biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1797–1869)
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| biography:
| US senator and cabinet officer, born in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. A prominent Tennessee lawyer, he served in the US House of Representatives (1827–41), first as a Democrat, then as a Whig, and as the latter he served less than a year as secretary of war (1841) and then as a moderate US senator from Tennessee (1847–59). Although he owned slaves, he was opposed to the spread of slavery in the new territories and states, and he spent fruitless years trying to fend off the oncoming confrontation over slavery. In 1860 he was presidential candidate for the Constitutional Union Party, in an effort to present a plea against secession that would appeal to those who saw the Republicans as extremists. (He won three states.) But when the Civil War broke out, his last public act was to advise Tennessee to join the Confederacy. |
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