Lyman Trumbull
Lyman Trumbull was an American lawyer, judge, and politician who represented the state of Illinois in the United States Senate from 1855 to 1873. Trumbull was a leading abolitionist attorney and key political ally to Abraham Lincoln and authored several landmark pieces of reform as chair of the Judiciary Committee during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era, including the Confiscation Acts, which created the legal basis for the Emancipation Proclamation; the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished chattel slavery; and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which led to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Born in Colchester, Connecticut to a prominent political family, Trumbull studied law in Greenville, Georgia, before moving to Illinois to establish a practice and enter politics. He served as the Illinois Secretary of State from 1841 to 1843 and as a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court from 1848 to 1853. As an attorney, Trumbull successfully argued the case Jarrot v. Jarrot, which de facto banned slavery in the state.
In 1855, Trumbull was elected to the Senate as the choice of the anti-slavery faction of the Illinois legislature, defeating Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln endorsed Trumbull for the election; the two soon became leading members of the new Republican Party. After the American Civil War, Trumbull was a leading moderate Republican, favoring both civil rights for freed slaves and reconciliation with the South.
In the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Trumbull voted to acquit Johnson despite heavy pressure from other Republican senators. He broke with the Republicans in 1870 and was a candidate for the presidency at the 1872 Liberal Republican convention. After returning to the Democratic Party, Trumbull left the Senate in 1873 to establish a legal practice in Chicago. Before his death in 1896, he became a member of the Populist Party and represented Eugene V. Debs before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Education and early life
Lyman Trumbull was born in Colchester, Connecticut on October 12, 1813, to Connecticut's leading political family, which included three Governors and had arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from Newcastle upon Tyne in 1639. His father, Benjamin Trumbull Jr., was an attorney, farmer, state representative, and the son of the historian Benjamin Trumbull. His mother, Elizabeth Mather, was a member of the Mather family of prominent New England Congregationalist clergymen including Increase Mather and Cotton Mather. Lyman was the seventh of eleven children, eight of whom survived into adulthood.File:Lyman Trumbull House.jpg|thumb|250px|As a young man, Trumbull relocated from Connecticut to Illinois, where his home in Alton is now a National Historic Site.|leftTrumbull attended Bacon Academy in Colchester, where he studied a traditional course in math, Latin, and Greek. When he turned eighteen, he teaching in Portland, Connecticut; New Jersey and Colchester. In 1833, he traveled to Pike County, Georgia, in hopes of becoming a schoolteacher there. Finding no position available, he proceeded to Greenville, where he was hired as principal of the Greenville Academy. Trumbull remained at Greenville for three years, where he read law in the offices of Hiram B. Warner. In 1837, he moved to Belleville, Illinois, where he began a legal practice in the office of John Reynolds, the former Governor of Illinois.
While living in Belleville in November 1837, Trumbull became aware of the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, an abolitionist minister and newspaper publisher, in nearby Alton. In a letter to his father, the young Trumbull predicted, " death and the manner in which he was slain will make thousands of abolitionists, and far more than his writings would have made had he published his paper an hundred years. … As much as I am opposed to the immediate emancipation of the slaves and to the doctrine of Abolitionism, yet I am more opposed to mob violence and outrage, and had I been in Alton, I would have cheerfully marched to the rescue of Mr. Lovejoy and his property."
Early legal, political and judicial career
In 1840, Trumbull was elected from St. Clair County to the Illinois House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party. He only served briefly in the House, where his colleagues included Abraham Lincoln and his future Senate colleague William Alexander Richardson. In 1841, Stephen A. Douglas resigned as Secretary of State of Illinois to become a member of the Illinois Supreme Court, and Governor Thomas Carlin appointed Trumbull to succeed him. Trumbull remained Secretary of State for two years, devoting most of his time to his legal practice while his brother Benjamin cared for the routine duties of the office. In 1843, Governor Thomas Ford requested Trumbull's resignation after he criticized Ford's position on the State Bank of Illinois. In 1842, the Bank had suspended payments after the value of its notes had fallen to fifty cents on the dollar, and Trumbull considered repeated efforts to legalize the suspension futile and disgraceful. Instead, and contrary to Ford's stated policy, Trumbull called for immediate liquidation of the Bank. His resignation divided the Illinois Democratic Party, with the Trumbull faction including Virgil Hickox, Samuel H. Treat, Ebenezer Peck, and Mason Brayman. Trumbull then returned to Belleville to practice law and marry Julia Jayne, a physician's daughter and a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln.In his private legal practice, Trumbull won a major victory for the abolitionist cause. In 1842, Trumbull and Gustav Koerner argued the case of Sarah Borders, a woman held under the state's indenture law in Randolph County, before the state supreme court. Trumbull and Koerner argued that slavery had been banned in the state since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. They lost their appeal, but shortly thereafter, Trumbull argued on appeal for the plaintiff in Jarrot v. Jarrot, in which an enslaved man, Joseph Jarrot, sued for wages by alleging that he had been held in servitude contrary to Illinois law. In this case, the supreme court accepted Trumbull's argument that no person could be held as a slave in the state of Illinois. The Jarrot decision, which de facto abolished slavery in the state, established Trumbull as the leading abolitionist attorney in the state.
In February 1846, Trumbull was a candidate for Governor of Illinois at the Democratic state convention. On the first ballot, he received the most votes but fell short of a majority, and the nomination was given to Augustus C. French. Trumbull attributed his defeat to Governor Ford, who favored John Calhoun of Chicago. On the second ballot, Calhoun's delegates voted for French to defeat Trumbull. Instead, Trumbull was nominated for U.S. Representative, but he lost the general election. In 1848, he was elected to the Supreme Court of Illinois, serving until 1853. In 1852, he was re-elected without an opponent.
United States Senator (1855–73)
1854 U.S. House election
Following the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, Trumbull, Gustav Koerner, and other anti-slavery Democrats began organizing an anti-Nebraska ticket in the 8th congressional district. The district, which was the state's most Democratic, was situated in the South Central region and centered on St. Clair County. Although the region had historically been a slaveholding region, a large number of German immigrants following the failed revolutions of 1848 had settled in St. Clair County. Against the chaotic backdrop of the Kansas–Nebraska debate, neither the Democratic nor Whig parties made formal nominations. Trumbull ran as an anti-Nebraska Democrat, and defeated Philip B. Fouke, a pro-Nebraska Democrat.1855 U.S. Senate election
The 1854 elections in Illinois were a crushing defeat for supporters of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and Senator Stephen A. Douglas. With overwhelming numbers in the state legislature, anti-Nebraska men were positioned to elect a new United States Senator to succeed James Shields, whose term expired in 1855. Abraham Lincoln, an ardent moderate critic of Douglas and the Act, was an early candidate for the seat. In a speech on October 16, 1854, Lincoln delivered a moral, legal, economic, and historical case against slavery which won him the endorsement of many anti-slavery members of the upcoming Illinois legislature, including Owen Lovejoy and John A. Logan. The Senate was to consist of nine Whigs, thirteen regular Democrats, and three anti-Nebraska Democrats allied with Trumbull. The House was composed of forty-six anti-Nebraska men and twenty-eight Democrats.The election was initially contested between Shields, Lincoln, and Trumbull. On the first ballot, Trumbull received only five votes. After the sixth ballot, Democrats swapped Shields for Governor Joel Aldrich Matteson, who had not actively supported the Nebraska bill. Trumbull had still not yet received more than eleven votes. On the ninth and tenth ballots, Matteson came within three votes of a majority, while Trumbull passed Lincoln. After the tenth ballot, Lincoln asked his supporters to vote for Trumbull to prevent a Matteson victory, and Trumbull won a majority by a single vote. At a reception later that night, Lincoln congratulated Trumbull on his victory.
When he entered the Senate in December 1855, Trumbull's credentials were challenged by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, who argued that Trumbull was not eligible to be elected under the Illinois State Constitution, which barred state judges from holding any other office. On March 5, 1856, Trumbull was seated by a vote of 35 to 8.
Antebellum period (1855–61)
Debate with Stephen A. Douglas and switch to Republican Party
On March 12, 1856, Trumbull delivered a speech in the Senate on the civil violence in Kansas. In it, he criticized the majority report of the Committee on Territories, submitted by his Illinois colleague Stephen A. Douglas, which defended the actions of "border ruffians" against claims of electoral fraud. The speech sparked a debate between the two, in which Douglas said Trumbull's claim to be a member of the Democratic Party was a "libel" and that his junior colleague had been elected by "Black Republicans," "Know-Nothings," and "Abolitionists." The Trumbull-Douglas debate lasted into the summer, and further established Trumbull's position as a leading force in anti-slavery politics. His speeches won praise from his colleagues Charles Sumner and Salmon P. Chase and served to dispel doubts from anti-slavery Lincoln men in Illinois.In June 1856, at Lincoln's urging, Trumbull attended the first Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Trumbull and Lincoln agreed to promote a conservative candidate for the presidential nomination, but it went to the more radical John C. Frémont, who had faint hope of victory. After the convention, Lincoln and Trumbull turned their focus to electing a Republican ticket in Illinois, and they were successful despite Frémont's failure to carry the state. As the debate over the Kansas Territory progressed to its admission as a slave or a free state, Trumbull and Lincoln were joined by Douglas in opposition to the so-called Lecompton Constitution, which guaranteed the property rights of slaveholders in the new state. In a speech on the Lecompton Constitution, Trumbull further argued that the Dred Scott decision, which offered a decision on an issue not before the court, was an illegitimate usurpation by the Supreme Court. Trumbull also contributed $2 to a fund to defray Dred Scott's legal fees.