HARPWEEK - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- President
- President - Elect
- President of the United States
Job Titles:
- President
- President of the United States
Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the United States, a congressman, a senator, and the Union military governor of Tennessee.
He was born on December 29, 1808, in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Mary McDonough Johnson and Jacob Johnson, a bank porter.
His father died when young Johnson was only three years old, and his widowed mother worked as a spinner and weaver to support her sons. Johnson worked as a tailor's apprentice from the age of 14, and then in 1827 opened his own tailor shop in Greeneville, Tennessee, where his family had moved.
Inspired by the spirit of Jacksonian democracy, Johnson helped found the Democratic Party in his region, and was elected town councilman in 1829 and mayor in 1831. He was a strict constructionist of the U.S. Constitution and an advocate of states' rights who distrusted the power of government at all levels. He won election to the Tennessee state legislature in 1835, 1839, and 1841, before being elected to Congress in 1843. As a member of the U.S. House, Johnson opposed federal government involvement in the economy through tariffs and internal improvements. He lost his congressional seat in 1852 because of gerrymandering by the Whig-dominated state legislature. In 1853, he narrowly elected governor of Tennessee, and reelected two years later. In 1857, Tennessee state legislature, elected him to U.S. Senate.
While in the Senate, Johnson became an advocate of the Homestead Bill, which was opposed by most Southern Democrats and their slave owning, plantation constituents. This issue strained the already tense relations between Johnson and wealthy planters in western Tennessee. He further antagonized them when he initially endorsed Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860. After the national party split into regional factions, Johnson backed the Southern Democratic nominee, John Breckinridge, but by then the rupture between Johnson and most Southern Democrats was too deep to heal. The break became final when he allied himself with pro-Union Whigs to fight the secessionist Democrats in his state for several months after Lincoln's election.
When the Civil War began, Johnson was the only senator from a Confederate state who did not leave Congress to return to the South. During the war, he joined Republicans and pro-war Democrats in the National Union party. By 1862, Union military forces had captured enough of Tennessee for Lincoln to name him as the state's military governor. In order to attract the political support of War Democrats in 1864, Lincoln selected Johnson as his vice-presidential running mate on the National Union ticket. Johnson delivered his vice-presidential inaugural address while inebriated, which lent credence to rumors that he was an alcoholic.
Within six weeks of taking office as vice president, Johnson succeeded to the presidency in April 1865 after Lincoln's assassination. The new president faced the difficult situation of developing a policy for the postwar reconstruction of the Union. Committed to limited government and a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution, Johnson's Reconstruction plan would have allowed the former Confederate states to return quickly to the Union. This would have left the civil rights of the former slaves completely under the authority of the former slave-owners who controlled the state governments.
Incensed at these policies, Radical Republicans in Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from the president and began passing their own program over Johnson's vetoes. The implementation of military districts and supervision across the South in 1867 piqued the president to aid Southern resistance and to attempt to thwart the process by firing Secretary of State Edwin Stanton, who was cooperating with Radical Republicans on Reconstruction. Stanton's removal violated the recently passed Tenure of Office Act and prompted the Republican-controlled House to impeach the president in February 1868. The removal trial in the Senate in May 1868 resulted in his acquittal by one vote.
Johnson remained in office as the lamest of lame-duck presidents, and unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1868. At the end of his term in March 1869, he returned to Tennessee where he began rebuilding his political base of support. Over the next few years, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for various offices. Finally, in 1875, an alliance of Republicans and a faction of the Democratic Party in the Tennessee legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate. He served only five months before he died on July 31, 1875, near Elizabethton, Tennessee.
Job Titles:
- Co - Editor of the New York Evening Post
Carl Schurz was a U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of the Interior, and a journalist. He was born on March 2, 1869, in Liblar, Germany, to Marianne Jüssen Schurz and Christian Schurz, a small businessman and teacher. He was educated at Marcellen Gymnasium in Cologne and at the University of Bonn, where he was powerfully affected by the nationalist and democratic views of Professor Gottfried Kinkel. During the failed Revolution of 1848, the young Schurz collaborated with his mentor to agitate for radical democratic reforms. He took part in an unsuccessful plot to capture the Siegburg arsenal, then fled to the Palatinate and joined the revolutionary militia. Serving as a lieutenant, he fought in battles at Übstadt and Bruchsal. At Rastatt, he narrowly escaped capture, and thus possible execution for treason, and managed to reach France. Professor Kinkel was not so lucky: he was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment at Spandau. In a daring feat, Schurz clandestinely returned to Germany and freed Kinkel from jail.
Schurz worked as a journalist and teacher in England and France for two years before migrating to the United States in 1852. That same year he married Margarethe Meyer, a rich heiress from Hamburg. The couple first lived in Philadelphia, and then moved to Watertown, Wisconsin, which had a substantial enclave of German immigrants. Schurz worked there as a journalist and real estate agent, but primarily engaged in Republican politics. An anti-slavery advocate and rousing bilingual speaker, he was an effective recruiter for the Republican Party among German Americans. In 1857, the party nominated him for lieutenant governor even before he had become a citizen. While the Republicans did well in the election, Schurz lost due to nativist prejudice against immigrants. In 1859, he failed in a bid to become the Republican gubernatorial nominee, but continued speaking for the party.
In 1861, newly elected President Abraham Lincoln appointed Schurz minister to Spain as a reward for his tireless electioneering during the previous campaign. Before departing for Europe, he recruited several cavalry regiments of German Americans. Once in Madrid, he became convinced that a policy of emancipation was necessary to prevent European intervention in the American Civil War, and so advised the president. In April 1862, Schurz resigned the ministership and returned to serve in the Union army as brigadier general. He was promoted to major general after the Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). His performance was criticized, however, at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Wauhatchie, for which a court of inquiry exonerated him. He was reassigned to command of a training camp outside Nashville and, finally, as chief of staff to General Henry Slocum in North Carolina.
After the war, Schurz toured the South on a fact-finding tour in the summer of 1865. His blistering report to Congress condemned President Johnson's lenient Reconstruction policies for allowing anti-black and anti-Unionist atrocities. Returning to journalism, Schurz took positions with the New York Tribune (as Washington correspondent), the Detroit Post, and the German-language St. Louis Westliche Post (as editor and part-owner). He increasingly became identified as the leading national spokesman for German Americans. In 1868, he delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, and in 1869 was elected to the U. S. Senate by the Missouri legislature.
Schurz soon broke with the Grant administration over its policies on civil service reform, patronage for Missouri, the attempted annexation of the Dominican Republic, and Reconstruction. One of the key instigators of the Liberal Republican movement, he presided at its 1872 national convention in Cincinnati. The new party's platform endorsed civil service reform and a conciliatory southern policy, while denouncing Grant administration corruption and expansionist foreign policy. They nominated eccentric newspaper editor Horace Greeley for president and Missouri Governor Gratz Brown for vice president, as did the Democratic Party. Schurz thought the Greeley nomination was a political mistake, but he supported the ticket. The senator was refused a second term in 1875 by the Democratically-controlled Missouri legislature.
In 1876, Schurz aligned himself with the Republican Party and campaigned for Rutherford B. Hayes. Once elected, the new president named him as Secretary of the Interior. Schurz replaced patronage within the Interior Department with merit hiring and promotion procedures (civil service reform), began the federal policy of environmental conservation, and uprooted corruption in the Indian Bureau. He came under fire for continuing the removal of Indians from their tribal lands to reservations, especially the forced resettlement of the Poncas, and eventually moderated that policy.
In 1881, Schurz became co-editor of the New York Evening Post, sharing duties with E. L. Godkin and Horace White. He promoted civil service reform and other causes and, as anti-Semitism gained momentum in Europe, called for religious and ethnic tolerance (his wife was half-Jewish). He was forced to resign in 1883 when he disagreed publicly with Godkin's criticism of striking telegraphers. The next year Schurz joined the "Mugwump" revolt of liberals from the Republican Party to protest the presidential nomination of James Blaine, a politico with a reputation for corruption and opposition to reform. Schurz remained thereafter a political independent, endorsing candidates of either party who supported his reform agenda.
In 1892, Schurz assumed the presidency of the National Civil Service Reform League and the editorship of Harper's Weekly upon the death of George William Curtis, who had previously filled both positions. Schurz was also a leading anti-imperialist, opposing the annexation of Hawaii and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War. He forged a friendship with Booker T. Washington and once again publicly spoke out for the civil rights of black Americans. Schurz was the author of a two-volume biography of Henry Clay (1887) and a three-volume autobiography called Reminiscences-the first volume, which explored his youth in Europe, was written in German, and the third volume was published posthumously. Schurz died on May 19, 1906.
Charles Sumner was a U.S. senator (1851-1874), abolitionist, and civil rights advocate. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Relief Jacob Sumner and Charles Pinckney Sumner, a sheriff and lawyer. In 1830, he graduated from Harvard and entered Harvard Law School, studying under U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who became his legal mentor. Sumner practiced law during 1835-1837, but, although he loved the intellectual aspect of the law, he had no affinity for its everyday practice. He also became an opponent of slavery at that time. In the late 1830s, he spent almost two-and-a-half years in Europe, studying its languages, cultures, and governments.
In 1840, Sumner returned to Boston where he became involved in several reform movements: public education, prisons, and antiwar (including opposition to the Mexican War). Most of all, he lent his time and considerable talents to the antislavery movement. In politics, he sided first with the "Conscience" Whigs, who opposed both slavery and the accommodating views of the "Cotton" Whigs, and then he helped form the Free Soil Party in the 1848 election year. He spoke out against "the lords of the lash and lords of the loom"; that is, the financial ties between Southern slaveowners and Northern industrialists. He also worked to defeat racial discrimination in the North. In 1849, he represented in court a group trying (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to integrate the public schools in Boston.
In 1851, a coalition in the Massachusetts legislature of Free Soilers and Democrats elected Sumner to fill the U.S. Senate seat of Daniel Webster, who had resigned to become secretary of state. An opponent of the Compromise of 1850, Sumner tried to repeal its Fugitive Slave Act. He argued that the intention of the constitutional framers had been to leave the states as the "guardians of Personal Liberty"; therefore, forcing state governments to cooperate in the return of runaway slaves was unconstitutional. His talent for oratory quickly made him the major antislavery voice in the Senate. After Congress opened the Western territories to the possibility of slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Sumner joined other Free-Soil Democrats and Conscience Whigs to establish the antislavery Republican Party.
When Kansas became embroiled in violence between pro- and anti-slavery forces, Sumner delivered a stinging attack from the floor of the Senate. His speech-"The Crime against Kansas"-used vitriolic rhetoric, focusing particular venom on fellow-Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina who was tarred as "mistress" to the "harlot Slavery." In retaliation, Butler's nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks, found Sumner seated at his desk on the Senate floor and beat the senator unconscious with his cane. The incident raised Sumner to the status of antislavery martyr. He was absent from the Senate for over three years, yet Massachusetts refused to fill his position. Butler, meanwhile, became a hero to many in the South for upholding the honor of his family and region. Returning to the Senate in 1859, Sumner continued where he left off with a four-hour antislavery harangue, "The Barbarism of Slavery."
At the onset of the Civil War Sumner began pushing for emancipation of the slaves. While lobbying President Abraham Lincoln for sweeping action, he drafted legislation that undermined the institution incrementally. The senator also helped convince the president to use black troops in the Union war effort. As chair of the important Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner sparred with Secretary of State William Henry Seward for control of the administration's foreign policy. On the issue of Reconstruction, Sumner was a radical who pushed for treating the former Confederate territory as conquered land to which the federal government could dictate with few restrictions. He was dissatisfied with Lincoln's mild reconstruction proposals and later became the chief adversary of President Andrew Johnson's policies, leading the call for the latter's impeachment (successfully) and removal (unsuccessfully). Sumner, a key spokesman for the African-American community, drafted or sponsored the major civil rights legislation of the period.
Sumner stood firm against the expansionist and interventionist foreign policy of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877). He used his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to stop the Grant administration's planned annexation of Santo Domingo and its formal recognition of the Cuban faction rebelling against Spanish rule. In response, the Grant administration orchestrated Sumner's removal as the committee's chair. Previously a harsh critic of Britain's pro-Confederate policies, the Senator sought retribution through a forced cession of Canada from Britain to the United States. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish blocked that effort, compelling the senator to accept the (1870) Washington Treaty's stipulation of monetary damages extracted from Britain.
Disgruntled not only by Grant's foreign policy, but by the president's hesitancy on desired liberal reforms, such as a merit bureaucracy, and by the administration's apparent corruption, Sumner reluctantly joined the Liberal Republican movement in 1872. In May a convention of Liberal Republicans nominated maverick newspaper editor Horace Greeley for president. A few months later, the desperate Democrats also endorsed Greeley, who was soundly defeated by Grant that November. After the election, Sumner continued to use his Senate seat to work for racial equality. In every session of Congress since 1870 he had introduced a civil rights bill to outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodations. Finally, shortly after his death, the outgoing Republican Congress passed a watered-down version of his bill as the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1883.
Sumner had married Alice Mason Hopper in 1866, when he was 55 years old; the couple had no children and divorced less than two years later. Charles Sumner died at his Washington, D.C., home on March 11, 1874.
David Hunter was a Union general during the Civil War. In May 1862, he issued an order freeing all the slaves in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, but it was quickly rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln.
David Hunter was born in Washington, D.C., on July 21, 1802 to Mary Stockton Hunter and Andrew Hunter, a minister, and was a grandson of Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Jersey. After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1818, he served with the U.S. Army on the western frontier, including two trips across the Rocky Mountains. He was stationed at Fort Dearborn (later, Chicago), 1828-1831, and married Maria Indiana Kinzie. In 1836, he resigned from the army, but he found his business pursuits in the Chicago area to be unsatisfactory, so he returned to the army in 1842 as a paymaster at the rank of major. He again served across the western frontier until the Civil War. Correspondence with Abraham Lincoln resulted in Hunter accompanying the president-elect from Illinois to Washington, D.C., in early 1861.
On May 14, 1861, Hunter was promoted to colonel, and three days later to brigadier general. He was wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, and was promoted to major general on August 13. On November 2, he replaced General John C. Fremont as commander of the Western Department. Hunter sent detachments to participate in the Union victories at Forts Donelson and Henry in February 1862. On March 31, 1862, he was reassigned to command the Department of the South, which encompassed Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. After capturing Fort Pulaski (Georgia) on April 11, he emancipated all the captured slaves. On May 9, he declared all the slaves in the Department of the South to be "free for ever." Ten days later, President Lincoln nullified Hunter's emancipation order, reserving the "war power" of emancipation for himself as commander-in-chief. The president also overruled Hunter when he raised a regiment of black recruits in South Carolina. He was relieved of the command of the Department of the South on August 22, 1862.
Hunter served on the court-martial of Fitz-John Porter, who was dishonorably discharged in January 1863 (the sentence was reversed in 1882). In May 1864, Hunter was placed in charge of the Union offensive in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. On June 5, he defeated a Confederate force at Piedmont and then set fire to the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. He later ordered the burning of the residence of John Letcher, a former governor of Virginia. Hunter's actions provoked a Confederate counteroffensive led by General Jubal Early, who penetrated into Maryland, demanding ransom from several towns, and reaching as far as seven miles from the White House. The Confederates were forced back into Virginia, but Hunter was relieved of his command on August 8, 1864, in favor of General Philip Sheridan. Hunter spent the rest of the war serving on courts-martial.
After Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, Hunter accompanied the president's body back to Springfield, Illinois, for burial. He then served as first officer of the military commission trying the conspirators in Lincoln's assassination. He retired the next year. Hunter died in Washington, D.C., on February 2, 1886.
Horace Greeley was the longtime editor of the New York Tribune and the 1872 presidential nominee of the Liberal Republican Party and the Democratic Party. He was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, on February 3, 1811, to Mary Woodburn Greeley and Zaccheus Greeley. His parents struggled to make a living at farming, and therefore moved several times in his youth. His sporadic schooling ended when he was 14, but he had an inquisitive mind and was a voracious reader throughout his life.
Horace Greeley was the longtime editor of the New York Tribune and the 1872 presidential nominee of the Liberal Republicans and Democrats. He was an abolitionist who became dissatisfied with the alleged slowness of President Abraham Lincoln to act on emancipation. On August 19, 1862, he publicly chastised Lincoln for it in the editor's "The Prayer of Twenty Millions." Unknown to Greeley and the public, the president had already decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Horatio Seymour was governor of New York and the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in 1868. He was born on May 31, 1810 in Pompey Hill, New York, to Mary Forman Seymour, daughter of a wealthy landowner, and Henry Seymour, a businessman. Seymour was schooled at local academies, and then studied law in Utica, New York. He passed the bar in 1832, but, after inheriting a considerable estate, had no need to practice it. In 1835, he married Mary Bleecker; they had no children.
Seymour entered politics early in life. In 1833, he moved to Albany, where he joined the staff of Governor William Marcy (1833-1839). Seymour made his electoral debut in 1841, when he won a seat in the New York state legislature, followed by a victorious run for the mayoralty of Utica in 1842. He returned to the legislature the following year and in 1845, having gained a reputation for effectively forging compromises between competing Democratic factions, was elected speaker of the assembly. Seymour became known for his tireless promotion of improvements to the Erie Canal. He was a member of the conservative "Hunker" wing of the New York Democracy, which favored state government support for internal improvements and backed the expansionist policies of President James K. Polk. The then-retired Seymour, however, did not play a major role in the dispute over the Mexican War and the expansion of slavery.
Seymour lost a bid for the New York governorship in 1850, but was elected two years later by a reunited Democratic Party. As governor (1853-1855), Seymour oversaw the enactment of penal reform and opposed prohibition and nativism. In 1854, he was narrowly defeated for reelection in a four-way race that pitted him against candidates from the emerging Republican Party, the nativist American Party, and a splinter Democratic faction. Seymour retired to his farm, but worked behind the scenes in an attempt to keep the increasingly divided Democratic Party united.
When his party did split in 1860, nominating two presidential candidates, Seymour backed Stephen Douglas and the policy of popular sovereignty for the Western territories (allowing the voters there to decide the question of slavery for themselves). After Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, Seymour opposed secession and worked for a peaceful compromise. When the Civil War began, he supported the Union military effort and distanced himself from the antiwar Peace Democrats. Elected governor in 1862, Seymour worked hard to fill his state's military quotas. He was a vocal critic, however, of Lincoln administration policies, including government centralization of power, emancipation of the slaves, the military draft, and the suppression of civil liberties.
Governor Seymour managed to delay the implementation and limit the scope of the draft in New York, but its commencement in July 1863 provoked four days of violent riots in New York City (as it did in cities across the North). As governor, he traveled to the city, where he spoke to an angry crowd, addressing them controversially as "My friends." He was attempting to quell the rioters' violence, but Republicans would thereafter tar him as sympathizing publicly with the perpetrators. In 1864, Seymour was defeated for reelection. Out of office, he continued to play an active and influential role in Democratic politics, supporting the lenient Reconstruction policies of President Andrew Johnson and opposing the alternative of the congressional Republicans.
After a lengthy deadlock at the Democratic National Convention in 1868, delegates chose Seymour was their compromise candidate for president. Despite his initial hesitation, Seymour ran a vigorous campaign, becoming only the second presidential nominee (after Stephen Douglas) to embark on an issues-oriented speaking tour. During the contest, Republicans associated the Democratic nominee with violence against blacks by reminding voters of his alleged complicity in the Civil War draft riots in New York City and by linking him with Reconstruction violence. In the November election, Seymour lost to Republican Ulysses S. Grant, the Union military hero of the Civil War.
In his later years, Seymour was honored as an elder statesman of his party. He mentored younger Democrats, such as Samuel J. Tilden and Grover Cleveland, both of whom became governors of New York and presidential nominees of the Democratic Party. Seymour lived long enough to see the latter elected president, but died in 1886 at his sister's house in Utica, New York.
James Mitchell... Bonner, John... Butler, Benjamin Franklin... Chase, Salmon Portland... Corwin, Thomas... Crittenden, John Jordan... Curtis, George William... Douglas, Stephen Arnold... Fremont, John Charles... Greeley, Horace... Henderson, John Brooks... Hunter, David... Johnson, Andrew... Johnson, Reverdy... Lincoln, Abraham... Seward, William Henry... Stevens, Thaddeus... Sumner, Charles... Toombs, Robert Augustus... Trumbull, Lyman... Wilson, James Falconer...
Jefferson Davis was a U.S. senator from Mississippi, secretary of war, and, most famously, president of the Confederacy. He was born in Christian (later Todd) County, Kentucky, to Jane Cook Davis and Samuel Emory Davis, who were frontier farmers. The exact year of his birth was not recorded. When he was a young boy, the family moved to the Louisiana Territory, then to Mississippi. He was educated for two years at St. Thomas College, a Catholic boarding school in Kentucky, before resuming his studies at academies near his family's home in Mississippi. He attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, for one year beginning in 1823. His father died the next year. Jefferson's eldest brother, Joseph, secured his sibling an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His record as a cadet (1824-1828) was one of rowdy behavior and mediocre academic achievement.
Upon graduation the army commissioned Davis as a lieutenant and assigned him to the West. He saw little action, however, even during the Black Hawk War (1832), most of which he missed while away on furlough. In 1835, a military court found Davis guilty of showing disrespect toward a superior officer, but determined that it was not a military offense. Unhappy with the decision as well as with army life, he resigned. In June 1835, he married Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of Zachary Taylor; she died three months later of yellow fever or malaria. Davis helped manage his eldest bother's plantations for several years. During that time he read extensively and became interested in public affairs, developing into a Democratic partisan and an advocate of states' rights and territorial expansion.
In 1843, Davis was defeated in a race for state legislator, but the next year he was elected to Congress. In 1845, he married Varina Howell. With the commencement of the Mexican War, Davis resigned from Congress to join the Mississippi volunteers. He performed skillfully at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista, for which he became a hero in his home state. In August 1847, the Mississippi legislature recognized Davis's new stature by appointing him to fill the U.S. Senate seat left unoccupied upon the death of Jesse Speight. In the Senate, Davis chaired the Committee on Military Affairs, promoted territorial expansion, and defended slavery, states' rights, and Southern interests. He staunchly opposed the Compromise of 1850, which attempted to settle issues, particularly related to slavery, provoked by the Mexican War. He countered unsuccessfully with a proposal for extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean (anticipating the equally unsuccessful Crittendon Compromise of 1861).
Davis resigned from the Senate in September 1851 to run for governor of Mississippi, but was defeated in a close election. In the spring of 1853, he was appointed to be secretary of war by the new Democratic president, Franklin Pierce. Davis proved to be a competent administrator who strengthened the U.S. army by insisting on improved training and equipment, merit promotions, and expanded arsenals, defenses, and personnel. He dispatched survey teams to locate potential routes for a transcontinental railroad, which he supported for national security reasons. He also advanced Southern views within the Pierce administration.
In 1857, Davis was reelected to the U.S. Senate, where he again served as chair of the Military Affairs Committee. When the Democratic Party split in the election of 1860, he supported the Southern candidate, John Breckinridge. Davis did not endorse immediate secession following Lincoln's election, but worked for compromise and supported the ill-fated Crittendon Compromise. When Mississippi seceded from the Union, Davis resigned his Senate seat. He accepted with reluctance the presidency of the newly proclaimed Confederate States of America.
As chief executive of a region seeking independence against a stronger opponent, Davis faced great obstacles. He has been praised as an intelligent, flexible, and effective administrator, but he lacked the crucial ability to inspire and lead the populace. He has been criticized for making unsound appointments, not paying enough attention to the western military theater, and ignoring the suffering of the general population. He interpreted the emergency powers under the Confederate constitution broadly and consequently oversaw the use of a military draft, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the government regulation or control of key industries. After the northern elections in 1864, Davis proposed to arm slaves and to free them as a reward for military service. Despite intense opposition, the Confederate Congress approved a revised version of his plan, although the war ended before it was implemented.
When the Civil War ended in Confederate defeat, Davis was arrested and incarcerated at Fort Monroe (Hampton, Virginia) for two years. After being paroled, he published a two-volume The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, which defended the right of secession. He engaged in several unsuccessful business ventures, and then died of pneumonia on December 6, 1889, while in New Orleans.
John Bonner was the managing editor of Harper's Weekly, 1858-1863. He was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1828. After graduating from Queen's College in Kingston, Ontario, he lived for six years in Paris studying law and medicine. He immigrated to New York City around 1851 and joined the editorial staff of the New York Herald. He was hired by as managing editor of Harper's Weekly in 1858 and then left that position five years later to pursue business interests. In the late 1860s, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked for various newspapers, including the Examiner. He was the author of several books, including A Treatise on the Registry Laws of Canada, a history of The Old Régime of the [French] Revolution, and children's histories of France, Greece, Rome, Spain, and the United States.
Lyman Trumbull was a Republican senator from Illinois. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he steered the Thirteenth Amendment through the Senate to passage by that body in April 1864.
Lyman Trumbull was born on October 12, 1813, in Colchester, Connecticut, to Elizabeth Mather Trumbull and Benjamin Trumbull. He was educated at Bacon Academy in Colchester, and began teaching school in Connecticut in 1829. Four years later, he moved to Georgia seeking better teaching opportunities. He was a schoolteacher in Greenville, while studying law in his off time. In 1836, he was admitted to the Georgia state bar and established a law practice in Greenville. While in Georgia, he developed the belief that slavery degraded both slave and slaveowner. In 1837, he moved to Belleville, Illinois, where he established a prosperous law partnership with John Reynolds, a former congressman, governor, and state justice.
In 1840, Trumbull was elected to the Illinois General Assembly as a Democrat and, just 27 years old, as that chamber's youngest member. He sponsored a bill to register free blacks in order to prevent them from being identified as fugitive slaves and returned to their alleged masters. During his legal career, he defended blacks in several lawsuits related to their alleged status as slaves. In 1841, Trumbull resigned from the state legislature to serve as the Illinois secretary of state after the resignation of Stephen Douglas, who had taken a seat on the Illinois Supreme Court. In 1843, Trumbull resigned as state secretary of state and married Julia Jayne; they later had three children. He continued to practice law in Belleville, losing a congressional race in 1846. He was elected as a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court in 1848 and reelected four years later.
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the Western territories to slavery, divided Illinois Democrats. An angry Trumbull became a leader of the opponents of the act. That fall, he was elected to Congress with the backing of Anti-Nebraska Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers. A few months later, in February 1855, the Illinois legislature chose Trumbull on the tenth ballot over Abraham Lincoln and two other candidates to represent the state in the U.S. Senate. In 1857, Trumbull became a Republican. In the Senate, he voted against the proposed proslavery ("Lecompton") constitution for Kansas and the Crittenden Compromise during the secession crisis of 1860-1861.
Early in the Civil War, Trumbull was one of five senators to oppose the war aims resolution of July 1861 because he thought its focus on preserving the Union and Constitution was too narrow. However, he strongly supported the Union war effort and generally backed the Lincoln administration, while expressing concerns about civil liberties violations and government centralization. Trumbull held a powerful position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (1861-1873). As chairman, he added emancipation sections to the First and Second Confiscation Acts, freeing slaves coming into Union lines. He steered the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the entire United States, to passage by the Senate in April 1864.
On Reconstruction, Trumbull was a moderate who supported the policies of Presidents Lincoln and, initially, Andrew Johnson. Although supportive of property and legal rights for blacks, Trumbull opposed granting them the political rights of voting and jury duty. He crafted legislation to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau and for a civil rights act, and was shocked when President Johnson vetoed them. In the spring of 1866, Congress overrode the vetoes, but the president's actions pushed moderates like Trumbull to cooperate with radical Republicans in controlling the Reconstruction process. Consequently, Trumbull voted for the Military Reconstructions Acts (1867), the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified, 1868), and the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified, 1870).
Despite his animosity toward the president, Trumbull opposed the effort to impeach and remove Johnson from office. Trumbull did vote in February 1868 for a resolution condemning the president for firing War Secretary Edwin Stanton (who was cooperating with Congress on Reconstruction); however, the Illinoisan was one of seven Republican senators who voted for Johnson's acquittal, and thereby prevented the president's removal.
During the first presidential term of Republican Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1873), Trumbull came to oppose further efforts at Reconstruction as counterproductive. In 1871, he voted against the Ku Klux Klan Act, which aimed to suppress anti-black violence in the South. He also opposed the Grant administration on allegations of aggression in foreign policy, inattention to civil service reform, and corruption in the federal bureaucracy. In 1872, Trumbull sought the presidential nomination of the splinter Liberal Republican Party, but lost to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who, in turn, lost the general election to Grant.
At the end of his third senatorial term in March 1873, Trumbull retired to practice law in Chicago, and thereafter associated with the Democratic Party. During the Electoral College controversy of 1876-1877, he served as legal counsel for Democratic presidential nominee Samuel J. Tilden. The Electoral College Commission awarded the disputed votes and the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Trumbull's first wife had died in 1868, and he remarried in 1877 to Mary Ingraham; they had no children. In 1880, he was the unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial nominee. In the early 1890s, he worked with the Populist movement in Illinois. Lyman Trumbull died on June 25, 1896, in Chicago.
Nast became a professional illustrator just as American journalism entered a new era in the 1850s with the advent of periodicals combining general-interest content, abundant illustration, and a national subscription base. In 1856, Frank Leslie hired the 15-year-old Nast as a staff artist for his new weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, where the boy honed his skills and learned how to etch on a woodblock. Nast also studied the work of cartoonists for Punch, the British magazine, especially their use of symbolic figures like John Bull and the British Lion. From the satiric art of Honoré Daumier of France and, more directly, Leslie's campaign against adulterated ("swill") milk, the young illustrator realized that art could be used to illuminate social problems.