradition of holding public office. Young Breckinridge's father was a state representative and his grandfather had been a U.S. senator. The senior John Breckinridge died in 1823 leaving his son to be raised by the boy's mother and grandmother. In 1839 the young man graduated from Centre College (Kentucky), then studied law at the College of New Jersey before completing his degree at Transylvania University (Kentucky) in 1841. He opened a law practice in Burlington, Iowa, but two years later returned to Kentucky, where he prospered in the profession.

During the Mexican War Breckinridge served as a major with the Kentucky volunteers. At the war's conclusion, he was elected to the state's lower house (1849-1851) as a states' rights Democrat, then won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (1851-1855). He played a key role in adding the repeal of the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery to Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act and in securing House approval for the final bill. Breckinridge himself sponsored no major legislation but was a popular political figure. In 1856 delegates to the Democratic National Convention selected him as James Buchanan's vice-presidential running-mate. Inaugurated when only 36 years old, he was the youngest vice president in American history. Buchanan did not include him in policy-making, so the vice president eagerly awaited returning to the U.S. Senate upon John Crittenden's retirement in 1861.

When the Democratic party split into sectional factions in 1860, Breckinridge was nominated for president by the Southern wing, who called themselves the National Democrats. Concerned that a divided party would allow the Republicans to triumph, he offered to decline the nomination if Douglas would reject his nomination by the Northern wing. Douglas declined, and both men remained in the race. Although Breckinridge was a slaveowner who supported the constitutional protection of slavery and the right of secession, he was not one of the radicals. He captured all the states in the Deep South, but Lincoln won the presidency with an electoral-college majority.

During the interval period, Breckinridge worked for a compromise and supported the attempt by Kentucky's government to remain neutral. When Kentucky formally sided with the Union in September 1861 and state officials tried to arrest him, he joined the Confederate army as a brigadier general. He accumulated a notable military record, fighting at Bowling Green, Shiloh, Baton Rouge, Stones River, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. He rose to the rank of major general, then served as the Confederacy's last secretary of war during what would be the closing months of the war. He opposed efforts to prolong the war with guerrilla fighting after Lee's surrender.

Following the war he fled to Cuba, then to England and finally to Canada. President Andrew Johnson pardoned him on Christmas Day 1868, allowing him to return to Kentucky a few months later. Although he forswore politics, Breckinridge urged sectional reconciliation and criticized the Ku Klux Klan. He was employed as a railroad executive until his death in 1874.

Source consulted: American National Biography

John Forney

Forney, John Wein

Born:  September 30, 1817  Died:  December 9, 1881

John Forney was born in Lancaster, the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country; of German extraction. At the age of thirteen, he left school to begin working, first in a store, then as an apprentice to the printer of the Lancaster Journal. In 1837, he purchased an interest in the financially troubled Lancaster Intelligencer, for which he became editor. In two years, he was able to make the newspaper profitable enough to allow him to merge it with the Journal. Forney used the newspaper to promote the political career of James Buchanan, a fellow Democrat from Lancaster. In 1845, Forney was named by President Polk as surveyor of the port of Philadelphia. Moving to that city, he became co-owner and editor of another newspaper, the Pennsylvanian.

Forney was elected as clerk of the U. S. House of Representatives in 1851, serving in that position until 1855. In 1852 he became editorial writer for a Democratic party newspaper, the Washington Daily Union. In 1854, he became a partner and helped the newspaper secure printing contracts with the House of Representatives, thereby providing it with a handsome, steady income. He left the clerkship of the House to work on Buchanan’s presidential election campaign. After his election in 1856, Buchanan was unable to secure a political position for Forney, so the journalist returned to Philadelphia in 1857 to start an independent Democratic newspaper called the Press. He soon began to support Stephen Douglas in his fight against the Buchanan administration over the Kansas question. Forney was reelected clerk of the House in 1859, and, as a Republican, served as secretary of the Senate from 1861 to 1868.

In 1861, Forney established the Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle, adding a daily edition (the Daily Morning Chronicle) in 1862. The newspaper’s expansion was allegedly at the urging of President Lincoln, who wanted the journal to counter criticism of the administration by the New York Tribune. In the Press and the Chronicle, Forney supported Lincoln and, in the beginning of his term, Andrew Johnson. The editor soon joined the Radical Republicans, though, to become one of the Johnson’s most strident critics. Uncharacteristically, the President refused the temptation to counterattack, explaining "I do not waste my ammunition on dead ducks." But Johnson’s disparaging dismissal of Forney itself became ammunition in the arsenal of Thomas Nast and other political cartoonists who used "dead duck" to symbolize Johnson’s lack of political clout.

In 1870, Forney sold the Chronicle and again returned to Philadelphia, where in 1871 he became collector of the port. In 1878, he established and edited Progress, a weekly magazine. Switching back to the Democratic party, he authored the campaign biography of Democratic Presidential nominee Winfield Scott in 1880. He also published Anecdotes of Public Men (2 vols., 1873-1881), The New Nobility (1881), and other works. He died in Philadelphia.

Sources consulted: Dictionary of American Biography; Mark Summers, The Press Gang.

Joseph Lane

Lane, Joseph

Born:  December 14, 1801  Died:  April 19, 1881

Joseph Lane was a senator from Oregon and the 1860 vice-presidential nominee of the National (or Southern) Democratic party. He was born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, to Elizabeth Street Lane and John Lane. In 1810 the Lane family moved to Henderson, Kentucky, where young Joseph was educated in the common schools and worked in a general store. In 1821 he moved to Indiana to farm, and was elected the next year to the lower house of the state legislature. He was reelected to several terms before winning a seat in the upper house in 1844. He served a brigade commander in the Mexican War, and was brevetted a major general in 1847. President James Polk appointed him as territorial governor of Oregon (1849-1850). He then won the first of four elections as the territory's congressional delegate (1851-1859), and was elected in 1859 as a Democrat to be one the new state's first U.S. senators.

When the Democratic party split over the issue of slavery expansion in 1860, the National (or Southern) Democrats nominated Lane as the vice-presidential running mate of presidential nominee John C. Breckinridge. After their defeat, Lane retired from public life. He died in Oregon in 1881.

Robert M. T. Hunter

Hunter, Robert Mercer Taliaferro

Born:  April 21, 1809  Died:  July 18, 1887

Robert M. T. Hunter was a U.S. senator from Virginia who was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1828 and was admitted to the bar two years later. He served in the Virginia assembly (1834-1837), the U.S. House of Representatives (1837-1843, 1845-1847), and the U.S. Senate (1847-1861). During the Civil War Hunter served as the Confederate secretary of state (1861-1862) and in the Confederate Senate (1862-1865), where he was occasionally president pro tempore. In February 1865 he was one of the Confederacy’s commissioners to the unsuccessful Hampton Roads peace negotiations. After the war he served as Virginia’s state treasurer (1874-1880).

Source consulted:Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

Stephen Douglas

Douglas, Stephen Arnold

Born:  April 23, 1813 
Died:  June 3, 1861

Stephen Douglas was a U.S. Senator, a leading advocate of "popular sovereignty," the drafter of the controversial and consequential Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the presidential nominee of the Northern wing of the Democratic party in 1860.
Stephen Douglas was born in Brandon, Vermont, to Sarah Fisk Douglass and Stephen Arnold Douglass (the younger Douglas dropped the final "s" from his family name in 1846). His father died when he was an infant, and his mother moved the family in with her father and bachelor brother. In his youth, Douglas worked as an apprentice cabinetmaker. He was politically inspired by the presidential campaign of General Andrew Jackson in 1828 and became a life-long Democrat. In 1830 his family moved to Canandaigua in upstate New York, where he studied at the town's academy.

Three years later Douglas began to study law under a local lawyer, but impatiently stopped after six months and moved to the "west," where training and qualification for the bar were less stringent. His journey took him through Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis before he put down stakes in Jacksonville, Illinois, in November 1833. The next year he was admitted to the Illinois bar, although the administering judge urged him to continue his legal studies.

Douglas was one of the pioneers at adapting the new Jacksonian party system-with its committees, conventions and partisanship-to Illinois. He became a leader in the state Democratic party, and was elected state's attorney before he turned 22. In 1836 he was elected to the state house of representatives, but the next year he moved to Springfield and was appointed to the land office of the new state capital. In 1840 he became secretary of state, but was appointed the following year to the state supreme court, the youngest justice ever to serve in that body. In 1838 he had narrowly lost a race for Congress, and in 1842 was unsuccessful in a bid for the U.S. Senate (he was not of legal age to qualify). He finally won a seat in the U.S. House the next year after the Illinois legislature implemented a redistricting plan. He served two terms in the House, then won election in 1846 to the first of three consecutive terms in the U.S. Senate.

In the Senate, Douglas became a leader of the northern Democrats and played a pivotal role in the major issues of one of the most crucial periods (1846-1861) in the nation's history. Nicknamed "the Little Giant," the diminutive Senator (5' 4") was a scrappy fighter and a tireless worker, whose powerful orations on the Senate floor drew capacity crowds to the galleries. He was both an advocate of states' rights and an avid Unionist.

Douglas was also a promoter of America's territorial expansion to fulfill its "manifest destiny," as the catch phrase of the time put it, to become a continental republic from sea to shining sea. To that end, he supported the annexation of Texas and of the entire Oregon Territory and backed the expansionist war against Mexico. To encourage settlement of the new American west, he proposed homestead legislation and pushed Congress to subsidize a transcontinental railroad to run from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast. As chair of first the House then the Senate Committee on Territories, he sponsored bills to establish seven territories: Oregon, Minnesota, Utah, New Mexico, Washington, Kansas, and Nebraska.

It was the Mexican War that reintroduced the issue of slavery into the national political discussion; specifically, whether slavery would be allowed to expand into the western territories. Douglas took a middle ground between the northern antislavery view that the federal government could ban slavery in the territories and the southern proslavery position that the Constitution protected the institution there. He advocated, instead, what he believed was a more democratic, fair, and workable solution: let the voters of the territories decide the issue themselves-"popular sovereignty." The Illinois senator was instrumental in the passage of the Compromise of 1850, which allowed the Utah and New Mexico territories to be organized on the basis of popular sovereignty, while permitting California to enter as a free state, which its residents overwhelmingly desired. He personally believed that slavery was ill-suited for transplantation to the west and that the settlers would reject it.

In order to accelerate the settlement of the west, Douglas drafted and introduced a bill to establish two territorial governments in part of the Louisiana Purchase land. By allowing the citizens of the territories to vote on the slavery issue, Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in that area. Passage of the bill ignited a political firestorm that caused the collapse of the Whig party, the birth of the Republican party, and the widening of a fissure between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic party. Henceforth in the 1850s sectional politics because more volatile and violent. Pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas created competing territorial governments and engaged in bloody guerrilla warfare.

In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that slavery was, as many southerners had insisted, constitutionally protected from interference by federal or territorial government. That decision undercut Douglas's remedy of popular sovereignty, but he responded with his "Freeport Doctrine" (named after one of the sites of the Lincoln-Douglas debates). He argued that territorial citizens could circumvent the letter of the decision by refusing to pass legislation ("slave codes") that supported and protected the institution; consequently, he reasoned, slaveowners would not venture to a territory where their investment in slaves was insecure.

Douglas's tactical response to the Dred Scott decision angered southern Democrats. During the winter of 1857-1858, he further alienated himself from southern Democrats and their northern allies, such as President James Buchanan, when he vehemently opposed the Lecompton constitution, drafted by the proslavery factional legislature in Kansas.

Later in 1858 Douglas held a series of seven debates with his Republican senatorial challenger, Abraham Lincoln. The sole topic discussed was the issue of slavery, and because Douglas was a major figure in national politics, the debates received national press coverage. The debates matched two powerful thinkers and hard-hitting speakers and are justifiably famous in American history. Although Douglas was reelected to the Senate by the Democratic state legislature, Lincoln became a national name for the first time and a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860.

Douglas had been a losing candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852 and 1856, but was in a position to take the prize in 1860. The Democratic nominating convention met in April 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina. The southern delegates arrived determined to have the party endorse in its platform a federal slave code for the territories. The northern delegates, led by Douglas, were equally adamant that their party would not endorse such a territorial slave code. The fierce disagreement led many southern delegates to walk out of the convention and reconvene in Richmond, where they nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge for the presidency. Northern Democrats reconvened in Baltimore and nominated Douglas for the presidency. Meanwhile, the Republicans nominated Lincoln and a group of former Whigs organized the Constitutional Union party and nominated John Bell for president.

It was customary that presidential candidates did not campaign actively for the office. Douglas broke with tradition, however, to undertake a speaking tour where his opposition was strongest, New England and the South. He urged southerners not to leave the union if Lincoln was elected. When the Republican's election provoked the secession of seven states from the deep south, Douglas searched for a compromise that would save the union. Once the Civil War began, he pledged his support to President Lincoln and the fight to save the union. Weakened by years of overwork and excessive drinking, Douglas died in June 1861 while on a trip to secure Illinois' support for the union cause. His final words were a message for his sons: "Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States."

Source consulted: American National Biography