William Allen, Governor, U.S. Senator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Allen_(governor)

William Allen (December 18 or 27, 1803– July 11, 1879) was an Democratic Representative, Senator and 31st Governor of Ohio. He moved to the U.S. state of Ohio after his parents died, residing in Chillicothe, Ohio.

He was of Quaker ancestry, was admitted to the bar at 21, and began his career as politician in the Democratic Party at a young age. Allen supported "popular sovereignty" and the presidential candidacy of Lewis Cass, identifying himself as a "Peace Democrat" and opposing the U.S. Civil War. In 2010, the Ohio General Assembly decided to replace a statue of Allen in the National Statuary Hall in part because "Allen’s pro-slavery position and outspoken criticism of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War make him a poor representative for Ohio in the U.S. Capitol."

Background

Allen was born in Edenton, North Carolina. His sister, Mary Granberry Allen, married Pleasant Thurman, and their son, Allen G. Thurman, followed in his uncle's footsteps, becoming a lawyer and politician. Allen moved to Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1819 and he and his sister lived there together.

Career

Allen studied law with Colonel Edward King and was admitted to the bar at age 21.

He served as a Representative from Ohio from 1832 to 1834, when he lost a bid for re-election, and Senator from Ohio from 1837 to 1849, losing a bid for a third term in 1848. Allen then retired to his farm, "Fruit Hill", which had belonged to his father-in-law, and fellow Ohio Governor, Duncan McArthur, near Chillicothe, Ohio, and did not return to public service for nearly a quarter century. He served as Governor of Ohio from 1874 to 1876. He unsuccessfully sought a second two-year term in an 1875 election. At the close of his administration, he retired to private life at Fruit Hill, where he died in 1879.

While in the Senate, Allen was one of a group of Western Democrat expansionists who asserted that the U.S. had a valid claim to the entire Oregon Country, which was an issue during the 1844 U.S. presidential election. He suggested that the United States should be prepared to go to war with the United Kingdom in order to annex the entire Oregon Country up to Russian-owned Alaska at latitude 54°40′N. This position ultimately produced the famous line "54 40 or fight!", coined in 1846 by opponents of such a policy (not, as popularly believed, a slogan in the Presidential campaign).

Allen was noted for his loud voice. A friend asked Senator Benjamin Tappan if a fellow Ohioan was still in Washington. Tappan replied "No, he left yesterday and is probably by this time in Cumberland, Maryland, but if you will go to Bill Allen and tell him to raise that window and call him he will come back."

William Allen was one of Ohio's two statues donated to the National Statuary Collection and stood in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol until, after a statewide poll run by the Ohio Historical Society, the Ohio National Statuary Committee voted August 26, 2010 to replace him with the statute of inventor Thomas A. Edison.

Allen is buried in Grandview Cemetery, Chillicothe.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7556

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Allen_(governor)

William Allen (December 18 or 27, 1803 – July 11, 1879) was a Democratic Representative, Senator and 31st Governor of Ohio.

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https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/allen-william-0

William Allen, congressman, governor of Ohio, lawyer, and nationally prominent Democratic leader, was born in Edenton, one of three natural sons of Nathaniel Allen (ca. 1755–1805) and Fanny Coulston. Nathaniel had been a member of the North Carolina convention that rejected the federal Constitution in 1788, and in 1802 he had represented Edenton in the state's House of Commons. Orphaned when young, William relied upon his half sister, Mary Granberry Allen Thurman, whose husband, the Reverend Pleasant Thurman, ministered to Methodist churches at Edenton until 1811, at Lynchburg, Va., until 1819, and at Chillicothe, Ohio, for years thereafter.

The facts of William's early schooling are obscure. He recalled in later life that he left an apprenticeship in Lynchburg to follow the Thurmans to Ohio, where he attended Chillicothe Academy and developed his lifelong interest in books. Located on the Scioto River in south central Ohio, Chillicothe had been the capital of the Northwest Territory and had served as the first capital of Ohio; it remained the courthouse town of Ross County. The Scioto Valley merited William Allen's toast as "the granary of the state, the stock-yard of the West."

Allen passed the examination for the Ohio bar at the age of twenty-one. He may have begun professional training under the lawyer Gustavus Scott, but he refined his legal knowledge and undertook active practice in and from the Chillicothe office of Rufus King's son, Edward (1795–1836). Edward King was captain of the local militia company, the Chillicothe Blues, which Allen joined in 1825. Allen's performances in the Fourth of July programs at Chillicothe in 1829 and 1830 brought him to widening public notice, and when King was commissioned a major general in 1831 and removed to Cincinnati, Allen was chosen to command the Blues.

Allen's patriotic oration of 1829 was printed in Chillicothe's influential Whig weekly, the Scioto Gazette; but politically both he and the nephew he brought into law partnership with him, Allen Granberry Thurman (1813–95), proved staunch proponents of Jacksonian Democracy. During the Civil War, the pair stood out as antiwar Democrats. In 1831, Captain Allen ran unsuccessfully for the Ohio legislature. On 22 Oct. 1831, when Chillicothe was celebrating the opening of navigation on the Ohio Canal to Lake Erie, Allen, as commander of the Blues, rendered formal military honors to Ohio's Whig governor, Duncan McArthur, a Chillicothe pioneer who had become a militia general before the War of 1812 and had improved the fine local estate known as Fruit Hill.

When the Jacksonian Democrats of Ohio's Seventh Congressional District selected Allen in the fall of 1831 to try for the district seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Whigs prevailed upon Governor McArthur to run against him. In the ensuing contested election, Allen was declared the winner by a single vote, 3738 to 3737. He sat in the Twenty-third Congress, 4 Mar. 1833–4 Mar. 1835.

In his campaign for reelection to the House, Allen was defeated by William K. Bond. In January 1837, however, there was enough Van Buren sentiment in the Ohio legislature to put Allen into the U.S. Senate (on a vote of 55 to 52) to replace the respected incumbent, Thomas Ewing. Six years later the legislature voted to retain Allen in the Senate for another term. This son of North Carolina thus represented Ohio in the Senate at Washington in the Twenty-fifth through the Thirtieth congresses, 4 Mar. 1837–3 Mar. 1849. Cooperation of Democrats and Free Soilers in 1849 led to the replacing of Allen with Salmon P. Chase.

Allen rightly sensed in 1846 that his own course in the Twenty-ninth Congress would gain him more favor with the people than all his past life together. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations he shared in the expansionist triumphs of a Democratic administration headed by President James K. Polk. In particular, Allen's stand on Oregon brought national notice, including wry mention in a chapter of Herman Melville's fanciful Mardi, published in 1849.

Senator Allen opposed the extension of slavery but abhorred abolitionism. In other respects, even his successor, Senator Chase, could write from Washington in 1854: "Your general course in Congress, as a Senator from Ohio had my entire approval and that feeling has been increased by the more intimate knowledge of it which I have gained from the Congressional Globe since I have been here. The firmness with which you opposed the schemes of corruptionists, the steadiness with which you insisted on the rights of the U. States in our controversies with England, your advocacy of publicity in Executive Proceedings of the Senate especially commend my admiration."

During Allen's first term in the U.S. Senate he was married to Effie McArthur Coones, only daughter and considerable heiress of Duncan McArthur of Fruit Hill. She died at Washington, D.C., 3 Mar. 1847, leaving a young daughter, Effie, Allen's only child. Effie grew up to become the wife of David H. Scott, M.D. Allen had the Scotts and their children live with him at Fruit Hill, where after his Washington years he cherished books and practiced farming and stock-raising. During the 1850s and 1860s, though he did not aggressively seek office, he continued a party asset, and both he and his kinsman Thurman emerged politically during the Reconstruction era, Thurman as U.S. Senator from Ohio, 1869–81, and Allen as the septuagenarian governor of Ohio, 1874–76. His service at Columbus was so creditable that Democrats, especially in Ohio, wanted him to seek further preferment.

William Allen died at Fruit Hill and was buried at Grandview Cemetery, Chillicothe. The State of Ohio commissioned the sculptor Charles H. Niehaus to carve the white marble statue of Allen that graces Statuary Hall in the Capitol at Washington.