John Bingham was a Republican congressman (1855-1863; 1865-1873)
whose proposal to protect civil rights constitutionally against
state action became the basis for Section One of the Fourteenth
Amendment. He was also a House manager at the Senate removal
trial for President Andrew Johnson in 1868, and served as U.S.
minister to Japan (1873-1885). He was born on January 21,
1815, in Mercer, Pennsylvania, to Ester Bailey Bingham and Hugh
Bingham, a carpenter and local politician. When he was 12, his
mother died and he went to live with a paternal uncle in Cadiz,
Ohio. In 1831, he returned to Mercer, where he worked for an
anti-Masonic newspaper. He attended Mercer Academy fulltime
during the 1834-1835 school year. Later in 1835, he began
attending Franklin College in New Athens, Ohio, but did not
graduate, perhaps due to illness. In 1837, he began reading law
at a law office in Mercer, and three years later was admitted to
the Pennsylvania and Ohio state bars, establishing a practice in
Cadiz. Campaigning in 1840 for Whig presidential nominee
William Henry Harrison led him to debate Edwin M. Stanton, the
future U.S. attorney general and secretary of war, who was
supporting Democratic President Martin Van Buren at the time.
Bingham settled in New Philadelphia, Ohio, in 1843, and
married his cousin, Amanda Bingham, the next year. The couple
later had eight children. In 1846, he was elected as a Whig to
be prosecutor for Tuscarawa County, but lost reelection two
years later. He spent 1850 working for a law firm in
Cincinnati before returning the next year to Cadiz, where he
failed to win election as a judge in Harrison County. When
the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened the Western
territories to slavery, Bingham organized the opposition in Ohio
and was elected to the first of four consecutive terms in
Congress as a Republican. An abolitionist, Bingham opposed
statehood for Kansas under the pro-slavery Lecompton
Constitution and opposed statehood for the free
territory of Oregon because it discriminated against free
blacks. In 1860, he endorsed fellow Ohioan Salmon Chase for the
Republican presidential nomination, and then campaigned in the
general election for Abraham Lincoln.
In the secession crisis, Bingham rejected efforts to
compromise with the South. During the Civil War, he pushed for
the abolition of slavery and chaired the House managers at the
removal trial of Tennessean West Humphreys, who had failed to
resign as a federal judge before accepting a Confederate
judgeship. In 1862, Bingham was narrowly defeated for
reelection. After his term ended in March 1863, he served as a
solicitor for the U.S. Court of Claims before President Lincoln
appointed him to the Judge Advocate General’s Office at the rank
of major. In the latter position, he successfully prosecuted
the court martial of William Hammond, the U.S. surgeon general,
on corruption charges. In April 1865, Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton named Bingham to the staff investigating and prosecuting
the conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln.
Bingham gave the closing argument for the prosecution.
In 1864, Bingham won the first of another four consecutive
terms in Congress. He supported most Reconstruction
legislation, including the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, the Fourteenth
Amendment, the Military Reconstruction Acts, and the Fifteenth
Amendment. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1866
because he believed Congress did not have the constitutional
power to enforce civil rights against the states. To remedy
that omission, his proposal to grant Congress such authority
became the basis for
Section One of the Fourteenth
Amendment. The Supreme Court later used the “due process”
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section One, to protect many
civil rights and liberties listed in the Bill of Rights against
interference by the states.
Although opposed to early efforts to impeach
and remove President Andrew Johnson from office, Bingham joined
the movement after the president violated the Tenure of Office
Act. The Ohio congressman served as chairman of the House
managers prosecuting the case against Johnson at the Senate
trial, where he delivered the three-day closing argument.
Bingham was implicated but not charged in the
Credit Mobilier
scandal. He lost renomination in 1872 because of
a popular groundswell to rotate the congressional seat among
politicians from the district’s other counties. After his term
ended in March 1873, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant
appointed him as the U.S. minister to Japan, where he served
until recalled by Democratic President Grover Cleveland in July
1885.
After retirement from public office, Bingham remained active
in Republican politics, campaigning for Republican presidential
nominees Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley. Bingham’s wife
died in 1891, and he spent his final years in poor health and
dire financial straits. In 1898, Congress awarded him a monthly
pension of $25. He died in Cadiz, Ohio, on March 15, 1900. |