Lyman Trumbull was a Republican senator from Illinois. As
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he successfully
steered through the Senate the Thirteenth Amendment, the
Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, and the Civil Rights Act of
1866.
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 as a Democrat to the Illinois
General Assembly, where he became the youngest member at age
27. 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 backed 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. |