Jacob Howard was a Whig congressman (1841-1843) and
Republican senator (1861-1871) from Maine. He served on the
Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction and steered the
Fourteenth Amendment, to which he added the citizenship clause,
to passage in the Senate. Jacob Howard was born on July 10, 1805, in Shaftsbury,
Vermont, to Polly Millington Howard and Otis Howard, who were
farmers. He attended academies in Vermont and Williams College
in Massachusetts. After graduating in 1830, he read law in
Ware, Massachusetts. In 1832, he moved to Detroit, Michigan,
was admitted to the state bar the next year, and became the city
attorney in 1834. He married Catherine Shaw in 1835; the couple
later had five children. In 1838, Howard was elected as a Whig
to the Michigan House, where he helped revise the state’s legal
code. His colleagues nicknamed him “Honest Jake.” Two years
later he was elected to Congress, but did not seek reelection
and returned to his law practice.
Howard spoke out forcefully against slavery and was among the
key founders of the Republican Party in Michigan when the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened the Western
territories to slavery. He wrote the new party’s platform,
chaired its Resolutions Committee, and was said to have
suggested the party’s name. Later that year, he was elected as
a Republican to the state attorney generalship. He served in
that position until resigning in late 1861 when he was elected
to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate. Howard was a skilled
constitutional lawyer, who aligned with the radical wing of the
party, urging emancipation and confiscation of Confederate
property. He was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
which drafted the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. He
also served as chairman of the Committee on Pacific Railroads
(1864-1871), and was reelected to a second term in early 1865.
Following the Civil War, Howard toured Virginia and the
Carolinas to investigate the postwar situation, which convinced
him that President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies were
inadequate. In December 1865, the Michigan senator was
named to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted
the Fourteenth Amendment. Because of the illness of
Chairman William Fessenden, Howard represented the Joint
Committee on Reconstruction by opening the debate and steering
the Fourteenth Amendment through the Senate. He
successfully amended Section One to include a definition of
national citizenship, and won passage of the proposed
constitutional amendment on June 8, 1866. He also lent
strong support to the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In
February 1868, Howard voted to impeach President Andrew Johnson
for violating the
Tenure of Office Act.
Howard retired from the Senate at the end of his term on
March 3, 1871, returning to his home in Detroit, where he died a
month later on April 2.
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