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James Gillespie Blaine
(January 31, 1830 – January 27, 1893)

 

James G. Blaine was a congressman (1863-1876), senator (1876-1881), secretary of state (1881; 1889-1892), and the Republican presidential nominee in 1884.  As a congressman in 1866, his proposal on apportionment of seats in the U. S. House
of Representatives became the foundation for Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment.  It penalizes a state that denies voting rights to any adult male citizen by proportionally reducing the state’s population base used in calculating congressional seats. 

Blaine was born on January 31, 1830, at Indian Hill Farm, near West Brownville, in Washington County, Pennsylvania, to Maria Gillespie Blaine and Ephraim Blaine, one of the state’s largest landowners.  Blaine was educated for several years in Lancaster, Ohio, then entered Washington and Jefferson College (Washington, Pennsylvania) in 1843, graduating in 1847, at the age of seventeen, near the top of his class.  After graduation, he was a schoolteacher at Western Military Institute (Kentucky) before moving to Philadelphia where he taught at the Pennsylvania Institute for the Blind and studied law in his spare time.  In June 1850, he exchanged wedding vows in secret with Harriet Stanwood.  They remarried in March 1851 because of the questionable legality of the first marriage ceremony. 

In 1854, Blaine moved to his wife’s hometown of Augusta, Maine.  He edited the Kennebec Journal and Portland Advertiser, and was one of the founders of the Republican Party in his adopted state.  He was elected to the lower house of the state legislature, serving from 1859-1862, the latter two years as speaker of the house.  By that time, Blaine was solidly positioned as a major player in Republican state politics.  He was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1863 and served until 1876.  He became an expert parliamentarian and was elected to three terms as House speaker (1869-1875). 

During his tenure in Congress, Blaine backed most of the Radical Reconstruction agenda and favored the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.  On economic issues like tariff and monetary policies he took centrist positions.  He became the leader of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, called the “Half-Breeds,” standing in opposition to both the conservative, pro-Grant “Stalwarts,” led by his bitter rival, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, and the liberal faction, represented by Senator Carl Schurz and Harper’s Weekly editor George William Curtis. 

In 1876, Blaine was the leading presidential candidate going into the Republican National Convention, but his chances were undermined by revelations in the “Mulligan Letters” which allegedly implicated him in graft involving railroad companies.  Still, he led on the first six ballots, and it was only on the seventh that a stop-Blaine movement came together to nominate a compromise candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes.  At the convention, the nickname “Plumed Knight” was bestowed on Blaine in a rousing nominating speech by Robert Ingersoll.  The term was a compliment to Blaine’s legislative skill and patriotism, as “a man who has preserved in Congress what our soldiers won upon the field.”  In the 1884 election, however, cartoonist Thomas Nast would use the epithet to mercilessly taunt Blaine.   

Shortly after the convention, on July 10, 1876, Blaine resigned his congressional seat to accept appointment as Maine’s junior U.S. senator upon the retirement of Lot Morrill.  Blaine was then elected in his own right and served until 1881.  In the Senate, he chaired the Committee on Rules and the Committee on Civil Service and Retrenchment. 

In 1880, a third-term boom made former president Ulysses S. Grant the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, while opponents of Grant backed Blaine or Senator John Sherman of Ohio.  The convention deadlocked for thirty-three ballots as none of the three candidates could win the requisite number of votes.  On the 34th ballot, momentum started for a compromise candidate, Representative James Garfield, and culminated in his nomination.  As a loyal party-man, Blaine endorsed and worked hard to elect Garfield.  The new president rewarded him with the cabinet post of secretary of state.   

On March 5, 1881, Blaine resigned the U.S. Senate to assume his new position.  After Garfield’s assassination, though, Blaine stayed on only briefly in the administration of President Chester Arthur, resigning in December 1881.  In his brief tenure as secretary of state, he called for a Pan-American conference and advocated U.S. control of an anticipated inter-oceanic canal crossing Central America (eventually fulfilled by the Panama Canal).  Upon his retirement, he began writing memoirs of his public life, published in two volumes (1884 and 1886) as Twenty Years in Congress

In 1884, Blaine was the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.  Former Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman was a popular alternative, but he refused to have his name placed in nomination.  Blaine was nominated on the fourth ballot over incumbent President Chester Arthur, who had alienated conservatives without gaining the support of reformers.  Because of Blaine’s alleged corruption, opposition to civil service reform, and reckless foreign policy views, an influential group of independent Republicans (called “Mugwumps”) broke with their party and supported Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland.  The tumultuous campaign ended in Cleveland narrowly defeating Blaine.  After the election, Blaine returned to finish the second volume of his memoirs, and in 1887 toured Europe, where he was received by several heads of state.   

In 1888, Blaine was again considered the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.  However, he declined to enter the race, believing that another acrimonious convention would damage whomever the Republicans nominated.  He still received a few scattered votes.  He had worked behind the scenes to nominate Benjamin Harrison, and when Harrison became president in 1889, he appointed Blaine to his previous position as secretary of state.  In 1889-1890, Blaine chaired the first Pan-American Conference and advocated reciprocal tariff agreements between Latin America and the United States.  In 1892, he resigned his cabinet post to seek the Republican presidential nominee against Harrison.  The president, though, was renominated on the first ballot, with Blaine and William McKinley in a near-tie for a distant second place. 

James G. Blaine died in Washington, D. C., on January 27, 1893, and was interred at Oak Hill Cemetery.  In 1920, his remains were transferred to Blaine Memorial Park in Augusta, Maine.


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