B: Babcock through Butler

See below for annotated biographies of Free Soil Party leaders, members and supporters. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.

BABCOCK, James Francis, journalist, born in Connecticut in 1809; died in New Haven, Connecticut, 18 June, 1874. He began newspaper work at an early age, and in 1830 became editor of the New Haven " Palladium," which soon began to issue a daily edition and which he conducted for thirty-one years. He controlled the nominations of the Whig Party for many years, and, though hostile to the Free-Soil Party at its inception, he finally gave it a hearty welcome in 1854. He retained his prestige with the Republican Party for some years, took an active part in furthering the national cause during the war, and, shortly after his resignation as editor of the " Palladium," was appointed, by President Lincoln, collector of the port of New Haven. He retained that office under President Johnson, whose policy he supported; and, after the rupture between the president and the Republicans, Mr. Babcock acted with the Democratic Party, and, after an angry and excited contest, was nominated by them for Congress, but was defeated by the Republican nominee. He was elected by the Democrats to the state legislature in 1873. The legislature of 1874 elected him judge of the Police Court of New Haven.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1887, Vol. I, p. 125.


BACON, Reverend Leonard 1802-1881, clergyman, newspaper editor, author, abolitionist leader.  Bacon edited an antislavery newspaper that supported the Free Soil movement. In 1848 Leonard Bacon  was one of the founders and the senior editor of the Independent, which asserted as a motto, "We stand for free soil.”

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, part 1 pp. 479-481.

BACON, LEONARD (February 19, 1802-December 24, 1881), Congregational clergyman, was born at Detroit, Michigan, the son of Reverend David Bacon [q.v.] and Alice (Parks) Bacon. In his sixth year the family removed to Tallmadge, Ohio, and one of the boy's first memories was of ·a school exhibition in the neighboring town of Hudson in which he and John Brown, later of Harper's Ferry fame, conducted a dialogue. At the age of ten, after his missionary father's defeat and poverty-stricken return to Connecticut, the boy was put under the care of an uncle, whose name he bore, in Hartford. So well was he trained at the Hartford Grammar School that at fifteen he entered the sophomore class of Yale College. Although maintaining a good rank, he fell below the expectations of his classmates, and, at the end of the course (1820), one of them, Theodore D. Woolsey, reproved him because "he had not studied enough and was in danger of hurting himself by superficial reading." This warning and a maturing sense of responsibility so influenced his habits in Andover Theological Seminary, which he entered in the autumn of 1820, that upon graduation he was assigned the principal address. On September 28, 1824, he was ordained as an evangelist by the Hartford North Consociation; it being his intention to go as a missionary to the Western frontier. The next day brought a letter from the ecclesiastical society of the First Church of New Haven, asking him to supply their vacant pulpit. After preaching fourteen sermons he was called by the society with a vote of 68 to 20 to become its minister at a salary of $1,000. He was installed over this noted church on March 9, 1825, when he was twenty-three years of age. The young man was rather appalled by the weight of his responsibilities. In the pews before him sat Noah Webster, the lexicographer, James Hillhouse, senator, Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton-gin, and many of the faculty of the college. The congregation was accustomed to a high order of ministerial ability. His immediate predecessor was Nathaniel W. Taylor, whose sermons were ·an intellectual event; before him, Moses Stuart, distinguished for scholarship and effective speech, had been the pastor. Evidently Leonard Bacon did not at first fulfil the hopes of his parish, for after some months a committee waited upon him, intimating that his sermons were not worthy of the high place he held. His answer was, "Gentlemen, they shall be made worthy." With the years he grew in power and gained hold upon the affections of his people. They were proud of his unusual influence in the city, of the commanding position he occupied in Congregational councils, and of the reputation which extended beyond the boundaries of the denomination. He was the sole and active pastor of the First Church for forty-one years, and pastor emeritus until his death. When it became known that he was leaving the active ministry the corporation of Yale offered him a chair in the Divinity School, and he was acting professor of revealed theology from 1866 to 1871, when he became lecturer on church polity and American church history, holding this position until his death in his eightieth year. He was twice married: in July 1825, to Lucy Johnson of Johnstown, New York, and in June 1847, to Catherine E. Terry of Hartford, Connecticut. Fourteen children were born to him.

Bacon was not primarily a great preacher. Although his sermons were always solid and dignified, they could be on ordinary Sabbaths very dull. But no occasion of unusual significance found him unequal to his task. As a theologian he was in sympathy with the system of thought known as the "New Haven School," yet he held his convictions in a spirit of abundant charity. His style in writing was the clear expression of a practical understanding, glowing with moral earnestness. At times it was made graceful by phrases of rare felicity. A gift of genuine poetic sentiment found expression in several hymns used in the churches of his order. The one beginning

"O God, beneath Thy guiding hand,"

written in 1838 for the second centennial of New Haven and of his church, sprang into immediate popularity and has secured a permanent place in American hymnology.

A natural controversialist, he was never so completely awake and self-possessed as in public debate with no moment available for preparation. Yet he fought as a champion, not as a gladiator. He engaged in no warfare which did not engage his conscience. "He inherited in large measure," wrote a friend, "the old Puritan zeal for making things straight in this crooked world, for compelling magistrates to rule justly, and for beating down the upholders of demoralizing institutions and customs." Yet he was a controversialist who sought to quell controversy. Two theological battles convulsed the Congregational churches of Connecticut during the early years of his ministry. The first was the famous Taylor-Tyler dispute on certain doctrines concerning man's freedom of choice. After the conflict had become so bitter that the followers of Dr. Tyler founded a new theological seminary at East Windsor, since removed to Hartford, Bacon wrote an Appeal to the Congregational Minister of Connecticut against a Division (1840), in which he showed that the two warring factions agreed on twenty-six points; as these more than covered the essential tenets of the Christian religion, he urged that, although the differences might be of importance to the science of theology, they afforded no occasion for brethren to renounce each other. The next pronounced disquiet grew out of the revolutionary teachings of Horace Bushnell [q.v.]. In 1847 Bushnell published his Christian Nurture in which he rejected the prevalent view of the necessity of conscious conversion and advanced the opinion that a child in a Christian household should "grow up a Christian," be trained in the Christian faith, and at the proper time be received into the church without experiencing a dramatic conversion. This was followed in 1849 by a still more unsettling book entitled God in Christ, in which was advanced what has since become known as the "moral influence" theory of the Atonement, in opposition to the prevailing substitutionary or governmental explanation. Bushnell, fiercely attacked, was defended by the Hartford Central Association. So intense was the feeling that fifty-one ministers petitioned the General Association of the state to exclude the Hartford Association from fellowship. Bacon, though not holding Bushnell's views, was influential in passing an ambiguous or mollifying resolution which prevented a division. If he was regarded as the most formidable polemical writer and speaker in the American Congregationalism of his day, he was equally distinguished for the soundness of his judgment. During the Beecher Tilton controversy, a council of churches called by Beecher's opponents in 1874 chose Bacon as moderator, while a later council held in Plymouth Church in 1876, the largest advisory council of its kind ever convened, also elected him moderator.

Perhaps Bacon's chief service to his denomination was his work in arousing Congregationalism to self-consciousness and confidence in its polity. In his early ministry the churches of this order were in a slough of self-distrust. A form of semi-presbyterianism was common among them, and a "Plan of Union," entered into with Presbyterianism, hindered Congregational polity from entering into the developing West. Bacon, as one of the editors of the Christian Spectator from 1826 to 1838, as one of the founders and editor for a score of years of the New Englander, by his speeches at conventions and his influence in national missionary societies, and by his historical studies, did more than any other to awaken the churches of this faith to the value of their heritage. In 1839 he published Thirteen Historical Bacon Discourses, but his most elaborate and permanent work, The Genesis of the New England Churches (1874), was the fruit of his old age. In this he told the story of the beginnings of Congregationalism in England, its establishment at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its struggle until success was assured. It is worthy of note that this successor of John Davenport was much more in sympathy with the principles and polity of the Pilgrims than with those of the Puritans.

Bacon's most conspicuous claim for remembrance rests on his leadership in the anti-slavery cause. In his student days at Andover he wrote a report On the Black Population of the United States (1823) which was extensively circulated in New England, and its severest passages quoted even in Richmond. On going to New Haven he organized a society for the improvement of the colored people of that city. With Garrison and the extreme abolitionists he had no sympathy, and he received from them malignant attacks. In 1846 he published a volume entitled Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays. This fell into the hands of a comparatively unknown lawyer in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. A statement in the preface made a profound impression on the future emancipator: "If that form of government, that system of social order is not wrong,-if those laws of the southern states, by virtue of which slavery exists there and is what it is, are not wrong, nothing is wrong." The sentiment reappeared in Lincoln's famous declaration, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." In 1848 the name of Leonard Bacon appears as one of the founders and the senior editor of the Independent, which asserted as a motto, "We stand for free soil.” Bitter opposition resulted from his anti-slavery work, even in his own church, but looking back on that epoch, he said : "I make no complaint-all reproaches, all insults endured in a conflict with so gigantic a wickedness against God and man, are to be received and remembered, not as injuries but a s honors." During the Civi1 War he was a steadfast supporter of the administration.

In appearance Bacon was of slight and sinewy frame, with a massive head, bushy hair and beard, a face suggestive of thought and intense energy, blue-gray eyes, lips mobile for wit, yet set in firmness, the whole figure denoting a man of vital force expressing itself in intellectual strength.

[Williston Walker, Ten New England Leaders(1901); Leonard Bacon, Pastor of the First Church in New Haven (1882); S. A. W. Duffield, English Hymns (1866); Congregation Yr. Bk. 18 82, pp. 18-21; New Haven Evening Register, Dec: 24, 1881.]

C.A. D-c:


BALDWIN, John Denison, 1809-1883, journalist, clergyman, Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives 1863-1867, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.  Editor of the anti-slavery journal, Republican in Hartford, Connecticut.  Owner, editor of Free-Soil Charter Oak at Hartford, Connecticut.  In 1852 became editor of the Commonwealth in Boston.  Supported Negro causes.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 148-149; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 537; Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe; Sewell, 1976, p.179)


Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

BALDWIN, John Denison, journalist, born in North Stonington, Connecticut, 28 September, 1809; died in Worcester, Massachusetts, 8 July, 1883. He supported himself from the age of fourteen, pursued academical, legal, and theological studies in New Haven, and received the honorary degree of master of arts from Yale College. He was licensed to preach in 1833, was pastor of a church in North Branford, Connecticut, for several years, and made a special study of archaeology. He became editor of the “Republican,” an anti-slavery journal, published in Hartford, and subsequently of the “Commonwealth,” published in Boston. From 1859 he owned and edited the “Worcester Spy.” He was elected to Congress in 1863, and reelected twice. He published “Raymond Hill,” a collection of poems (Boston, 184 7); “Prehistoric Nations” (New York, 1869, and “Ancient America” (1872). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I. pp. 148-149.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 537;

BALDWIN, JOHN DENISON (September 28, 1809-July 8, 1883), journalist, was descended from a Buckinghamshire county family through the emigrant, John Baldwin, who arrived in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1664. Five generations later, at North Stonington, John Denison Baldwin was born, eldest son of Daniel and Hannah (Stanton) Baldwin. Daniel Baldwin was a large land owner, who, suffering reverses, removed, when John was seven, to Chenango County, New York, at that time a wilderness. Here John toiled on the farm until, after another seven years, the family. returned to North Stonington where he was able to attend the village school. At seventeen he was studying at Yale, while supporting himself by public-school teaching. Unable to complete his college course, he began the study of law, then entered Yale Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1834. Ordained in the same year, he became pastor of the Congregational Church at West Woodstock, Connecticut, until 1837. Later he held pastorates at North Branford and North Killingly. As a preacher he is said to have shown sagacity and public spirit. Eager for further education, he studied French, German, and especially archeology. While at North Branford he published The Story of Raymond Hill and Other Poems (1847), which exhibit melancholy beauty and a moral purpose.

From North Killingly he was elected by the Free-Soil party, which he helped to organize in Connecticut, to the legislature, where he sponsored the law establishing the state's first normal school (1850). Reaching the conviction that his services would be more usefully employed in journalism, he abandoned the ministry in 1849 to become owner and editor of the Free-Soil Charter Oak at Hartford. Three years later he removed to Boston, becoming editor of the daily and weekly Commonwealth. Sumner, Henry Wilson, and Theodore Parker were frequent visitors to his office and became life-long friends. In 1859 he embraced the opportunity to purchase, with his sons, the Worcester Spy, which he made one of the leading newspapers of the state. Identifying himself now with the Republican party, he was influential, as a delegate to the convention of 1860, in securing the nomination of Hannibal Hamlin for vice-president. As a party counsellor, Baldwin was always highly valued for his knowledge of men and his political sagacity regarding the effects of measures. He was elected to the Thirty-eighth Congress (1862), and was twice reelected, becoming a member of committees on expenditures, public buildings, and library. He made notable speeches on state sovereignty and treason, on reconstruction, and in defense of the negro. His efforts-unfortunately premature-for international copyright, won gratitude from authors. Of Baldwin's two works Prehistoric Nations (1869) and Ancient America ( 1872), the first sets forth a now wholly discredited theory of the derivation of Western civilization from the Cushites of Arabia, while the second, a popular presentation of American aboriginal peoples, is rated as among the best books of its class then written. Baldwin later published several volumes on his own ancestry, besides contributing to the Baldwin Genealogy. His most influential work, however, was through the Spy. Here his industry, business capacity, and literary ability had full play and gave the paper wide influence through the state and beyond. Republicans knew it as the "Worcester County Bible," Democrats dubbed it "The Lying Spy." Baldwin's retentive memory afforded wide range of facts, and his direct, forcible, sincere words were always animated by high ideals. A journal's mission, he believed, was the exercise of an influence for right principles and movements; even news was subordinate. Though not a rapid writer, he was a diligent one, making frequent archaeological and kindred contributions to magazines. In later years he largely withdrew from active editorial work on the Spy, enjoying in retirement his family and books. He was married in 1832 to Lemira Hathaway of Dighton, Massachusetts, by whom he had four children, two daughters who died in early life and two sons, John Stanton and Charles Clinton, who survived him and carried on the Spy. He died in Worcester, Massachusetts.

[Sketches of Baldwin's career are given in his own Record of the Descendants of John Baldwin, of Stonington, Connecticut (1880); The Baldwin Genealogy (1881), ed. by C. C. Baldwin; S. E. Staples, Memorial of John Denison Baldwin ( 1884); Western Reserve Historical Tract 65 (in vol. II); Commemorative Biography Rec. of Tolland and Windham Counties, Connecticut (1903);_ Historical Homes and Institutions and Genealogy and Personal Memoirs of Worcester Co., Massachusetts ( 1907), ed. by E. B. Crane, vol. I; Charles Nutt, History of Worcester and Its People ( 1919), vol. IV; extended obituary in the Worcester Daily Spy, July 9, 1883; an unpublished autobiography in the possession of his grandson, Mr. Robert S. Baldwin of Worcester.]

R.S.B.


BANKS, Nathanial Prentiss, 1816-1894, Waltham, Massachusetts, statesman, anti-slavery political leader.  Republican U.S. Congressman and Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Union General.  Governor of Massachusetts.  Member of the Free Soil and, later, Republican parties.  He was opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.  He was also opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, as this repeal favored the slave power.  Banks was called, “the very bone and sinew of Free-soilism” (Scribner’s, 1930, p. 578)

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. 1, pp. 158-159; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 577-580; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe); Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 348; Sewell, 1976, pp. 221, 275-277, 284, 289, 345)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 577-580;

BANKS, NATHANIEL PRENTISS (January 30, 1816-September 1, 1894), congressman, governor of Massachusetts, Union soldier, was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, the eldest of the seven children of Nathaniel P. and Rebecca (Greenwood) Banks. His father was superintendent of the mill in which is said to have been woven the first cotton cloth manufactured in the United States. After only a few years in the common schools the boy had to go to work in the cotton-mill, from which fact in later years there clung to him the nickname, "the Bobbin Boy of Massachusetts." Keenly ambitious, he set to work to remedy the deficiencies in his own education. By his own efforts he obtained some command of Latin, and diligently studied Spanish, early declaring that America some day would be brought into intimate association with peoples of that tongue. He seized every opportunity for practise in public speaking, lecturing on temperance and taking an active part in a local debating society. He soon became a recognized power in town meeting. For a time he studied to become an actor, and made a successful appearance in Boston as Claude Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons, but he soon turned to the law. At twenty-three he was admitted to the bar, but he never practised in the courts. He first entered public service as an inspector in the Boston customs house. For three years he was the proprietor and editor of a local weekly newspaper, the Middlesex Reporter. In March 1847 he was married to Mary I. Palmer. Seven times he was a candidate for the lower branch of the Massachusetts legislature before he became a member of that body in 1849. By the "coalition'' in 1851 Henry Wilson as a Free-Soiler was made president of the Senate, and Banks as a Democrat was made speaker of the House, and he was reelected to that office the following year.

At thirty-seven this self-taught man was chosen president of what has been called "the ablest body that ever met in Massachusetts," the constitutional convention of 1853, over which he presided with rare tact and self-control. Entering Congress in 1853, he served-though not continuously-in ten Congresses, representing five different party alignments. In his first term, though elected as a Democrat, he showed his courage and independence by opposing the Kansas-Nebraska bill. In the Thirty-fourth Congress, to which he had been elected as the candidate of the "Americans" (Know-Nothing party), he was put forward for the speakership in the most stubborn contest in the history of that office. Backed by no caucus, he drew votes from the other Know-Nothing candidates because of his uncompromising record in his first term (H. von Holst, Constitutional History of the United States, 1885, V, 204 ff.). As the struggle dragged on, he bluntly declared that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was an act of dishonor, and that under no circumstances whatever would he, if he should have the power, allow the institution of human slavery to derive benefit from the repeal. He thus came to be regarded as "the very bone and sinew of Free-soilism," and his election (February 2, 1856, on the 133rd ballot, and only after the adoption of a resolution calling for election by plurality vote), was hailed as the first defeat of slavery in a quarter of a century, and was later looked back upon as the first national victory of the Republican party. He held that the speaker's office was not political but executive and parliamentary. To the anti-slavery men he gave a bare majority on the various committees, and made several of his most decided opponents chairmen. Historians of the office rate Banks as one of the ablest and most efficient of speakers (M. P. Follett, The Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1902, pp. 36, 58-59; H. B. Fuller, The Speaker of the House, 1909, pp. 102-11, 116-17). He showed consideration and consummate tact, and his decisions were prompt and impartial. Though his service was in a period of the bitterest partisanship, not one of his decisions was overruled.

In 1856 Banks declined a nomination for the presidency from the convention of "North Americans," anti-slavery seceders from the "American" convention which had nominated Fillmore. Though he had been the candidate of the "Americans" in his second campaign for Congress and though he had just received this further evidence of their favor, he had already outgrown that nativist association, and in 1857 he cast aside his promising career in Congress to accept the Republican nomination for governor of Massachusetts. To the dismay of conservatives, he adopted the innovation of stumping the state in person, and against the seemingly invincible incumbent of three terms he won the election by a large majority. He held the governorship for three successive years, 1858-60, and proved an effective and progressive executive. He was a pioneer in urging the humane and protective features of modern probation laws, and di splayed a great and intelligent interest in all movements for educational progress. His wise forethought as to the militia enabled his successor, Governor John A. Andrew, to respond at once to Lincoln's call, sending troop after troop of Massachusetts militia, well trained and fully equipped for service.

At the end of his term (January 1861) Banks removed to Chicago, to succeed George B. McClellan as president of the Illinois Central Railroad. But Sumter had hardly fallen when he tendered his services to President Lincoln, and on May 16 he was commissioned major-general of volunteers. His first service was in the Department of Annapolis, where he cooperated in measures to prevent the seemingly imminent secession of Maryland. He was next assigned to the 5th corps in the Department of the Shenandoah. Here the transference of Shields's division to McDowell left Banks isolated with a command diminished to 10,000 to cope with " Stonewall" Jackson's greatly superior force s. The Confederates' capture of Front Royal, May 23, 1862, left no course open to Banks-his force now outnumbered two to one-but precipitate retreat. A race for Winchester, a vigorous battle, in which Banks's command bore itself well, and then a hasty crossing of the Potomac at Harper's Ferry rescued his army, but with a loss of some 200 killed and wounded and more than 3,000 prisoners (J. W. Draper, History of the American Civil War, 1868, II, 393). In June, Banks's force was brought into the new consolidation, the Army of Virginia, placed under General Pope. From Culpeper, August 9, 1862, Pope ordered Banks, in case the enemy approached, to "attack him immediately." Acting upon this explicit order, late in the afternoon, Banks's little army, in mood to avenge the humiliations they had suffered in the Shenandoah Valley, charged the enemy with such suddenness and vehemence that the whole of Jackson's left was driven from its position before his reserves could be brought into action. But some lack of tactical skill, the wounding of two of Banks's general officers, and the weight of opposing numbers after the first shock of surprise soon turned the tide of battle, and the Federals were forced into disorderly retreat. Banks was severely blamed for making this attack at Cedar Mountain, and Pope denied that his order authorized the action which Banks took ("Report of the Joint Committee on Conduct of the War," Senate Report No. 142, 38 Congress, 2 Session, part III, pp. 44-54). But "it will be hard to prove, if language means anything, that he at all transgressed his [Pope's] orders. Of course the order should not have been given" (William Allan, The Army of Northern Virginia, 1892, p. 171, n.). For a short time in the fall of 1862 Banks was in charge of the defenses of Washington. In the closing months of the year, at New Orleans he succeeded General B. F. Butler in command of the department. He was assigned the tasks of holding New Orleans and the other parts of the state which had been reduced to submission, and of aiding Grant to open the Mississippi. After placing his garrisons he had hardly 15,000 men left for aggressive action. In April 1863 he succeeded in regaining considerable territory for the Union, and in May he reached Alexandria. His next objective was Port Hudson. On May 25 and 27 he made costly attempts to capture the place by assault, bringing into action negro troops, who, he declared, showed the utmost daring and determination. Repulsed with heavy losses, he began siege. Though hard pressed by famine, the garrison repelled another assault, June 13, but within a week after the fall of Vicksburg it found itself forced to unconditional surrender, July 9, with loss of 6,200 prisoners, a large number of guns, and a great mass of military supplies. The thanks of Congress were tendered to Banks and his troops (January 28, 1864) "for the skill, courage, and endurance which compelled the surrender of Port Hudson, and thus removed the last obstruction to the free navigation of the Mississippi River" (United States Statutes at Large, 38 Congress, 1 Session, Resolution No. 7).

The later movements of the year proved ineffective: although with the cooperation of a naval force Banks had advanced along the coast as far as Brownsville, capturing some works of importance, he found his force inadequate to extend the movement and withdrew to New Orleans. Here in the difficult task of dealing with the civilian population he inherited the unpopularity of his predecessor, and his assassination was attempted. He opposed the admission of Confederate attorneys to practise in the courts. With no legal authority for his action, in January and February 1864, Banks issued orders prescribing the conditions of suffrage and other details as to elections, under which state officers and delegates to a constitutional convention were chosen and a constitution adopted. Although hardly one in seven of the voters of the state voted upon the question of ratifying this constitution, Banks went to Washington, where for months he pressed the recognition of the Louisiana state Government (E. L. Pierce, Memoir of Charles Sumner, 1893, IV, 215, 221).

In the opening months of 1864 preparations were made for the ill-starred Reel River Expedition. General Grant had strenuously opposed this movement, and later declared that it was "ordered from Washington," and that Banks had opposed the expedition, and was in no way responsible, except for the conduct of it (Personal Memoirs, 1886, II, 139-40). The State Department insisted that the flag must be restored to some one point in Texas, as a counter to the movements of the French in Mexico; the President was eager to establish a loyal government in Louisiana; and the agents of the Government and speculators were lured by the great stores of cotton along the river. Starting in the early spring, the only season when the Reel River was navigable, Banks advanced with a land force of 27,000 men, Admiral Porter being in command of a supporting fleet of gunboats. When within two days' march of his objective, Shreveport, Banks's army, extending for miles along a single road, encountered the main body of the enemy at Sabine Crossroads, April 8, and was routed. On the following clay at Pleasant Hill a fierce battle was fought, in which both parties claimed the victory. Failure of his supplies of ammunition, rations, and water compelled Banks to fall back. Meantime the fleet had been placed in imminent peril by the unprecedentedly early subsidence of the Red River, and was saved only by the brilliant engineering feat of Colonel Joseph Bailey in constructing a series of dams that secured enough depth of water to send the gunboats over the shallows (J. W. Draper, History of the American Civil War, 1870, III, 235-38). The army followed the naval force down the river, repelling rear attacks. Grant's peremptory recall of 10,000 men left Banks facing a serious crisis. On May 13 he evacuated Alexandria. Though left in nominal command, he was soon virtually superseded by the arrival of General E. R. S. Canby, who had been appointee to the command of all forces west of the Mississippi. A majority of the Committee on the Conduct of the War placed upon Banks a large measure of responsibility for the disasters which befell this expedition, but a minority member, D. W. Gooch, defended him on the ground that the major causes of failure, i. e. the unforeseeable difficulties of navigation, and the shortness of the time for which nearly half of the force were "lent" by Sherman, were beyond his control (Senate Report No. 142, 38 Congress, 2 Session, part II, pp. 3-401). Although repeatedly in this humiliating expedition Banks showed a lack of military skill, in the main he had to "bear the blame of the blunders of his superiors," who for alleged reasons of state ordered a movement which had little military justification, and doomed it to failure by so organizing it that, while four forces were supposed to cooperate, the commander of no one of them had the right to give an order to another (Asa Mahan, Critical History of the Late American War, 1877, p. 407).

Honorably mustered out of military service, August 24, 1865, Banks returned to his native city, and was almost immediately elected as a Republican to fill a vacancy in the House, caused by the death of D. W. Gooch, where he continued to serve from the Thirty-ninth to the Forty-second Congress. During this period he voted for the act stopping further contraction of the currency, and was a member of the committee of five to investigate the Credit Mobilier charges. He was chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs at the time Maximilian was in Mexico and war with France seemed likely to follow. He advised a bold policy in regard to the Alabama Claims, advocated our acquisition of Alaska, and reported a bill asserting the right of every naturalized American citizen to renounce all allegiance to his native land, and authorizing the President, if such right should be denied, in reprisal to suspend trade relations with such a Government, and to arrest and detain any of its citizens. In the campaign of 1872, because of a personal quarrel with President Grant; he supported Greeley's candidacy, and as a consequence was himself defeated for reelection. At the beginning of the short session, the month following this defeat, he tendered his resignation from the Committee on Military Affairs in order that the House might be "represented by some member more unequivocally committed to its policy," but the House by a substantial vote refused to excuse him from such service (December 2, 1872, Congressional Globe, p. 10). During the two-year interruption of his congressional career he was elected to the Massachusetts Senate for the session of 1874, but in the following November he was returned to Congress as a Democrat. Two years later he was reelected as a Republican. At the expiration of this term, he was appointed by President Hayes to the position of United States marshal for Massachusetts, and served from March II, 1879, to April 23, 1888. In that year he was reelected to Congress as a Republican, defeating Colonel Thomas W. Higginson. Before the end of the term his health became seriously impaired; he retired to his home in Waltham, where he died, September 1, 1894. He was survived by a son and two daughters,   one of whom, Maude Banks, attained some distinction as an actress. By resolution of the Massachusetts General Court provision was made for the erection of a bronze statue of General Banks upon the grounds of the State House. This statue, by Henry H. Kitson, was unveiled September 16, 1908.

[No general biography of Banks has been published. The story of his early career is told by William M. Thayer in The Bobbin Boy (1860). The main features of his military career are presented in the books and reports above cited; see also Official Records. Certain phases are discussed by G. F. R. Henderson,   in Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1898), I, 388 ff., and by Geo. C. Eggleston, in History of the Confederate War (1910), I, 208. Frank M. Flynn's Campaigning with Banks in Louisiana (1887) contains little of value; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe].

G. H. H.


BEATTY, John, soldier, born near Sandusky, Ohio, 16 September, 1828. He received a common-school education and entered on a business career in a banking-house at an early age. He took an active banking-house at an early age. He took an active part in public affairs, and was identified with Free-Soil Party until it was merged in the Republican. In 1860 he was a Republican presidential elector. In 1861 he enlisted as a private in the 3rd Ohio Infantry, and was appointed  successively captain and Lieutenant-Colonel. He took part in the early western Virginia Campaigns, became a colonel in 1862, and commanded a brigade in the fight at Stone River, 31 December 1862, to 2 January, 1863.  In 1863 he was commissioned a brigadier general and served through the Tennessee and Chattanooga Campaigns.  He was elected to the Fortieth Congress  and was twice re-elected. In 1884 he was Republican presidential elector at large. In 1886 he was a member of the board of state charities. He has written "The Citizen Soldier" (Cincinnati. 1876) and "The Belle o' Becket's Une" (Philadelphia. 1882). Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 208-209.


BERRY, Nathaniel Springer, governor of New Hampshire, born in Bath, Maine, 1 September, 1796. His father was Abner Berry, a ship-builder; his grandfather, John Berry, captain of infantry in the revolutionary war. His mother was Betsy, daughter of Nathaniel Springer, a captain of artillery in the same war, killed in battle. When he of the family was such that his lot was cast among strangers, and his educational advantages were limited. He became an apprentice as a tanner and currier at Bath, New Hampshire, at sixteen, and served until twenty-one. In April, 1818, he moved to Bristol, New Hampshire, and in 1820 engaged in the manufacture of leather, which business he followed about thirty-five years. He was colonel of the 34th Regiment of New Hampshire Militia for two years, was a judge of the court of common pleas from June, 1841, till June, 1850, and judge of probate for the five years ending 5 June, 1861. In 1828, 1833, 1834, and 1837 he represented Bristol in the state legislature, in 1854 represented the town of Hebron, and in 1835 and in 1836 was a state senator for the 11th District. Politically he acted with the Democratic Party for twenty-two years, and was a delegate to its national convention at Baltimore in 1840; but the action of this convention on the subject of slavery caused him to break his party ties, and he became one of the organizers of the Free-Soil Party in New Hampshire. At its first state convention. in 1845, he was nominated for governor, and received votes enough to prevent an election by the people. He was re-nominated at the four succeeding conventions. In March, 1861, he was elected Governor by the Democratic Party, inaugurated in June following, and re-elected in March, 1862, serving until June, 1863. He was indefatigable in his efforts to aid the general government in the suppression of the rebellion; and enlisted, armed, equipped, and forwarded to the seat of war more than 16,000 men. He signed, with the other northern war-governors, the letter of 28 June, 1862, to President Lincoln, upon which he made the call of 1 July, 1862, for 300,000 volunteers. In 1823 Mr. Berry became a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and in 1872 was a delegate to the general conference. He lost his wife in 1857, and in 1886 was residing with his son in Bristol. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 250.


BIRD, Francis William, 1809-1894, anti-slavery political leader, radical reformer.  Member of the anti-slavery “Conscience Whigs,” leader of the Massachusetts Free Soil Party.  Led anti-slavery faction of the newly formed Republican Party.  Supported abolitionist Party leader Charles Sumner.  Opposed Dred Scott decision.  “Bird Club” greatly influenced radical Republican politics in Massachusetts and in the U.S. Senate.  Organized Emancipation League.  Supported enlistment of African Americans in the Union Army and emancipation of Blacks in the District of Columbia.  Supported women’s rights, Indian rights, suffrage rights for Chinese, and other causes. Editor of the Free Soiler newspaper. 

(American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 2, p. 805; Raybach, 1970 p. 184,Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, p. 343; Sewell, 1976 p. 219).  


BLAIR, Francis Preston, soldier, born in Lexington, Kentucky

(American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 2, p. 805; Raybach, 1970 p. 184,Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, p. 343; Sewell, 1976).  

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp.  281.

BLAIR, Francis Preston, soldier, born in Lexington, Kentucky, 19 February, 1821; died in St. Louis, Missouri, 8 July, 1875, was son of Francis P. Blair noticed above. After graduation at Princeton, in 1841, he studied law in Washington and was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1843, and began to practice in St. Louis. In 1845 he went for his health to the Rocky Mountains with a company of trappers, and when the war with Mexico began he enlisted in the army as a private. After the War he returned to the practice of his profession in St. Louis. In 1848 he joined the Free-Soil branch of the Democratic Party, was for a time editor of the “Missouri Democrat,” and from 1852 till 1856 was a member of the Missouri legislature. In 1856 he joined the newly organized Republican, Party, and was elected to Congress, where, in 1857, he spoke in favor of colonizing the Negroes of the United States in Central America. In 1858 the Democratic candidate for Congress was returned. Mr. Blair successfully contested the seat, but immediately resigned, and was defeated in the election that followed. He was, however, elected again in 1860 and in 1862. Soon after the South Carolina secession Convention was called, in November, 1861, Mr. Blair, at a meeting of the Republican leaders in St. Louis, showed the necessity of immediate effort to prevent the seizure by the state authorities of the St. Louis Arsenal, containing 65,000 stand of arms belonging to the government. He became the head of the military organization then formed, which guarded the arsenal from that time; and it was at his suggestion that the state troops under General Frost were captured on 10 May, 1861, without orders from Washington. It is claimed that he thus saved Missouri and Kentucky to the union. Entering the army as a colonel of volunteers, he was made brigadier-general 7 August, 1861, and major-general 29 November, 1862, resigning his seat in Congress in 1863. He commanded a division in the Vicksburg Campaign, led his men in the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, and was at the head of the 17th Corps during Sherman's Campaigns in 1864–5, including the march to the sea. In 1866 he was nominated by President Johnson as collector of internal revenue at St. Louis, and afterward as minister to Austria; but in each case, his opposition to the reconstruction measures led to his rejection by the Senate. He was afterward commissioner of the Pacific Railroad. His dissatisfaction with the Party of the Republicans led him to return to the Democratic Party, and in 1868 he was its candidate for the vice-presidency. In January, 1871, General Blair again entered the legislature of Missouri, and in the same month he was elected to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate, where he remained until 1873, when he was a candidate for re-election, but was defeated. At the time of his death he was state superintendent of insurance. He published “The Life and Public Services of General William O. Butler” (1848). Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp.  281.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 2, pp. 322-329.

BLAIR, FRANCIS PRESTON (February 19, 1821-July 9, 1875), Union soldier, statesman, was born at Lexington, Kentucky, the third and youngest son of Francis Preston Blair [q.v.]. While a child he was taken to Washington, D. C., by his father and there he attended a select school. As a young man he contributed to the editorial columns of the Globe, edited by his father, who took great pride in educating his son for a political career. Blair graduated at Princeton (1841) and then entered the law school at Transylvania University. After graduating there, and upon admission to the bar at Lexington, Kentucky, he went to practise with his brother, Montgomery [q.v.] in St. Louis (1842). Three years of intense study and practise of law injured his health. While he was seeking rest and recreation in the Rocky Mountains the Mexican War broke out; consequently, he joined a company of Americans which was commanded by George Bent. When General Kearny took New Mexico Blair was appointed attorney-general for the territory.

Upon returning from the West Blair was married on September 8, 1847, to Appoline Alexander of Woodford County, Kentucky, and resumed his law practise in St. Louis. Having pronounced views on the extension of slavery he established a Free-Soil paper, the Barnburner, to further the interests of the cause in Missouri. He organized and led the Free-Soil party in that state and voted for Van Buren in 1848. Henry Clay found supporters in him, his father, and Montgomery, for his Compromise of 1850. Though a slave owner, Blair denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a violation of the Missouri Compromise, and his views on slavery, so clearly and forcefully expressed, marked him as a character dangerous to slave interests. Two terms in the Missouri legislature (1852-56) gave him opportunity to express his Free-Soilism and prepare himself for Congress. He was like Thomas Hart Benton in his methods, although in 1856 he refused Benton's request to retract some of his public statements on slavery. Benton was defeated for governor of Missouri in that year, while Blair, who voted for Fremont, was the only Free-Soiler elected to Congress from a slave state. In his first speech in Congress he warned the South that slavery was bound to die. He urged the South to adopt the policy of gradual emancipation by deportation and colonization. He was defeated for reelection to Congress (1858). In 1859 he published an argumentative "address" on colonization, entitled, The Destiny of the Races on This Continent.

The years 1858 to 1861 were eventful years for Blair. He opposed the extension of slavery on the basis that it was an economic hindrance to the development of the West, as well as socially and morally wrong. His family connections, his brilliance, his ability as an extemporaneous speaker, and his courageous frank manner, made him one of the popular orators of the day. As a speaker he was in demand in Minnesota and Vermont where he campaigned for the Republicans, in Illinois where he hoped to ruin the political fortunes of Douglas, and in Missouri where he battled against the "Nullificationists" and Benton's old enemies, especially the "Fayette Clique." He organized the Union party in Missouri and largely transformed it into the Republican party; in the latter he became the "leading spirit and chief adviser" in his own state. Like his father, he was a constitutionalist and an unyielding unionist. He was a Democrat-Republican who used parties merely as a means to an end.

The speeches and letters of Blair indicate that he feared a coming catastrophe long before the Civil War. The spectre of "Nullification" haunted him. He tried in vain to convert Northern men to his scheme of colonization. He supported Edward Bates for the presidential nomination through fear of secession early in the campaign of 1860, but he turned to Lincoln on the third ballot in the Chicago convention. After the convention few men labored as faithfully as he in the campaign. Consequently, he was ready to act quickly and decisively when civil war loomed. He organized the "Wide Awakes" in St. Louis, had men secretly drilled, secured ammunition and arms, kept himself informed of movements at Washington, and as a friend and supporter stood well in Lincoln's favor.

Blair was elected to Congress in 1860. In the spring of 1861 he determined to save Missouri for the Union. After much political maneuvering and "Home Guards" organizing, he and General Lyon marshalled their forces sufficiently to compel the surrender of Camp Jackson, a camp of state militia sympathetic with the Confederacy. It was a play of Blair and his Unconditional Unionists against Governor Jackson and his confederates, who desired to carry Missouri into the Confederacy. The capture of Camp Jackson drove thousands of Missourians into the Confederate cause, but the issue was now sharply drawn in the state; the United States arsenal at St. Louis was saved, and the state remained Unionist. Blair was offered a brigadier-generalship but refused in order to avoid political complications in Missouri.

In the Thirty-seventh Congress, as chairman of the Committee on Military Defense, Blair's policy was to crush the rebellion as quickly as men and money could do it. His policy included the acceptance of all volunteer troops for service, government control of railroads and telegraph lines, and the construction of a ship canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River for commercial and military purposes. He caused Fremont to be sent to Missouri to command the forces in that region but soon became disgusted with Fremont's policy, criticized him, and was, in turn, arrested and imprisoned by him. Blair's father and brother attempted unsuccessfully to stop the quarrel. For this and other reasons Lincoln removed Fremont. Blair's enemies in Missouri increased in number, particularly while he was in the army. In 1862, when the Union cause looked dark, an appeal was made to Blair to raise troops and lead them to the front. He immediately raised seven regiments, received the appointment of brigadier-general, and saw his first hard fighting at Vicksburg where he showed bravery and leadership. He was in many engagements, was raised to the rank of major-general, and completed his military career with Sherman on the march through the South. As commander of the 15th and 17th Corps, respectively, he received the praises of Generals Sherman and Grant. Blair was considerate of his officers and men and was popular among them. While in the army he made his own opinions and the wishes of General Sherman known to his brother, the Postmaster General, who in turn communicated the information to the President. In 1864 Blair was recalled from the battlefield to help organize Congress and to defend Lincoln's plan of reconstruction. On February S and 27, 1864, he made two provocative speeches: one defending the President's policy; the other, against Secretary Chase and the Radicals whom he derisively called Jacobins. A storm of condemnation from the Radicals fell on his head. Chase threatened to resign, and Blair returned to his command.

When the war closed Blair was financially ruined as he had spent much of his private means in support of the Union. His attempt to retrieve his lost fortune on a cotton plantation in Mississippi failed. He then turned his attention to politics in Missouri where a set of Radical Republicans had gained control within the party. He opposed the registry laws, test oaths, the policy of sending carpet-baggers to the South, and the disfranchisement of the whites and the enfranchisement of the negroes. He wished to allow the states to return to the Union to work out their own problems if they recognized abolition as an accomplished fact and swore allegiance to the Constitution. President Johnson nominated Blair for collector of internal revenue at St. Louis, and then to the Austrian mission, only to see the Senate refuse to confirm his appointment in each case. Blair was then appointed as commissioner on the Pacific Railroad but Grant removed him as soon as he became president. The Radicals in Missouri caused Blair to defend the conservatives and ex-Confederates. He began his work of reorganization of the Democratic party in 1865, supported Johnson in 1866, and received the nomination for vice-president with Seymour in 1868. In the latter year his public utterances and his notorious "Broadhead Letter," addressed to J. O. Broadhead, declaring that it would be the duty of the Democratic candidate if elected to abolish the Reconstruction governments, gave the opposition an opportunity to distort Blair's meaning when he advanced his plan of reconstruction. He maintained that the Constitution had been perverted. To restore it, he would have the people, by their mandate expressed at the polls, declare the acts of the Radical Congress "null and void"; compel the army to undo its usurpations of power in the South; disperse the carpet-bag governments; allow the whites to reorganize their own governments and elect senators and representatives. After the Democratic defeat in 1868 he cooperated with the Liberal Republicans, secured election as representative to the Missouri legislature; and was, by that body, chosen United States senator. He helped to secure the nomination of Horace Greeley for president (1872), and through cooperation with the Liberal Republicans saw the Radicals ousted from power in Missouri. He was defeated for reelection to the United States Senate in 1873. During the same year Blair was stricken with paralysis, never to recover. He was generous to a fault, cordial, and seldom held a personal grudge against a political enemy. His scathing denunciations of his political opponents antagonized them but his faculty for remembering names and his sociability endeared him to many people. He was nominally state superintendent of insurance when he died. His friends erected a fitting monument to his memory in Forrest Park (St. Louis) and Missouri placed his statue in the United States Capitol.

[The chief sources are the Blair Papers (unpublished). Two biographies of a political and biased nature are: Jas. Dabney McCabe (Edward Martin), The Life and Public Services of Horatio Seymour Together with a Complete and Authentic Life of Francis P. Blair, Jr. (1868); David Goodman Croly, Seymour and Blair: Their Lives and Services (1868). A manuscript copy of a sketch of the life of Blair, presumably written by Montgomery Blair, is in the Blair Papers. Short sketches exist by Wm. Van Ness Bay, in Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar of Missouri (1878); Augustus C. Rogers, Sketches of Representative Men North and South (1874); Chas. P. Johnson, "Personal Recollections of Missouri's Statesmen" in Proc. Missouri History Society, January 22, 1903; and John Fiske, The Mississippi Valley in the Civil War (1900). The best account of Blair's services in Missouri during the early part of the Civil War is found in General Nathaniel Lyon and Missouri in 1861 (1866) by Jas. Peckham.]

W.E.S.


BLANCHARD, Jonathan, 1811-1892, clergyman, educator, abolitionist, theologian, lecturer.  Worked for more than thirty years for the abolition of slavery.  Member of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  President of Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, 1845-1858.  President, Illinois Institute.  Vice president, World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, England, 1843. 

(Bailey, J.W., Knox College, 1860; Blanchard Papers, Wheaton College Library, Wheaton, Illinois; Blanchard Jonathan, and Rice, N.L. [1846], 1870; Dumond, 1961, p. 186; Kilby, 1959; Maas, 2003; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 196-197; Sewell, 1976; pp. 76, 121; Dictionary of American Biography, 1936, Vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 350-351)

Dictionary of American Biography, 1936, Vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 350-351)

BLANCHARD, JONATHAN (January 19, 18nMay 14, 1892), Presbyterian clergyman, college president, the son of Jonathan and Mary (Lovel) Blanchard, was born in the little town of Rockingham, Vermont, of pure English ancestry. His early education was obtained in the common schools of the town and from private instructors. He was a school-teacher at the age of fourteen and entered Middlebury College at the age of seventeen, graduating in 1832, when he was twenty-one years old. For two years he taught at Plattsburg Academy and afterwards studied at Andover and at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. In the latter city he was ordained pastor of the Sixth Presbyterian Church in September 1838. From the beginning Blanchard was a strong temperance advocate and in 1834, at the age of twenty-three, he became a violent abolitionist. In 184 3 he attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London and was elected American vice-president of that body. On his return from England he delivered a series of spirited lectures on the wrongs of Ireland. In spite of the fact that Cincinnati was almost as strongly pro-slavery as any southern community, he never hesitated to attack that institution in sermons, in articles, and in private conversation (see A Debate on Slavery ... Between the Reverend I. Blanchard and N. L. Rice, 1846). Almost as violent was his hatred of secret societies and especially of the Masonic order. This, too, he attacked in every way and at every opportunity. As the Civil War approached he more and more coupled Masonry and slavery and declared that the Masonic order was concerned in the attempt at disunion. During his Cincinnati pastorate he founded and edited a church paper later known as the Herald and Presbyter. In 1845 he was elected president of Knox College, at Galesburg, Illinois, and held that position until 1857. Under his administration the financial condition of the college was greatly improved and the number of students practically doubled. Blanchard's outspoken attitude on many subjects, however, brought him into frequent controversies, and the later years of his administration were full of strife and difficulty. After resigning the presidency he served for a year as acting president and teacher, at the same time conducting the Christian Era which he had founded. In 1860 he took the presidency of Wheaton College, at Wheaton, Illinois. While there he published Freemasonry Illustrated (1879) and founded and edited the Christian Cynosure. He became president emeritus in 1882 and died on May 14, 1892. He was married in 1838 to Mary Avery Bent, by whom he had twelve children, five sons and seven daughters. One son, Charles Albert, succeeded his father as president of Wheaton College, and died on December 20, 1925.

J. W. Bailey, Knox College (1860); Rufus Blanchard, History of Du Page County, Illinois (1882), pp. 174 ff.; T. S. Pearson, Cat. of Grads. of Middlebury College; Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1892.

J A. B.


BLISS, Philemon, 1813-1889, lawyer, U.S. Congressman, 1854, Chief Justice, Dakota Territory in 1861, elected Supreme Court of Missouri, 1868.  Helped found anti-slavery Free Soil Party.  Agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). 

(Blue, 2005, p. 76; Dumond, 1961, p. 165; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. I, Pt. 2, pp. 375-376; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. I, Pt. 2, pp. 375-376)

BLISS, PHILEMON (July 28, 1814-August 24, 1889), congressman, jurist, was born in North Canton, Connecticut, of early Puritan stock through both parents, Asahel and Lydia (Griswold) Bliss. The family moved to Whitestown, New York, in 1821, where Philemon attended the local academy and Oneida Institute, but lack of funds compelled him to withdraw from Hamilton College in his sophomore year, and ill health cut short his training in a local law office. He began the active practise of law at Elyria, Ohio, in 1841, and two years later married Martha W. Sharp. His public career began in 1849 with his election by the Ohio legislature as judge of the 14th judicial district where he served until 1852. Of Federalist and Whig antecedents, he had campaigned actively for Clay in 1844, but his pronounced anti-slavery views carried him into the Free-Soil party in 1848 and later into the Republican. In 1854 he was elected to Congress from a formerly Democratic district and was reelected in 1856. His dislike of controversy and his weak voice-he struggled all his life against bronchial and pulmonary weakness-unfitted him for debate, but his set speeches are able statements of the advanced anti-slavery, anti-state-sovereignty views. In 1861 he accepted an appointment as chief justice of Dakota Territory, hoping that the drier climate would relieve his throat trouble. Two years later he resigned, and coming to Missouri with improved health, in 1864, he brought his family to St. Joseph. Here he served as probate judge and as a member of the county court of Buchanan County; in 1867 he was appointed a curator of the state university, serving until 1872 and taking an active part in its reorganization. In 1868 he was elected to the state supreme court for a four-year term on the Radical or Republican ticket, and won the respect and confidence of all parties in a time of great political bitterness. The dominance of the Democratic party after 1872 ended his political career. In that year the curators of the university appointed him first dean of the newly created department of law, which position he held until his death in 1889. He died at St. Paul, Minnesota, whither he had gone for his health, and he was buried at Columbia, Missouri.

While a man of decided convictions and unquestioned intellectual courage-he was a lifelong Republican in a state and community intensely Democratic-he had an essentially judicial and peaceful temperament. In spite of his lifelong struggle against physical weakness and his retiring disposition, he gave a great and well recognized service in the training of the postbellum generation of lawyers, and in the restoration and advancement of the standards of the legal profession in Missouri. His sound legal knowledge is evidenced by his Treatise upon the Law of Pleading under the Codes of Civil Procedure '': (1870), a text nationally used and frequently revised until superseded by the modern case method.

[J. H. Bliss, Genealogy of the Bliss Family in America (1881); The Bench and Bar of St. Louis (1884), pp, 376-79; W. F. Switzler, "History of the University of Missouri" (MSS.).]

J. V.


BOLES, John, Massachusetts Anti-slavery political leader, in the Massachusetts Free-Soil Party. (Rayback, 1970 pp. 212, 248.)


BOOTH, Sherman M., 1812-1904, Wisconsin, abolitionist leader, orator, politician, temperance activist.  Editor of anti-slavery newspaper, the Wisconsin Freeman, in Racine, Wisconsin.  Member, Free Soil Party, and helped found the Liberty Party.  Published Liberty Party newspaper, American Freedman.  Assisted runaway slave Joshua Glover.  Was arrested, tried and convicted for violation of Fugitive Slave Law.  Booth was acquitted under Wisconsin State law.

(Blue, 2005, pp. 6-7, 13, 117-137, 267, 268; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 62, 151; Sewell, 1976; p. 154, 159, 213-214, 242, 245, 260; Minutes, Convention of the Liberty Party, June 14, 15, 1848, Buffalo, New York).


BOOTH, Walter, 1791-1870, Woodbridge, Conn., soldier,  jurist, U.S. Congressman from Connecticut, Free Soil Party.

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, p. 338; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe; Sewell, 1976; p. 168n).


BOUTWELL, George Sewall, 1818-1905, statesman, lawyer.  Governor of Massachusetts.  Helped organize the Republican Party.  Member of Congress, 1862-1868.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senator.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 331-332; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 2, pp. 489-490; Congressional Globe; Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1927 (1928); Sewell, 1976; pp. 221, 223; Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 348, a volume of “Speeches and Papers” (1867); and “Why I am a Republican” (Hartford, Connecticut, 1884).)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

BOUTWELL, George Sewall, statesman, born in Brookline, Massachusetts, 28 January, 1818. His early life was spent on his father's farm until, in 1835, he became a merchant's clerk in Groton, Massachusetts He was afterward admitted to partnership, and remained in business there until 1855. In 1836 he began by himself to study law, and was admitted to the bar, but did not enter into active practice for many years. He also began a course of reading, by which he hoped to make up for his want of a college education. He entered politics as a supporter of Van Buren in 1840, and between 1842 and 1851 was seven times chosen as a democrat to the state legislature, where he soon became recognized as the leader of his party. In 1844, 1846, and 1848 he was defeated as a candidate for congress, and in 1849 and 1850 he was the democratic nominee for governor with no better success; but he was finally elected in 1851 and again in 1852 by a coalition with the free-soil party. In 1849-'50 he was state bank commissioner; in 1853 a member of the state constitutional convention. After the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854 he assisted in organizing the republican party, with which he has since acted. In 1860 he was a member of the Chicago convention which nominated Lincoln, and in February, 1861, was a delegate to the Washington peace conference. President Lincoln invited him to organize the new department of internal revenue in 1862, and he was its first commissioner, serving from July, 1862, till March, 1863. In 1862 he was chosen a member of congress from Massachusetts, and twice re-elected. In February, 1868, he made a speech advocating the impeachment of President Johnson, was chosen chairman of the committee appointed to report articles of impeachment, and became one of the seven managers of the trial. In March, 1869, he entered President Grant's cabinet as secretary of the treasury, where he opposed diminution of taxation and favored a large reduction of the national debt. In 1870 congress, at his recommendation, passed an act providing for the funding of the national debt and authorizing the selling of certain bonds, but not an increase of the debt. Secretary Boutwell attempted to do this by means of a syndicate, but expended more than half of one per cent., in which he was accused of violating the law. The house committee of ways and means afterward absolved him from this charge. In March, 1873, he resigned and took his seat as a U. S. senator from Massachusetts, having been chosen to fill the vacancy caused by the election of Henry Wilson to the vice-presidency. In 1877 he was appointed by President Hayes to codify and edit the statutes at large. Mr. Boutwell was for six years an overseer of Harvard, and for five years secretary of the Massachusetts state board of education, preparing the elaborate reports of that body. He afterward opened a law office in Washington, D. C. He is the author of “Educational Topics and Institutions” (Boston, 1859); a “Manual of the United States Direct and Revenue Tax” (1863); “Decisions on the Tax Law” (New York, 1863); “Tax-Payer's Manual” (Boston, 1865); a volume of “Speeches and Papers” (1867); and “Why I am a Republican” (Hartford, Conn., 1884). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I. pp. 331-332.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 2, pp. 489-49

BOUTWELL, GEORGE SEWALL (January 28, 1818-February 27, 1905), politician, born in Brookline, Massachusetts, was the son of Sewall and Rebecca (Marshall) Boutwell, both of old Massachusetts stock. His boyhood was passed in Lunenburg, Massachusetts., where from the age of thirteen to seventeen he was employed in a small store with the privilege of attending school during the winter months. When he was seventeen he became clerk in a store in Groton, Massachusetts. He devoted much of his time to self-education in the hope of becoming a lawyer, and at an early age began to write articles for the newspapers on political topics, and to make addresses. In 1841 he was married to Sarah Adelia Thayer. He was an active Democrat, and during seven sessions between 1842 and 1850 represented Groton in the lower house of the state legislature. Through his useful work there he became one of the leaders of the younger element of the party, whose anti-slavery leanings made possible the coalition with the Free-Soilers which in 1850 defeated the Whigs. As a result of this coalition, Boutwell was elected by the legislature governor for the year 1851, and Charles Sumner, representing the Free-Soilers, was elected senator; the same political combination effected Boutwell's reelection for 1852. After the expiration of his term he pursued legal studies with th e purpose of becoming a patent lawyer; from 1855 to 1861 he was secretary of the state board of education. In January 1862 he was admitted to the Suffolk bar.

The important part of Boutwell's career lies in the field of national politics. He had  been one of the organizers of the Republican party in Massachusetts in 1855, and he consistently represented its radical wing, more, however, on the side of practical politics than in its idealistic aspect. From July 17, 1862, to March 3, 1863, he was commissioner of internal revenue, and in that short period did effective work in organizing this new branch of the government. His activities as a radical Republican were most conspicuous during his terms of service as representative in Congress from 1863 to 1869 in connection with the problems of reconstruction. As a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction he helped in framing the Fourteenth Amendment; his belief in the necessity of full suffrage for the negro led to his advocacy of the Fifteenth Amendment. His support of the congressional plan of Reconstruction involved persistent, vigorous, and even fanatical opposition to President Johnson and his policies. In the movement for the impeachment of the President he was among the leaders, being chosen by the House of Representatives as one of its s even managers to conduct the impeachment. His suggestion that a suitable punishment for Johnson, the "enemy of two races of men," would be his projection into a "hole in the sky" near the Southern Cross, drew the ridicule of William M. Evarts, counsel for the defense. Boutwell's efforts on behalf of the radical Republicans were rewarded by a place in Grant's cabinet as secretary of the treasury. To this position he brought qualifications chiefly of a political nature, and he was not a supporter of civil service reform; but he labored diligently in improving the organization of the department and in reducing the national debt. Before the end of his four years as secretary he had effected the redemption of 200 millions of six per cent bonds and sold an equal amount bearing interest at five per cent (Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, December 1872, iii). Early in his administration occurred the famous " Black Friday," on which day a n attempted corner in gold was broken by his release of Treasury gold.

From March 1873 to March 1877, he served a four-year term as senator from Massachusetts. On his failure to be reelected by his party he was appointed commissioner to revise the statutes of the United States. In 1880 he became counsel and agent of the United States before a board of international arbitrators for the settlement of claims of French citizens against the government of this country, and of American citizens against the government of France. In his practise as a lawyer, which he resumed after his retirement from the Senate, he handled numerous cases involving questions of international law. The independence of spirit which at various times in his career he had manifested, in marked contrast to his general disposition for party regularity- showed itself in his last years in his opposition to the policy of the Republican party on the Philippine question, and led to his withdrawal from the party; he was president of the Anti-Imperialist League from its organization in November 1898 until his death in 1905.

He was the author of Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions (1859); A Manual of the Direct and Excise Tax System of the United States (1863); Speeches Relating to the Rebellion and the Overthrow of Slavery (1867); The Constitution of the United States at the End of the First Century (1895); The Crisis of the Republic (1900).

Boutwell's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (1902) contains interesting though guarded accounts of the public men of his time; to it is prefixed a biographical sketch which appeared in the Memoirs of the Judiciary and the Bar of New England, January 1901. For his connection with the impeachment of Johnson see D. M. DeWitt, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1903); E. P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke (1907) has numerous references to Boutwell as secretary of the treasury.]

H. G. P.


BRADBURN, George, 1806-1880, Nantucket, Massachusetts, politician, US Congressman representing the Free Soil Party, newspaper editor, Unitarian clergyman, abolitionist, women’s rights activist, lecturer.  Member, American Anti-Slavery Society.  Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1840-1845.  Attended World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in June 1840, where he protested the exclusion of women from the conference.  Lectured for the American Anti-Slavery Society with fellow abolitionists William A. White and Frederick Douglass in 1843.  Editor, the Pioneer and Herald of Freedom from 1846 to 1849 in Lynn, Massachusetts.

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 345; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).


BRAINERD, Lawrence, 1794-1870, anti-slavery activist, temperance activist, capitalist, statesman, U.S. Senator, elected 1854, member of the Liberty and Free Soil Parties.  Manager, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1833-1839. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 358; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. I, Pt. 2, p. 594)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

BRAINERD, Lawrence, senator, born  in 1794; d. in St. Albans, Vt., 9 May, 1870. He was active in forwarding the political, commercial, and railroad interests of Vermont, and was for several years candidate for governor. After the death of Senator Upham, Mr. Brainerd was chosen to the senate as a Free-Soiler for the remainder of the term, serving from 5 December, 1854, till 3 March, 1855. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I. pp. 358.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. I, Pt. 2, p. 594)

BRAINERD, LAWRENCE (March 16, 1794- May 9, 1870), capitalist, senator, one of twelve children born to Ezra and Mabel (Porter) Brainerd, was a native of East Hartford, Connecticut. At the age of nine years he went to Troy, New York, to live with Joseph S. Brainerd, an uncle. Five years later, he removed with this uncle to St. Albans, Vermont. He attended the St. Albans Academy for two years and entered the store of a local merchant as clerk. At the age of twenty-two he established a mercantile business of his own in which he was very successful. He bought a large tract of swamp land near Lake Champlain, drained and improved it, and developed it into a 1,200-acre farm, one of the best in Vermont. When the Bank of St. Albans was established in 1826, he became a heavy stockholder, a director, and later its president. He was active in steamboat enterprises in the early days of that method of transportation, in 1847 superintending the building at Shelburne Harbor of the United States, then considered one of the finest steamboats ever built. He became interested early in railroad development and the construction of the Vermont & Canada line was due largely to his energy and aid, in cooperation with John Smith and Joseph Clark. He pledged practically his entire fortune to make possible the building of the railroad. From the construction of the road until his death he was a director and in later years was associated with his son-in-law, Governor John Gregory Smith, in the management of the corporation. He was also engaged in railroad building in Canada and was a promoter of the Missisquoi Railroad. He took an active interest in public affairs, being particularly interested in the anti-slavery cause and in temperance reform. Originally a Democrat, he was affiliated with the Free-Soil wing of the party. In 1834 he was a member of the legislature and in 1846, 1847, 1848, 1852, and 1854, he was a candidate of the Free-Soil Democratic party for governor. He was elected United States senator in 1854 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Senator Upham, was president of the convention called to organize the Republican party in Vermont, was a delegate to a preliminary national Republican convention at Pittsburgh in February 1856, and called to order the first Republican national convention, held at Philadelphia in June 1856. Much interested in agricultural development, he was a president of the Vermont Agricultural Society. In 1819 he married Fidelia B. Gadcomb and twelve children were born to them. He was a man of large frame and great physical strength. [St. Albans Daily Messenger, May 9, 1870; W. H. Crockett, Vermont, vol. III ( 1921); H. C. Williams, ed., Biography Encyclopedia of Vermont (1885).]

W.H.C.


BRINKERHOFF, James, 1810-1880, U.S. Congressman, member anti-slavery Free-Soil Party, author of the Wilmot Proviso Bill.

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

BRINKERHOFF, Jacob, jurist, born in New York in 1810; died in Mansfield, Ohio, 19 July, 1880. He removed early to Plymouth, Ohio, and was elected to congress as a democrat, serving from 4 Dec., 1843 till 3 March, 1847. While in congress he was author of the original draft of the celebrated Wilmot proviso. From 1856 to 1871 he was a judge of the supreme court of Ohio.

Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe; Sewell, 1976; pp.144-145, 166, 173, 273).


BRODERICK, David Colbert, 1820-1859, Washington, DC, forty-niner, political leader, elected to the California State Senate in January 1851.  Elected U.S. Senator from California in 1857.  Member of the Free Soil Party.  He was opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the admission of Kansas as a state under the Lecompton constitution.  He left the Democratic Party on the issue of slavery in 1858.  California had much pro-slavery sentiment, and this affected Broderick’s career.  Broderick was killed in a dual with California Supreme Court Chief Justice David S. Terry.  Terry was a leader of the pro-slavery movement in California. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 382.  Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. III, pp. 61-62; Lynch, Jeremiah, A Senator of the Fifties, 1911).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

BRODERICK, David Colbreth, senator, born in Washington, D.C., 4 February, 1820; died near Lake Merced, California, 16 September, 1859. His father, who had emigrated from Ireland, was employed in cutting stone for the capitol. In 1823 the family moved to New York, where young Broderick received a public-school education, after which he was apprenticed to learn the stone-cutter's trade. He became actively connected with the volunteer fire department of New York, and at the same time acquired considerable political influence. In 1846 he was defeated as a Democratic candidate for Congress from New York. Three years later he went to California, where he at once became prominent in politics. In 1849 he was a member of the California constitutional Convention. He was elected to the state senate in 1850 and again in 1851, when he became the presiding officer of that body. In 1856 he was elected U. S. Senator from California, serving from 4 March, 1857, until his death. He was eminent as a debater, the admission of Kansas as a state under the Lecompton constitution, and became separated from the Democratic Party on the slavery question in 1858. His death resulted from a wound received in a duel fought with David S. Terry, chief justice of the supreme court of California. Political differences and personal abuse in public speeches, of which Terry and Broderick were about equality, led to the duel. Judge Terry was the challenger. Mr. Broderick fell at the first fire, his own pistol being discharged before he could level it. . Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 382.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. III, pp. 61-62;

BRODERICK, DAVID COLBRETH (February 4, 1820-September 16, 1859), forty-niner, politician, was born in Washington, D. C. He was of Irish stock, and his father, a stone-mason for a time employed on the national Capitol, was doubtless an immigrant. Of the mother, whose maiden name was Copway, little is recorded except that she was idolized by her son. The boy had little schooling. Before he was fourteen the family moved to New York. About 1837 the father died, and the boy began his struggle for a living for himself, his mother, and his younger brother. Industrious, ambitious, belligerent, of strong physique and able to give a good account of himself in a street brawl, he literally fought his way to the front. By the time he was twenty he was a member of an engine company (of which later he became foreman) and was active in ward politics as an adherent of Tammany Hall. His mother dying and his brother being accidentally killed, he was left without kin. His struggles had molded his character; he was "stubborn, positive, unrelenting and unforgiving," self-centered also, and determined upon his advancement to the utmost of his powers. He owned a saloon, which seems to have netted a good profit, and he became politically prominent. He was a member of the city charter convention of 1846, over which he several times presided, and in the same year he was the unsuccessful Tammany nominee for Congress in the 5th district.

In the spring of 1849 he determined to go to California. Closing his saloon, emptying his casks in the street, and vowing that he would never again "sell or drink liquor, smoke a cigar or play a card," he took passage by way of Panama, and in June arrived in San Francisco. Here he found old friends ready to back him alike in business and politics. He formed a partnership with an assayer for the coining of gold "slugs" of four-dollar and eight-dollar values in metal, which passed readily, because of the scarcity of coin, for five dollars and ten dollars. The business, though highly profitable, was sold some months later, and Broderick turned his attention to the still more profitable enterprise of trading in shore-front lots. From the time he landed he was in politics. In August he was chosen a delegate to the constitutional convention, and in January of the following year was elected to fill a vacancy in the Senate. On the succession of Lieutenant-Governor McDougal to the governorship, in January 1851, Broderick was elected president of the Senate. Though his private life was exemplary, in politics he was unscrupulous. An adept in Tammany methods, he soon became a political boss; and it is said of him that from 1851 (when he was reelected to the Senate) to 1854 he was "the Democratic party of California." He now determined upon a seat in the United States Senate, and set about to compass the defeat of William M. Gwin, whose term would expire on March 4, 1855. The attempt served for the time only to divide the party and to deadlock the legislature, but on January 10, 1857, he won the election by 79 votes out of 111. At the same time, through a bargain made with his rival, Gwin, he brought about the latter's reelection and obtained the promise of a monopoly of the Federal patronage for the state.

President Buchanan refused to recognize the bargain, and Gwin, in spite of his promise, continued to distribute the patronage. Broderick turned on both men with bitter resentment. At what time he first developed sentiments hostile to the slave power and to political corruption cannot be said. But he now vehemently attacked the administration, both for its policy in Kansas and for its alleged venality, and he carried the war into his own state, where pro-slavery feeling was for the time dominant and aggressive. His attitude brought him into national prominence, but made him a marked man at home. Both he and his friends felt that he was now regarded as a menace and that means would be taken to get rid of him. A remark made by him on June 27, 1859, concerning Chief Justice David S. Terry, one of the leaders of the proslavery element, brought a challenge from Terry, who resigned his judgeship, and Broderick accepted. They met on the early morning of September 13. The pistol furnished Broderick was so "light on the trigger" that it was prematurely discharged by the act of raising his arm. Terry's bullet struck Broderick in the breast, and he fell mortally wounded. Conveyed to a near-by farmhouse, he lingered for three days. On his deathbed he said: "They have killed me because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt administration." The dead body was conveyed to the city, where on September 18 funeral services were held at which Col. Edward D. Baker [q.v.] delivered an eloquent and impressive eulogy. On February 13, 1860, memorial services were held by both houses of Congress. Broderick was buried at the foot of Lone Mountain.

He is pictured by Lynch as a large man, robust, and of great strength, with steel-blue eyes, a large mouth filled with strong white teeth, a ruddy brown beard, and a plentiful shock of "slightly dark" hair. His face, says Lynch, was not attractive. His character has been variously portrayed; Bancroft says that it has been "distorted into something abnormal by both his enemies and his friends." The identification of the man shot down by Terry with the ward-heeler of 1850 is no easy task. He had become a student and a man of thought, an advocate of many measures of broad social significance. He read not only the historians and the statesmen, but the poets, and his favorite bard was Shelley. By whatever circumstances he had been led to a hatred of the slave power and a heightened devotion to the Union, the change was one which in a measure transformed him. Though martyrdom invested him with a glamour beyond his meed, he had given substantial promise of a great and useful career.

[Jeremiah Lynch, A Senator of the Fifties (1911); John W. Dwinelle, A Funeral Oration upon David C. Broderick, including memorial addresses delivered in Congress, February 13, 1860 (pamphlet, 1860); Jas. O'Meara, Broderick and Gwin (1881); H. H. Bancroft, History of Cal. (1888); Theodore H. Hittell, History of Cal. (1897); Hermann Schussler, The Locality of the Broderick-Terry Duel (pamphlet, 1916).]

W.J.G.


BROWN, Benjamin Gratz, 1826-1885, lawyer, soldier.  Anti-slavery activist in Missouri legislature from 1852-1859.  Opposed pro-slavery party.  Commanded a regiment and later a brigade of Missouri State Militia.  U.S. Senator 1863-1867, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 105; Congressional Globe; Sewell, 1976; pp. 319, 321)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

BROWN, Benjamin Gratz, lawyer, born in Lexington, Kentucky, 28 May, 1826; died in St. Louis, Missouri, 13 December, 1885, was graduated at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, in 1845, and at Yale in 1847, was admitted to the bar in Louisville, Kentucky, and soon afterward settled in St. Louis. He was a member of the Missouri legislature from 1852 till 1859, and in 1857 made there a remarkable anti-slavery speech, which is said to have been the beginning of the Free-Soil movement in that state. He edited the “Missouri Democrat,” a journal of radical Republican principles, which had for its most violent political opponent “The Missouri Republican,” a Democratic sheet of the most uncompromising character. For five years (1854–'9) he constantly opposed the pro-slavery party, and was often threatened with personal violence, on one occasion being wounded by a pistol-shot. In 1857 he was the Free-Soil candidate for governor, and came within 500 votes of election. At the beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, he gave all his influence to the support of the union, and was in close consultation with General Lyon when he planned the capture of Camp Jackson and broke up the first secession movement in St. Louis. Brown commanded a regiment of militia on that occasion, and afterward, during the invasion of the state by Confederate generals Price and Van Dorn, commanded a brigade. He was a member of the U.S. Senate from 1863 till 1867, and lent his powerful influence in 1864 to favor the passage of the ordinance of emancipation by the Missouri state Convention. In 1871 he was elected governor of Missouri, on the liberal Republican ticket, by a majority of 40,000. In 1872 he was the candidate for vice-president on the Democratic ticket with Horace Greeley, and after the election, which resulted in the defeat of the Democrats and the election of the Republican candidate, General Grant, he resumed his law practice. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 403.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 105).

BROWN, BENJAMIN GRATZ (May 28, 1826-December 13, 1885), senator, governor of Missouri, was born at Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Mason and Judith (Bledsoe) Brown. His father, Mason Brown, was a jurist of some note who served as judge of a Kentucky circuit court and, from 1856 to 1859, as secretary of state. His grandfather, John Brown, was the first United States senator from Kentucky. The Browns were related to the Prestons, Breckenridges, Blairs, Bentons, and other well-known Kentucky families.

Brown entered Transylvania University but withdrew in 1845 and entered Yale University, where he was graduated in 1847. He then studied law in Louisville, was admitted to the Kentucky bar, and, in 1849, moved to St. Louis. The same year he took the stump in support of Thomas H. Benton's attack upon the "Jackson Resolutions" adopted by the Missouri legislature that year. He again came actively to the support of Benton in the Atchison-Benton senatorial contest of 1852-53. Appreciating the importance of the large German vote in St. Louis, he early cultivated its support; and, largely as a result, he was elected, and reelected, to the lower branch of the state legislature between 1852 and 1859. For upward of two decades the St. Louis Germans constituted the principal element in his political following. In the Missouri legislature of 1857, Brown took an especially prominent part. A joint resolution was introduced declaring emancipation of the slaves to be impracticable, and that any movement in that direction was "inexpedient, impolitic, unwise, and unjust." In reply to this, Brown, at some personal risk, it is said, made an able and forceful anti-slavery speech in which he advocated and prophesied the abolition of slavery in Missouri on economic grounds-more out of regard to the interest of poor white laborers than as an act of humanity to the slaves. This incident has been regarded by some as the beginning of the Free-Soil movement in Missouri (Speech of Hon. B. Gratz Brown of St. Louis on the Subject of Gradual Emancipation in Missouri, February 12, 1857, Pamphlet, 1857). Brown's speech apparently made him the Free-Soil Democratic candidate for governor the same year. He failed of election by the narrow margin of about 500 votes.

Between 1854 and 1859, most of Brown's energies were absorbed in newspaper editorial work for the Missouri Democrat-a paper of strong Free-Soil, and, later, Republican, principles. In its columns, Brown persistently assailed the institution of slavery in Missouri and advocated emancipation. In 1856 he fought a duel with Thomas C. Reynolds over differences growing out of editorials relating to the Know Nothing movement in St. Louis. Brown was shot near the knee, and limped during the rest of his life.

In the formation of the Republican party in Missouri in 1860 Brown took an active part and was a delegate-at-large to the Chicago convention which nominated Lincoln. At the opening of the Civil War, he became colonel of the 4th Regiment of Missouri (three months) Volunteers, and energetically cooperated with General Lyon and Frank P. Blair, Jr.. in circumventing the Missouri secessionists.

In the state election of 1862 the abolition of slavery was the outstanding issue, especially in the eastern part of the state. Brown led the radicals, who insisted upon immediate emancipation, in opposition to the gradual emancipationists led by his cousin, Frank P. Blair, Jr. Although the policy of the latter was indorsed two years later by the state convention which adopted an ordinance for the gradual extinction of slavery, Brown's faction won a majority of the seats in both branches of the next legislature, and nominated him for the United States Senate. After a prolonged contest, Brown was elected on the thirty-second ballot (1863) for the unexpired term of W. P. Johnson, who had been expelled as a secessionist. He took the oath of office December 14, 1863, and served until March 4, 1867. In 1864, he was one of the signers of the call for the Cleveland convention of radicals who opposed the renomination of Lincoln and nominated Fremont and Cochrane.

While in the Senate, Brown served upon the committees on military affairs, Indian affairs, Pacific railroad, printing, public buildings and grounds, and also as chairman of the committee on contingent expenses. Although frequently taking part in Senate debates, he made only one extended speech. This was in support of an amendment to a bill to promote enlistments in the army, confirming and making of full effect as law the President's emancipation proclamation, and adding a section declaring the immediate abolition of slavery in all states and territories of the United States, as a war measure (March 8, 1864. Congressional Globe, 38 Congress, I Session pt. II, pp. 984-90). His next longest speech was in opposition to the proposed reading and writing tests for voting in the District of Columbia and in advocacy of woman suffrage for the District. "I stand," he declared, "for universal suffrage, and as a matter of fundamental principle do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any ground of race, color, or sex ... I recognize the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right . . . " (December 12, 1866. Congressional Globe, 39 Congress, 2 Session, pt. I, p. 76). He also spoke, or introduced resolutions, in favor of the eight-hour d ay for government employees, approving retaliation for rebel mistreatment of Northern prisoners of war, advocating government construction, ownership, and operation of telegraph lines, and urging the establishment of the merit system in the civil service. His speeches are noteworthy for their obvious sincerity and absence of buncombe, their dignified simplicity of diction, and unusual directness and incisiveness.

Before the end of his senatorial career, Brown became prominently identified with the so-called Liberal movement in Missouri for the repeal of the drastic test-oaths prescribed in the Missouri constitution of 1865 and aimed at sympathizers with the Confederate cause. Later, this Liberal movement, which came to embody a reaction against the radical Republican reconstruction policy and in favor of amnesty for former rebels and reconciliation between the sections, culminated in the nomination of Brown for governor, in 1870, and his triumphant election by a majority of more than 40,000. At the same election, constitutional amendments were approved repealing the obnoxious test-oaths.

In his messages as governor (1871-73), Brown recommended constitutional amendments reorganizing the courts, including the grand jury system, and the better regulation of railroads through the creation of a board of railroad commissioners. The bankruptcy of a number of railroads whose bonds had been guaranteed by the state embarrassed his administration, and resulted in a loss to the state of approximately $25,000,000.

The success of the Liberal movement in Missouri encouraged liberals and reformers in other states and led directly to the launching of the Liberal Republican party in 1872 in opposition to the renomination of President Grant and in favor of tariff and civil service reform and abandonment of radical Republican reconstruction policies. Brown's prominence naturally led to serious consideration of his availability as the presidential candidate of this independent movement; and at the Cincinnati convention of the Liberal Republicans, in May 1872, he stood fourth on the first ballot for the presidential nomination, receiving ninety-five votes. Suspecting that his delegates were being enticed away by the friends of Charles Francis Adams, Brown unexpectedly appeared in Cincinnati, obtained permission to address the convention, and in his speech astonished the delegates by warmly urging the nomination of Horace Greeley. On the sixth ballot Greeley was nominated, and, later, Brown himself received the vice-presidential nomination. Afterward, Carl Schurz and others charged that the ticket was the result of a deliberate bargain between the friends of Greeley and Brown (F. Bancroft, Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1907-08, II, 362-63). Brown's nomination, however, seems to have been of little or no help to the Liberal Republican campaign, although he participated actively in the canvass. In August he attended a class banquet at Yale, became intoxicated, and made a speech in bad taste, criticizing things eastern (E. D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement, 1919, p. 156). Following this campaign, Brown gave up active participation in politics and devoted himself to the practise of law, making a specialty of railway cases. By 1876 he had virtually gone over to the Democratic party. He attended that party's national convention, where "loud calls for Gratz Brown brought that gentleman to the rostrum, accompanied by a round of applause" (Official Report of the Proceedings, p. 91). In his brief response, he expressed sympathy with Democratic demands for reform and the belief that former Liberals would warmly support those demands. Brown's death in 1885 was the direct result of overwork, following close upon a serious illness, in completing a report as referee in an important railroad case pending in the federal court at St. Louis. In person, Brown is described as of medium height, of very slender figure, and "immediately noticeable for his wealth of red hair and beard."

[A disparaging sketch by a political opponent in 1872, pointing out Brown's weaknesses, appears in E. Chamberlin, The Struggle of '72 (1872), pp. 540-47. A more favorable, and generally more satisfactory sketch is printed in W. B. Davis and D. S. Durrie, An Illus. History of Missouri (1876), pp. 482-83. Other Missouri histories contain scattered reference to Brown's opposition to secession, advocacy of emancipation in Missouri, and administration as governor, especially, W. F. Switzler, Illus. History of Missouri (1879); and The Province and States (1904), ed. by W. A. Goodspeed, vol. IV. The Brown-Reynolds duel is described in some detail in W. B. Stevens, St. Louis-the Fourth City, 1764- 1911 (1911), I, 377-85; Missouri Historical Review, XIX, 423- 26. Brown's senatorial speeches appear in the Congressional Globe for the 38th and 39th Congresses. For his political campaign speeches one must consult contemporary newspaper files. Interesting light on Brown's appearance at the Cincinnati convention is shed by H. Watterson, "The Humor and Tragedy of the Greeley Brown Campaign," Century, LXXXV, 27-45. His connection with the earlier stages of the Liberal Movement may best be traced in T. S. Barclay, "The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri," Missouri Historical Review, vol. XX .]

P.O.R.


BRYANT, William Cullen, 1794-1874, author, poet, editor, abolitionist.  Wrote antislavery poetry.  Free Soil Party.  Editor of the Evening Post, which supported Congressman John Quincy Adams’ advocacy for the right to petition Congress against slavery, and was against the annexation of Texas.  After 1848, the Evening Post took a strong anti-slavery editorial policy and supported the Free Soil Party, supporting Martin Van Buren.  It opposed the Compromise of 1850.  Bryant and the Post opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.  In 1856, the Post broke with the Democratic Party, endorsing the new Republican Party and its anti-slavery faction.  They supported John C. Frémont as the presidential candidate.  Bryant opposed the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court.  He endorsed John Brown’s raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in1859.  He strongly supported the nomination of Lincoln as the Republican candidate for president in 1860.

(Rodriguez, 2007, p. 326; Sewell, 1976; p. 139, 146, 229, 363, 279-280; Staudenraus, 1961, pp. 101-102; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 422-426; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 200; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 3)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 200;

BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN (November 3, 1794-June 12, 1878), poet, editor, was descended from Stephen Bryant, who settled in the Plymouth colony in 1632 and became a town officer of Duxbury, Massachusetts. For several generations the Bryants were farmers, but the poet's grandfather, Philip Bryant, and his father, Peter Bryant, were physicians. The latter settled at Cummington, in western Massachusetts, married Sarah Snell, who traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower, and carried on a laborious and ill paid practise. He was a skilful surgeon, who had been trained under the French refugee, Leprilete; he had traveled widely as a surgeon in a merchant vessel; he had musical taste, playing much on the violin; and he was a lover of poetry, possessing a well-stocked library and writing light verse in both Latin and English. His strength was such that he could easily lift a barrel of cider over a cartwheel. The poet's mother was tall, strong, known for her common sense and stern moral qualities, and with certain literary habits; she kept a diary in which she concisely noted the occurrences in the neighborhood. Bryant's health in early childhood was delicate, his head seemed excessively large, and he was of a painfully nervous temperament, but by a stern regimen, including daily cold baths, his father made him a sturdy boy. The mother took pride in his precocity, teaching him the alphabet at sixteen months. The future poet was fortunate in his natural surroundings. His birthplace was a farmhouse surrounded with apple-trees, standing amid fields which sloped steeply down to the north fork of the Westfield River. In his fifth year the family removed to a place of still greater attractiveness, the homestead of his maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Snell, also of Cummington. The boy delighted in the brooks, the river, the rocky hillsides, and the deep forests, as yet only partly invaded by settlement, and enjoyed nutting, gathering spearmint, fishing, and other outdoor pastimes. He was fortunate also in the fact that his father's political interests-Dr. Bryant represented Cummington first in the lower and later the upper branch of the legislature kept the door of the farmhouse partly open upon the wider world of Boston.

Measured in years of formal tuition, Bryant's education was limited. The district schools gave him a training in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and the Westminster Catechism. At the age of twelve, his parents having decided that he deserved a college education, he was sent to live with the Reverend Thomas Snell, an uncle in North Brookfield, to learn Latin, and the following year was transferred to the care of the Reverend Moses Hallock, to acquire Greek. Both were men of great dignity, elevated moral standards, and austere influence. In the eight months with his uncle, Bryant showed a remarkably acquisitive mind, reading Virgil, the select orations of Cicero, and the colloquies of Corderius, while after two months with the Reverend Mr. Hallock "I knew the Greek New Testament from end to end almost as if it had been English" (Godwin, Bryant, I, 33). Meanwhile poetical ambitions had awakened in the boy. He owed much to his early and ingrained familiarity with the Scriptures, and when he was ten or eleven his grandfather Snell gave him the whole book of Job to turn into verse. A more important incentive came from his father's library, a collection ultimately numbering about 700 volumes. "In the long winter evenings and stormy winter days," Bryant wrote later, "I read with my elder brother . . . . I remember well the delight with which we welcomed the translation of the Iliad by Pope when it was brought into the house. I had met with passages from it before, and thought them the finest verses ever written" (Ibid., I, 24). In childhood he often prayed "that I might receive the gift of poetic genius, and write verses that might endure" (Ibid., I, 26). Before he was in his teens he had scribbled on many subjects, with the encouragement and also the sharp criticism of his father. Taken to Williamstown in September 1810, Bryant passed an easy examination for entrance to the sophomore class of Williams College. The institution was small and poverty-stricken, with a faculty of four who taught a meager curriculum for ill-prepared country lads. Bryant's chief amusements were woodland rambles, participation in the meetings of the Philotechnian literary society, and a course of miscellaneous reading, in which he profited particularly by his study of the Greek poets. Classmates remembered him later as modest, unobtrusive, studious, inclined to choose sober and bookish friends, and competent but not brilliant in the classroom. But his college career was brief. Withdrawing from Williams to prepare himself to enter the junior class at Yale, he worked at his books all summer (1811), only to have his father declare that his means were insufficient for the step.

Already Bryant had appeared, in a way which he later regretted, in print. In 1808, catching the indignant spirit of the Federalists about him, he had written a satire called "The Embargo," which in five hundred lines or more assailed President Jefferson as unpatriotic, a cowardly truckler to the French, an eccentric dabbler in science, and a man of low personal morals. Dr. Bryant unwisely carried this production up to Boston and had it published under the title of The Embargo: or Sketches of the Times, a Satire; by a Youth of Thirteen. It sold well, was praised by some reviewers, and attracted so much attention that in 1809 Dr. Bryant had it republished with several other pieces taken from the Hampshire Gazette, and placed his son's name on the title page. Not a line of the volume was ever included by Bryant in his later writings, and he spoke of the pamphlet with testy disgust as "stuff." But it proved the precursor of a really great poem. The autumn after he left Williamstown witnessed the composition of the first form of "Thanatopsis," a work written under several clearly traceable influences. His father had brought home the melancholy poetry of Henry Kirke White, and Bryant, hanging over it eagerly, read also Blair's Grave, and Bishop Porteus's poem upon Death. Simultaneously he was captivated by the fine blank verse of Cowper's Task. Under these circumstances-imbued with the mortuary meditations of Blair and Kirke White, watching the onset of the dark Berkshire winter, and supplied by Cowper with a superior and fascinating metrical form-he began the poem which was to make him famous; a great Puritan dirge, the first fine poetic expression of the stern New England mind. But after completing the poem he was content to stuff it into a corner of his desk. It was necessary for him to turn seriously to a career, and guided largely by his father, he determined to study for the bar. In December 1811 he entered the office of a Mr. Howe of Worthington, four or five miles distant, and there remained until June 1814, an unhappy period. He had no liking for legal study, and was troubled by the fear that his sensitive nature was unfitted for the controversies of the law courts. Meanwhile he made the acquaintance, momentous for his future work, of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. For the first time he understood the true character of the impulses which had caused him to pray to be a poet, and realized that they were inextricably bound up with his intense love of natural beauty. As yet, however, he was still groping for an authentic poetic expression. An unfortunate and obscure love affair was reflected in conventional verse, much of it callow in thought and hackneyed in imagery. In the late spring of 1814 he transferred his legal studies to the office of William Baylies in Bridgewater, and there completed them, passing his preliminary examination for the bar in August. These were the years of the second war with England, which awakened no enthusiasm in Bryant. His letters attack the conflict vehemently, and show that he, like other New England Federalists, was thinking seriously of the possibility of secession from the Union and of conflict with the Southern States.

Bryant was fully admitted to the bar in August 1815. While the young lawyer would have liked to embark upon practise in Boston, his purse was too thin to support him in a large city, and he somewhat hastily decided to hang out his sign in Plainfield, a village seven miles from his Cummington home. In December 1815 he walked over to make some preliminary inquiries. While striding along the highway he saw in the afterglow of sunset, flooding the western sky with gold and opal, a solitary bird winging along the horizon; his mind was filled with the beauty of the scene, and at his lodgings that night he wrote the finest of his lyrics, "To a Waterfowl." This also went into his drawer. After eight months in Plainfield, he found a larger opening in Great Barrington, in partnership with a young established lawyer whose practise was worth $1,200 a year. Bryant's experience as a lawyer in Great Barrington endured till the beginning of 1825. There were then three grades of lawyers in the state, entitled respectively to plead in the lower courts, to manage cases in the supreme court, and to argue before the supreme court bench; and Bryant by the fall of 1819 had been admitted to the third category. His name appears four or five times in the supreme court reports, indicating a practise larger than that of most young lawyers. But he found the contentious life of the bar uncongenial, while the frequent miscarriages of justice offended him. Tradition ascribes his final decision to relinquish practise to a decision of the state supreme court in 1824 reversing upon a flimsy technical quibble a judgment for $500 which Bryant had obtained for a plaintiff in a libel suit. But the basic reason was financial. On June 11, 1821, Bryant married Frances Fairchild, daughter of a neighboring farmer-the beginning of a union of singular harmony and devotion; and shortly afterward a daughter was born. As head of a family he required a larger income, and fortunately his pen enabled him to find it.

His fame as a poet dates from the almost accidental publication of "Thanatopsis" in the North American Review in 1817. One of the editors, Willard Phillips, had told Dr. Bryant that he wished William Cullen to contribute; Dr. Bryant found in his son's desk the manuscript of "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," and a briefer piece; and Phillips excitedly carried them at once to his Cambridge associates. "Ah, Phillips, you have been imposed upon," said R. H. Dana; "no one on this side of the Atlantic is capable of writing such verses." When in September the first abbreviated version of "Thanatopsis" was published, its effect was somewhat blunted by four weak stanzas on death which were accidentally prefaced to it; but thereafter Bryant's position in the narrow American literary world was secure. He contributed several other poems and three prose essays, one on American poetry, to the Review. Four years later, in 1821, he was invited to read the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Harvard Commencement to a distinguished audience, and wrote "The Ages," one of his longest productions, which contains many fine passages but is deplorably uneven. His Boston acquaintances prevailed upon him to publish it and some of his other verse, and the result was a pamphlet of forty-four pages, containing twelve pieces in all (Poems: Cambridge, 1821). Besides the final version of "Thanatopsis," to which he had added a stately exordium and conclusion, it contained three lyrics of unmistakable genius-"Green River," "To a Waterfowl," and "The Yellow Violet"; and it was warmly praised not merely by American reviewers, but by Blackwood' s.

Among the fruits of this literary success were a visit to New York (1824) at the invitation of Henry Sedgwick of Stockbridge, and an engagement to furnish an average of one hundred lines a month to the United States Literary Gazette of Boston for $200 a year. This ushered in a period of unexampled productivity in Bryant's career, for in about eighteen months (1824-25) he wrote between twenty and thirty poems for the Gazette, including some of his finest work-"Rizpah," "An Indian at the Burial Place of his Fathers," "Monument Mountain," "Autumn Woods," and the "Forest Hymn." By 1825 he had clearly emerged as America's one great poet. The result was an invitation (January 1825) to assume the co-editorship with Henry J. Anderson of the monthly called the New York Review and Atheneum Magazine, at $1,000 a year. Bryant accepted, left his wife and baby in Great Barrington, and for a little more than a year was exclusively employed upon a magazine of precarious and declining fortunes. He made the acquaintance of the literary circle of New York-Halleck, S. F. B. Morse, Verplanck, Chancellor Kent, and others; he wrote for the Review a few fine poems, notably "The Death of the Flowers," as well as much hack work. But he was increasingly worried by poverty and had obtained a license to practise law in the city courts when he was rescued by an offer from the Evening Post. Its editor, William Coleman [q.v.], had been injured in an accident, and Bryant stepped in (June 1826) as assistant.

For the next three years Bryant was sub-editor of the Evening Post, and upon the death of Coleman in July 1829 he assumed the editorial chair which he was to hold for almost a half-century. He quickly acquired a one-eighth share in the journal, which in 1830 became one-fourth, and in 1833 one-third. From the standpoint of material gain the step was fortunate. For the first time it lifted Bryant above financial anxiety, giving him an annual income during the first four years of between $3,300 and $4,000, sums then counted large in New York. He became at one step a public figure of prominence and influence, for the Evening Post, founded under the auspices of Alexander Hamilton, had long been one of the country's leading newspapers. But as a poet he unquestionably suffered by the new demands upon his time. Of the whole quantity of verse which he wrote during his long life, about one-third had been composed before 1829. During 1830 he wrote but thirty lines, during 1831 but sixty, and in 1833 apparently none at all. Newspaper staffs were small, and for the first fifteen years of his control Bryant had but one permanent editorial assistant. He wrote editorials, clipped exchanges, reviewed books, and sometimes gathered news. Usually he was at his desk soon after seven in the morning and remained till nearly five. This confining labor irked him, he cared little at the outset for journalism as a career, bracketing it with the law as "a wrangling profession," and his letters show that at first he meant to escape from it to find "leisure for literary occupations that I love better." Meanwhile he gave the Evening Post increased strength as a Jacksonian and free trade organ, enlarged· its news, and improved its format. But he relied more and more heavily upon his able, aggressive, and highly radical assistant, William Leggett, and after 1830 spent much time out of the office. He enjoyed excursions to the Catskills, Berkshires, and Alleghanies; in 1832 he made a journey to Illinois, where the prairies delighted him, and where he is said to have met Abraham Lincoln; and in 1833 he went on a Canadian tour. In June 1834 he sailed for Europe with his wife and children, intending to leave the Post forever and live upon his one-third share. He was absent during the whole of 1835 and was spending the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg when news reached him that Leggett was dangerously ill and the Evening Post in financial difficulties. He arrived in New York in March 1836, to find the journal without an editor, its business manager just dead, and its circulation, advertising revenue, and influence disastrously injured by the ill-temper and lack of judgment with which Leggett had asserted a Locofoco Democracy, attacked monopoly and inflation, and harried the Whigs. It was necessary to plunge in and labor with unwearying assiduity to rescue the paper. Leggett's connection with it was severed, and Bryant became half-owner. During 1837 and 1838 he worked again from dawn until dark, alarming his wife by his neglect of his health. As editor he had been taught a sharp lesson, and for three decades thereafter his primary allegiance-at times his sole allegiance was to the Evening Post.

By 1840 he had become one of the leading Democratic editors of the nation, and had begun to take advanced ground against slavery. He supported Jackson and Van Buren, demanded a low tariff, opposed the use of public money for internal improvements, and advocated a complete separation between government and banking. He vigorously championed the workingman against judges who held that labor unions were a conspiracy to obstruct trade. When J. Q. Adams defended the right of petition against Calhoun and the South, the Evening Post stood with him; it opposed the annexation of Texas; and it assailed Van Buren for pledging himself to maintain slavery in the District of Columbia. Bryant was able in 1840 to wage a whole-hearted campaign against Harrison, and four years later still kept the Evening Post on the Democratic side, though in his revulsion against Polk and the annexation of Texas he considered bolting the ticket. His chief aid during these years was Parke Godwin [q.v.], later his son-in-law, who assisted in a steady expansion of the news features. To the editorial page Bryant gave dignity and moderation; in vivacity, cleverness, and force it was not equal to the Tribune or Springfield Republican, but in occasional bursts of noble eloquence it was far superior, and his stately elevated style was a model for American journalism.

In 1832 he had brought out a collection called Poems containing eighty-nine pieces in all; the most notable additions to his previous work being "To the Fringed Gentian" and "The Song of Marion's Men." It was a slender sheaf to represent the entire production of a man who had written "Thanatopsis" twenty-one years earlier, but the North American Review rightly pronounced it "the best volume of American verse that has ever appeared." So marked was the American success of his work that Bryant sent a copy to Irving, who was then abroad, asking him to find an English publisher. The English edition came out (London, 1832), with a dedication to Samuel Rogers and an introduction by Irving which made in too unqualified terms the,., generally valid claim that "the descriptive writings of Mr. Bryant are essentially American a claim which some reviewers at once challenged. Irving also slightly displeased Bryant by altering a line of "The Song of Marion's Men" from "The British foeman trembles" to "The foeman trembles in his camp." The English reception of the poems was friendly, and John Wilson wrote an extended and for the most part eulogistic review for Blackwood's. This same year Bryant edited a prose collection called Tales of the Glauber Spa, which was published anonymously, and which contained several stories, creditable but by no means distinguished, from his own pen. This line of endeavor, a fruit of his contacts with Robert Sands and others, he wisely abandoned.

After the first heavy labor of restoring the Evening Post was accomplished Bryant resumed his pen, and the half-dozen years following 1838 evinced a partial renewal of his poetic energy. He wrote some fifteen poems in this period, and the fresh material enabled him to issue The Fountain, and Other Poems (1842) and The White Footed Doe, and Other Poems (1844), the former containing fourteen pieces, and the latter ten. A prefatory remark in the first volume shows that he had in contemplation a long reflective and descriptive poem somewhat resembling Wordsworth's Excursion and Cowper's Task; for he says that some of the poems are presented "merely as parts of a longer one planned by the author, which may possibly be finish ed hereafter." His friend R.H. Dana, Sr., had for years been insistently urging him to compose an extended poem; but it is probable that Bryant found when he attempted it that he did not have a sufficiently fertile and broad imagination, and that his art lacked flexibility and variety. The real value of the project was in furnishing him a much-needed incentive to write the brief lyrics which he hoped to fit into a larger scheme. The reason usually assigned for the slenderness of his output, his preoccupation with the conduct of the Evening Post, has partial, but only partial, validity. After the early forties he was free to take long vacations from the office, and did take them. The journal prospered, its annual average dividends during the forties being almost$10,ooo, while in the fifties it rapidly became a veritable gold-mine. From beginning to end of his life the poet-editor lived with a simplicity that was in some respects almost Spartan. But Bryant's growing wealth enabled him to buy in 1843 an old farmhouse and forty acres of land at Roslyn, Long Island, on the shores of an inlet of the Sound. Here, following the outdoor pursuits he always loved, he was able to spend week-ends and even whole weeks together in summer and fall. He delighted to work in his garden, to take long walks, to swim, and to botanize. He collected a large library, in which he spent much time. He could continue, moreover, those extensive travels which he loved, and which he partially described in correspondence to the Evening Post collected under the title of Letters of a Traveller (1850)-a wide tour of the South, four trips in close succession to Europe, and a jaunt to Cuba. Had it been only leisure and peace that were lacking, Bryant might have written as much in these years as Longfellow; and his keen professional interest in current events might, had he possessed a different temperament, have inspired his pen as passing history inspired Whittier's.

Yet despite increased leisure and frequent absences, Bryant devoted much hard labor to the Evening Post and after 1848 gave it a leading place in the national discussion of the slavery question. It broke sharply with the Democratic party in 1848, supporting the Free-Soil candidacy of Van Buren against Zachary Taylor with such ardor as to be the most efficient advocate of the new party. Two years later it opposed Clay's compromise bill, urging the free states not to give up a single principle. In 1852 it reluctantly indorsed the Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, but the following year its utterances against slavery were so radical that the Richmond Enquirer called it "abolitionist in fact." Bryant's disgust with the subserviency of Pierce to the South, and his resentment at the Kansas-Nebraska bill, made him quickly and completely dissever the Post from the Democratic party. In 1856 he enthusiastically allied the paper with the new Republican organization, while his assistant editor, John Bigelow [q.v.], was one of the men instrumental in bringing Fremont forward as its candidate. In the four heated years which ensued Bryant made the Evening Post one of the most vigorous of the "Black Republican" organs. He encouraged the despatch of settlers and rifles to Kansas, denounced the Dred Scott decision as an unallowable perversion of the Constitution, and called John Brown a martyr and hero. When Lincoln made his Cooper Union speech in 1860, Bryant introduced him, and the poet-editor was heartily glad to see him defeat Seward for the nomination. After secession began, Bryant never wavered in denouncing all plans for compromise, and in demanding that rebellion be put down by the sword. Many of his editorial utterances for these years display a grandeur of style, and a force and eloquence not to be matched elsewhere in the press of the period, and they produced an effect out of all proportion to the slender circulation of the Evening Post.

Throughout the Civil War Bryant belonged to the radical faction which demanded greater energy in its prosecution and assailed Lincoln for his moderation and his reluctance to emancipate the slaves. He was indignant at the modification of Fremont's proclamation. The Evening Post repeatedly urged the President to act, and pointed out that Antietam furnished a favorable opportunity. In his criticism of many administration policies Bryant was in close contact with Salmon P. Chase, whose appointment to a cabinet position he had urged upon Lincoln; but the editor objected warmly to some of Chase's own fiscal policies, notably the inflation of the currency by the issue of treasury notes as legal tender. For a time in 1864 the Evening Post hesitated to advocate the renomination of Lincoln, but in midsummer Bryant fell into line, and thereafter his praise of the Chief Executive lacked nothing in fervor. After the close of the war he broke from his former radical associates upon the issue of reconstruction in the South, the Evening Post maintaining an unflinching advocacy of President Johnson's mild policy, and attacking the harsh measures of Congress. Bryant regretted the impeachment of Johnson, and rejoiced when the Senate failed to convict him. After Grant's inauguration his active interest in the management of the Evening Post materially relaxed. The death of Mrs. Bryant on July 27, 1865, had been a heavy blow. In 1866 he tried to escape from his depression of mind by beginning a translation of the whole of Homer, completed in 1871, and showing a fine mastery of blank verse; and in 1866-67 he made a dispirited tour, his sixth and last, of Europe. He had been everywhere regarded for many years as the first citizen of New York, and he was unweariedly at the service of all good causes. In civic, social, and charitable movements his name took precedence of all others. But he was never in any sense popular; austere, chill, precise, and dignified, his demeanor made familiarity impossible, and even in small gatherings he was not a clubbable man. Though he was a polished and impressive orator, and spoke often, his immense influence as a public leader was almost wholly an indirect influence; he reached the minds of those who in turn could reach the masses. His volume of original writing in this period was not large, but it maintained the even merit which had usually marked his production since the appearance of "Thanatopsis." In 1876 he harked back to the subject of mortality in the noble poem "The Flood of Years," and followed it by his retrospective meditation, "A Lifetime," the last of all his works. To the end of his life, always athletic and active, he continued to give several hours daily when in town to the Evening Post, walking to and from his home. He was estranged from the Grant Administration by its blunders, its tariff policy, its course at the South, and its low moral tone, and he regarded the Liberal Republican movement with guarded approbation. Had the Liberal Republican convention in 1872 nominated Charles Francis Adams he might have supported him, but he regarded Greeley's candidacy as preposterous. Four years later, associates urged him to side with Tilden (an old personal friend) against Hayes, but he kept the Evening Post Republican. He labored as usual in the office on the day (April 29, 1878) when he delivered an oration under a hot sun at the unveiling of the Mazzini statue in Central Park. Returning after the ceremonies to the home of James Grant Wilson, he fell on the steps, sustained a concussion of the brain, and shortly lapsed from partial consciousness into coma. His death in June was followed by a funeral in All Souls' Unitarian Church and burial in Roslyn Cemetery.

Bryant holds a double place in American history. He brought to his editorial chair some qualities which no editor of his time possessed in equal degree. In culture and scholarship he surpassed Raymond, Bowles, and Greeley, while in dignity and adherence to moral principle he was far in advance of Bennett and Dana. Few men of his time did half so much to lift journalism from a vulgar calling to a place of high honor and national influence. The literary correctness of the Evening Post, controlled by Bryant's fastidious taste-his index expurgatorius is still quoted was famous. But, preoccupied with the great aims of his editorial page, he lacked the faculty of Bowles and Greeley for creating a broad newspaper which would appeal by enterprise in newsgathering and by special features to a great popular audience. He was responsible for few innovations in journalism, and they were not of high importance. His journalistic vein had something of the narrowness which marked his poetic genius, and though the Post's editorials, political news, literary articles, and foreign correspondence were of the highest merit, they were for the few and not the many. As a poet he holds a position in American letters akin to that of Wordsworth in English. He is our great poet of nature, with which more than one hundred of his total of about one hundred and sixty poems deal. He had certain clear limitations : he lacked warmth of emotion, and especially human emotion, while his imagination was restricted in range, and he seldom revealed intellectual profundity. But he possessed a sensitively artistic perception of what was lovely in nature, and a capacity for its imaginative interpretation, which are not equaled by any other American writer. It is not nature in general, but the untouched nature of the New World, and of New England in particular, which his verse pictures with definiteness and accuracy. With this descriptive power are joined an elemental piety, a pervading sense of the transiency of all earthly things, and a meditative philosophy which, while melancholy, is also peaceful and consoling; qualities which give too much of his work a religious depth, and make his poetry as cool and restful as the deep forests he loved. His range was not wide nor high, but within that range he wrought with a classical love of restraint, purity, and objectivity, chiseling his work as out of marble; and he produced a small body of poetry which may be called imperishable.

[The standard life is Parke Godwin's A Biography of Wm. Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence (1883), in two large volumes. Godwin also edited Bryant's Poetical Works and Complete Prose Writings (1883, 1884). The latter includes a selection of articles from the Evening Post, but the paper's editorial pages contain additional material of value which has never been collected. Godwin also made a selection from Bryant's travel writings, but these are found more fully in Bryant's own Letters of a Traveller (1850), dealing with his European, Western, and Southern wanderings. John Bigelow's brief volume in the American Men of Letters series, Wm. Cullen Bryant (1890), reflects the author's intimacy with the poet, as does also Jas. Grant Wilson's Bryant and His Friends (1886). The aim of Wm. Aspenwall Bradley's Bryant (1905) in the English Men of Letters series is critical rather than biographical. A note by Carl Van Doren on the origin of "Thanatopsis" may be found in the Nation, CI, 432-33. Some light is thrown upon Bryant's work as editor by Geo. Cary Eggleston, Recollections of a Varied Life (1910), and by Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922), while a sharply critical sidelight is furnished by a manuscript volume of memoirs by J. Ranken Towse, in the possession of the Evening Post. The best brief critical studies are by E. C. Stedman in Poets of America (1885), and Wm. Ellery Leonard in the Cambridge History of American Lit. (1917), I, 260 ff. The last-named volume contains a full bibliography.]

A.N.


BUCKINGHAM, Joseph T., Co-founder of the Free Soil Party. “The Free Soil State convention met in Boston on the 3d of October. The convention was called to order by Mr. Wilson, Amasa Walker was made temporary chairman, and Joseph T. Buckingham was made permanent president.”

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, pp. 255, 344)


BURLINGAME, Anson, Anson, 1820-1870, New Berlin, New York, diplomat, lawyer, orator. Massachusetts State Senator, elected 1852.  Republican United States Congressman, elected in 1855 and served 3 terms.  Burlingame was a member of the Free Soil Party and an early co-founder of the Republican Party in Massachusetts.  Anti-slavery activist in the House of Representatives.  He delivered a speech in reprimand of Senator Preston Brooks after he assaulted Senator Sumner on the Senate floor. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 456-457; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, p. 289; Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1927; Congressional Globe (1928); Sewell, 1976; p. 166, 258, 271n, 289, 345, 346 Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, pp. 308, 336, 491-493).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

BURLINGAME, Anson, diplomatist, born  in New Berlin, Chenango county, New York, 14 November, 1820; died  in St. Petersburg, Russia, 23 February, 1870. He was the descendant of a family who were among the early settlers of Rhode Island. His father, a farmer, removed, when Anson was three years old, to a farm in Seneca county, Ohio, where they lived for ten years, and in 1833 again removed to Detroit, and after two years more to a farm at Branch, Mich. In 1837 Anson was admitted to the University of Michigan, and six years later went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered the law-school of Harvard university, where he was graduated in 1846. He began the practice of the law in Boston, and a year or two later became an active member and a popular orator of the Free-Soil party, then recently formed. In the political campaign of 1848 he acquired a wide reputation as a public speaker in behalf of the election of Van Buren and Adams. In 1849-'50 he visited Europe. In 1852 he was elected to the Massachusetts senate, and in 1853 he served as a member of the state constitutional convention, to which he was elected by the town of Northborough, though he resided in Cambridge. He joined the American party on its formation in 1854, and in that year was elected by it to the 34th congress. In the following year he co-operated in the formation of the republican party, to which he ever afterward steadily adhered. In congress he bore himself with courage and address, and was recognized as one of the ablest debaters on the anti-slavery side of the house. For the severe terms in which he denounced the assault committed by Preston S. Brooks upon Senator Sumner, in 1856, he was challenged by Brooks. He promptly accepted the challenge, and named rifles as the weapons, and Navy island, just above Niagara Falls, as the place. To the latter proposition Mr. Brooks demurred, alleging that, in order to meet his opponent in Canada, in the then excited state of public feeling, he would have to expose himself to popular violence in passing through “the enemy's country,” as he called the northern states. The matter fell through, but the manner in which Mr. Burlingame had conducted himself greatly raised him in the estimation of his friends and of his party; and on his return to Boston, at the end of his term, he was received with distinguished honors. He was re-elected to the 35th and 36th congresses; but failing, after an animated and close contest, to be returned to the 37th, his legislative career ended in March, 1861. He was immediately appointed by President Lincoln minister to Austria; but that government declined to receive, in a diplomatic capacity, a man who had spoken often and eloquently in favor of Hungarian independence, and had moved in congress the recognition of Sardinia as a first-class power. He was then sent as minister to China. In 1865 he returned to the United States with the intention of resigning his office; but the secretary of state urged him to resume his functions for the purpose of carrying out important projects and negotiations that he had initiated. To this he finally consented. When, in 1867, he announced his intention of returning home, Prince Kung, regent of the empire, offered to appoint him special envoy to the United States and the great European powers, for the purpose of framing treaties of amity with those nations—an honor never before conferred on a foreigner. This place Mr. Burlingame accepted, and, at the head of a numerous mission, he arrived in the United States in March, 1868. On 28 July supplementary articles to the treaty of 1858 were signed at Washington, and soon afterward ratified by the Chinese government. These articles, afterward known as “The Burlingame Treaty,” marked the first official acceptance by China of the principles of international law, and provided, in general, that the privileges enjoyed by western nations under that law—the right of eminent domain, the right of appointing consuls at the ports of the United States, and the power of the government to grant or withhold commercial privileges and immunities at their own discretion, subject to treaty—should be secured to China; that nation undertaking to observe the corresponding obligations prescribed by international law toward other peoples. Special provisions also stipulated for entire liberty of conscience and worship for Americans in China, and Chinese in America; for joint efforts against the cooly trade; for the enjoyment by Chinese in America and Americans in China of all rights in respect to travel and residence accorded to citizens of the most favored nation; for similar reciprocal rights in the matter of the public educational institutions of the two countries, and for the right of establishing schools by citizens of either country in the other. The concluding article disclaims, on the part of the United States, the right of interference with the domestic administration of China in the matter of railroads, telegraphs, and internal improvements, but agrees that the United States will furnish assistance in these points on proper conditions, when requested by the Chinese government. From America Mr. Burlingame proceeded in the latter part of 1868 to England, and thence to France (1869), Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Prussia, in all of which countries he was favorably received, and in all of which, but France, to which he intended returning, he negotiated important treaties or articles of agreement. He reached St. Petersburg early in 1870, and had just entered upon the business of his mission when he died of pneumonia, after an illness of only a few days. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, p. 289;

BURLINGAME, ANSON (November 14, 1820- February 23, 1870), congressman, diplomat, the son of Joel Burlingame, a Methodist exhorter and lay preacher, and his wife, Freelove (Angell) Burlingame, was born at New Berlin, Chenango County, New York. As a small child he went with his parents to Seneca County, Ohio, and thence ten years later to Detroit. His early education was in the common schools and his undergraduate days were concluded in the Detroit branch of the then very young University of Michigan. Although in his later years he displayed an urbanity not usually bred in frontier life there was also in him a marked freedom and directness of manner characteristic of the environment in which he was reared. At the age of twenty-three he came eastward to the Harvard Law School and then settled in Massachusetts where he became a junior law partner in Boston with George P. Briggs, son of Ex-Governor George Nixon Briggs. On June 3, 1847, he married Jane Cornelia Livermore, a daughter of Isaac Livermore of Cambridge.

Burlingame's gift of oratory together with his exceptional personal charm led him quickly into politics where he found ample opportunities in the tumultuous fifties. He was elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 1852 and in the following year was a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention. In 1855 he was elected to Congress where he served three terms, being defeated in 1860 by William Appleton. A Free-Soiler and one of the organizers of the Republican party in Massachusetts, he was also an outspoken admirer of Kossuth and was at one time associated with the Know-Nothing party. Few records remain of his Congressional career. His speeches were unwritten and the reports in the Congressional Globe are fragmentary. He usually voted with his New England colleagues, he was a faithful representative of his constituents, and he was quickly responsive to appeals of justice and humanity. As the result of a stinging speech in castigation of Preston' Brooks [q.v.], the assailant of Sumner, he was challenged to a duel by Brooks. Burlingame formally accepted, but named as the place the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, which was difficult for Brooks to reach with safety. Brooks declined to go and the duel was averted. Burlingame's ostensible acceptance gained him great popularity in the North. (For the fullest and mo st recent account of this affair, see James E. Campbell, "Sumner, Brooks, Burlingame, or the Last of the Great Challenges," Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly, XXXIV, 1925, 435-73; for an earlier account, more favorable to Burlingame, see John Bigelow, Retrospection of an Active Life, I, 1909, 165-70.)

In the campaign of 1860 Burlingame did yeoman service for the Republican party and was rewarded by the appointment of minister to Vienna. Because of his previous sympathy for Kossuth and for Sardinian independence he was unacceptable to the Austrian court and his appointment was changed to Peking, a capital in which his former constituents maintained a lively interest because of the large share of Massachusetts in the China trade. Although by the treaties of 1858 the powers had at last attained the right of resident diplomatic representation in P eking, they had overreached themselves in China in more than one important respect. The imperial government was by no means able to carry out all of the provisions of the treaties because of the semi-autonomous character of the local governments. The treaty-port merchants, long held back from direct participation in the interior trade were both jubilant at the recent chastisement administered to China and truculent in claiming their new treaty rights. The situation was ominous when Burlingame arrived. Further military conflicts with the provinces seemed very possible and there was even the prospect that either by conquest or penetration the European nations would assert and seek to maintain full sovereign rights at least in the treaty-ports where they had been granted the right of residence and trade. While even the prospect of a partition of China presented itself to the American Government, practically all naval forces had to be withdrawn from the Far East because of the Civil War. Burlingame had to meet his problem single-handed.

With a sagacity singularly in contrast with the temerity of some of his other foreign policies at the outbreak of the war, Secretary Seward had instructed Burlingame to cooperate closely with the powers in China. Almost immediately, Burlingame assumed the leadership among the diplomatic representatives in Peking, although they were all far more experienced than he, and cooperation under his direction involved the agreement among the ministers to withstand the pressure of the treaty-port merchants and to assume toward the imperial government a tolerant attitude. This policy in turn gave to Burlingame great influence among the Chinese officials who sought his advice on a variety of problems such as the Lay-Osborn flotilla fiasco, the appointment of Robert Hart to the Foreign Inspectorate of Maritime Customs, and the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion. To Burlingame much credit is due for thwarting the early efforts of the foreign merchants to set up in the treaty-ports ·government wholly independent of the imperial authority. He developed a great admiration for and confidence in the Chinese and during a visit to the United States in 1865-66 he sought by speeches and personal conference to spread his enthusiasm and confidence among American mercantile houses. He also sought to promote the practise, which became common in later years, of placing American technical advisers in the employ of the Chinese Government. One may sum up the policy of Burlingame in China in the words of Raphael Pumpelly, who for a time was the guest of the American Legation in Peking and subsequently engaged in some surveys of the Chinese mineral resources, as a policy "based upon justness and freed from prejudice of race."

Among other projects which Burlingame urged upon China was the sending of diplomatic representatives to the western powers, an innovation which Japan had already adopted with some success in 1860. Very likely because of Burlingame's suggestion, Seward, on December 15, 1865, instructed him to urge such a course upon China. The idea seems to have met also with the approval of Robert Hart and it came about very naturally, when Burlingame let it be known in Peking in November 1867 that he was about to resign as minister, that the Chinese Government offered him the post as the head of an official delegation with two Chinese colleagues to visit the western powers, both to observe western civilization and also to plead with the governments not to press their demands for a revision of the treaties of 1858.

Burlingame set out promptly, visiting first the United States, then Europe. While the so-called Burlingame Mission met with unqualified hostility in China and was relatively barren of results on the Continent it fully accomplished its purpose in America and measurably succeeded in England. On July 28, 1868, Burlingame had signed with Secretary Seward a convention supplementary to the American treaty of 1858, which convention pledged the American Government to respect Chinese sovereignty and stated that the Chinese emperor by granting foreigners certain rights of trade and residence in China had "by no means relinquished his right of eminent domain or dominion." It contained other provisions which were also mere amplifications of rights granted ten years before. There was added also a bilateral immigration clause, designed to promote the importation of Chinese laborers to the Pacific Coast, particularly for work on the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad which had been experiencing labor difficulties. This article subsequently proved to be most ill-advised and was a fundamental cause of friction which brought the two governments twenty-five or more years later to a prolonged state of diplomatic non-intercourse. It may be questioned whether the treaty itself did not in the end do more harm than good but the immediate effect was beneficial to China and to Chinese American relations. Supported by the most emphatic approval of the American Government, Burlingame visited London, arriving just on the eve of the inauguration of the first Gladstone ministry. From Lord Clarendon he secured not a treaty but a declaration that China was "entitled to count upon the forbearance of foreign nations," and this was followed by an instruction from London to Peking which clearly revealed that the new government in London was not disposed to support the extravagant demands of the foreign merchants in China for the revision of the treaties. After London, Burlingame visited Paris, Berlin, and other European capitals, reaching St. Petersburg in February 1870, where he was stricken with pneumonia and died on the twenty-third of that month. His diplomatic career may fairly be described as brilliant. With the exception of the bilateral immigration clause in the treaty of 1868, for which Seward was at least as much responsible as Burlingame, few Americans in the Far East have served their own country so beneficially and certainly none has given to China a more sincere friendship.

[The most extensive bibliography with reference to Burlingame is to be found in Anson Burlingame and the First Chinese Mission to Foreign Powers (1912) by Frederick Wells Williams. While less a biography than an interpretation of Burlingame's services with respect to China, it is appreciative and yet judicial-in purpose. The contemporary estimates of Burlingame vary with the nationality of the writers. For the British point of view see Alexander Michie, The Englishman in China (1900); J . Barr Robertson, "Our Policy in China," Westminster Review, January 1870; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, February 1869. J. Von Gumpach, in his The Burlingame Mission; a Political Disclosure (1872), seeks to demonstrate from documentary sources that the Burlingame Mission greatly exceeded its powers and misrepresented many important facts. Of a very much more favorable character are the appreciations of Burlingame by Jas. G. Blaine, Atlantic Monthly, November 1870; W. A. P. Martin, A Cycle of Cathay (1896); Raphael Pumpelly, Across America and Asia (1870), and My Reminiscences (1918) .]

T.D.


BUTLER, Benjamin Franklin,  1795 – 1858 was a prominent lawyer from the state of New York. A professional and political ally of Martin Van Buren, among the elective and appointive positions he held were Attorney General of the United States and United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was also a founder of New York University  Actively supported the Free-Soil Movement. He was a prominent participant in the 1844 Democratic National Convention. As one of the leaders of the New York delegation he supported the candidacy of Martin Van Buren and opposed the 2/3 rule for nominating, but failed in both cases. In the end he was the one to announce that the New York delegation would switch to eventual winner James K. Polk.

(Sewell, 1976; pp. 156, 157, 225,229, 363)


BUTLER, Ovid, 1801-1881, Augusta, New York, lawyer, newspaper publisher, university founder, abolitionist.  Founded abolitionist newspaper, Free Soil Banner, in 1849. Helped found Northwestern Christian University in 1855.  It was later renamed Butler University.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.