Thomas Hart Benton

• Born: March 14, 1782
• Birthplace: Harts Mill, near Hillsboro, North Carolina
• Died: April 10, 1858
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

American politician

A prominent United States senator from Missouri through three decades of the early nineteenth century, Benton championed Western expansion, public land distribution, and “hard money.” He was also a leading supporter of President Andrew Jackson and his policies.

Area of achievement Government and politics

Early Life

Thomas Hart Benton was the son of Jesse and Ann Gooch Benton. His father was a lawyer who had been a secretary to the British governor of colonial North Carolina, a member of that state’s legislature, and a speculator in Western lands. His mother was reared by her uncle, Thomas Hart, a prominent Virginia political and military leader with extensive wealth in land. Another uncle of Ann Gooch had been a British governor of Virginia.

Although Benton’s father died when he was eight, his mother was able to keep the large family together. Benton attended local grammar schools and in 1798 enrolled at the recently established University of North Carolina, but was forced to leave in disgrace after one year when he was expelled for having stolen money from his three roommates. When he was nineteen, his mother moved the family of eight children and several slaves to a large tract of land south of Nashville, Tennessee, which had been claimed by Jesse Benton prior to his death.

After three years on the family farm, young Benton left to teach school and study law. In 1806, he was admitted to the Tennessee bar and rather quickly became a successful attorney whose philosophy and practice reflected the rural frontier environment. Benton specialized in land cases, and he began to pursue the reform of the Tennessee judicial system, an issue that helped him to a seat in the state senate and wide recognition.

During the War of 1812, Benton joined Andrew Jackson in raising volunteers for the military effort against England. For this work he received an appointment as a colonel of a regiment, but Jackson apparently did not trust him enough to place him in a field command, and Benton therefore saw no action in the war. In 1813, Benton’s relationship with Jackson was interrupted by a wild tavern fight in which his brother, Jesse Benton, was severely stabbed, Jackson was shot, and Thomas Benton was cut with a knife and either pushed or thrown down a flight of stairs.

In the fall of 1815, when Benton was thirty-three years of age, he moved to Missouri Territory, settling in the small riverfront village of St. Louis. He rapidly involved himself in the affairs of the city. Between 1815 and 1820, he established an active law practice, ran for local political offices, bought a house and property to which he relocated his mother and family, killed another St. Louis attorney in a duel, and for two years served as the editor of the St. Louis Enquirer. At this point in his life, he was clearly an imposing figure who seldom backed away from a quarrel or a fight. He was a large and physically powerful person with a wide and muscular upper body, a large head, a short, thick neck, and wide shoulders. He possessed a long nose, high forehead, and dark, wavy hair that was often worn long in the back and at the temples.

Benton used the pages of the St. Louis Enquirer to address current political issues. He concentrated upon the development of the West, banking and currency, and national land distribution policies, and he vigorously advanced Missouri statehood. By 1820, he was clearly established as a leader in Missouri politics. When Missouri entered the Union as a result of the great compromise of 1820, David Barton and Thomas Hart Benton were selected to represent the new state in the U.S. Senate.

Life’s Work

After a four-week horseback ride from St. Louis, Benton reached Washington, D.C., in mid-November of 1820 to begin a celebrated thirty-year career in the Senate. En route to the capital, he stopped at the Cherry Grove Plantation, near Lexington, Virginia, and proposed marriage to Elizabeth McDowell, whom he had met in 1815. She accepted the offer and the marriage took place in March of 1821.

Once he was in the Senate, Benton moved quickly to an active involvement in national issues. He first pressed forward those items with a Missouri base and about which he had written in the St. Louis Enquirer: the opening of government mineral lands, the development of the Oregon country, federal support of the Western fur trade, and the revision of the national land distribution policy. During the early months of 1824, he introduced two proposals that became closely identified with him and that he would continue to promote throughout his senatorial career: the elimination of the electoral college and the graduated land distribution system. In the former, his goal was to amend the Constitution so that the president and vice president could be directly elected by the people; in the latter, he pursued legislation to reduce the price of public lands by twenty-five cents per acre per year until the land was available at no cost. This practice, he argued, not only would broaden the base of the new democratic system but also would effectively serve to increase the prosperity of the entire nation.

As a result of the controversies surrounding the presidential election of 1824, Benton and Jackson established a close personal and political relationship as a result of which the Missouri senator was elevated to a leadership position in the Democratic Party. When Jacksonian Democracy carried Jackson into the presidency in 1828, Benton became the leading Jacksonian in the Senate and one of the most powerful men in American government in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was often mentioned as a possible candidate for the presidency himself, but he quickly rejected such promotion.

As a member of Jackson’s famous Kitchen Cabinet, Benton led the fight to oppose the rechartering of the Bank of the United States and successfully expunged from the record the Senate resolution censuring Jackson for his role in the famous bank struggle. Benton also became the most ardent champion of hard-money policies—that is, those favoring a money system based upon the circulation of gold and silver only. It was his view that such a policy would best serve the common people, as paper currency was too easily manipulated by people of privilege. To this end, he prepared Jackson’s famous 1836 Specie Circular, which required that public land purchases be made only with gold or silver coin. Because of his dedication to this issue, he received the nickname “Old Bullion.”

Benton also played a key role in the Texas and Oregon annexation controversies. Although he was an ardent expansionist and westerner, he opposed the acquisition of Texas in 1845 out of concern that it was unfair to Mexico and would lead to war between the two new nations. He was successful in his efforts to establish the northern boundary of Oregon at the forty-ninth latitude rather than the 54-40 line favored by many Americans in 1844 and 1845. His position on these two issues lost him much support in his home state, and he only narrowly won reelection to the Senate in 1844.

In spite of his opposition to the Texas annexation and resulting war with Mexico, Benton supported the American war effort and served as chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee and as an important military adviser to President James K. Polk. In fact, Polk, who was suspicious of the leading field generals who were members of the Whig Party, extended to Benton the unprecedented position of joint military-diplomatic leader of the American war effort with a rank of major general. Benton considered the offer but rejected it when he could not receive from Polk the pledge of authority that he believed should cohere to such a position.

The American victory in the Mexican War and the subsequent annexation of vast new territories raised the issue of slavery to the forefront of the national political scene in 1848-1850. Although Benton was a slaveholder all of his adult life, he opposed slavery’s expansion and expressed contempt for both secessionists and abolitionists. He reacted vigorously to John C. Calhoun’s resolutions for noninterference with slavery in the new territories and was angered by the Missouri legislature’s 1849 endorsement of the action.

The Missouri resolutions assumed a strong proslavery position and directed the two Missouri senators to act accordingly. Benton spent most of 1849 in Missouri campaigning against this legislative policy and directive, and conducted a statewide speaking tour in an effort to reverse the action. This was a turbulent affair marked by name-calling, charges, countercharges, and threats of violence.

The 1850 session of the U.S. Senate was one of the most famous in its history. For Thomas Hart Benton, it was one of the most crucial. He was a vigorous opponent of the slavery sections of the great compromise of that year as he believed there was too much sympathy for proslavery interests and secessionist threats. His rhetoric of opposition to Henry Clay’s resolutions was direct and critical and elicited a strong response from southern senators. On one occasion, Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi drew and aimed a loaded revolver at the Missouri senator on the Senate floor. Benton’s strong and highly publicized opposition to sections of the 1850 compromise left him with a severely weakened political base at home, and when the Missouri legislature in January of 1851 moved to the senatorial election, Benton lost to the Whig and anti-Benton candidate Henry S. Geyer, bringing his thirty-year Senate career to a close.

Frustrated by his defeat in the Missouri legislature for reelection to the Senate, the sixty-nine-year-old Benton launched a campaign for election to the House of Representatives. Few people have ever pursued a House of Representatives seat with as much to prove as Benton did in 1852—and, for the moment, victory was his. From 1853 to 1854, he returned to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, where he took the lead in opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act as well as all other attempts to extend slavery into the territories. Because of his determined position on this issue, he lost further support in his home state, and his effort to win reelection to the House seat failed in 1854.

Undaunted by this reversal, Benton developed an unsuccessful campaign for the governorship of Missouri in 1856 and worked nationally for the election of James Buchanan and the Democratic Party, refusing to vote for John C. Frémont, who headed the newly formed and sectional Republican Party, even though Frémont was his son-in-law, having married his daughter, Jessie.

With his political defeats in 1854 and 1856 and the death of his wife in 1854, Benton retired to his Washington, D.C., home to work on a number of writing projects. He continued an active schedule of appearances at political rallies and public speeches. He published a large two-volume summary of his thirty-year Senate career in 1854-1856, a sixteen-volume Abridgement of the Debates of Congress from 1789 to 1856 (1857-1861), and a historical and legal examination of the Dred Scott decision, Examination of the Dred Scott Case (1857). His work in this direction was hampered by the increasing pain and complications of cancer and a fire that destroyed his home and personal records. The final page of his collection of the debates in Congress was completed on April 9, 1858. He died early the next morning, April 10, 1858, at the age of seventy-six. His wife and two sons had preceded him in death; four daughters survived.

Significance

Thomas Hart Benton reflects, in many ways, the character and nature of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. An easterner who became a westerner, he was tough, bold, aggressive, egotistical, talkative, shrewd, self-educated, and fiercely independent. He found his career and gained a reputation on the frontier. He moved easily into law, banking, land investment, newspapers, the military, and politics. He extolled the strength and virtues of the common person in a society struggling with the issue of whether the elite or the common person should govern. As a leading proponent of Jacksonian democracy, Benton became the voice of union, a supporter of nationalism in an age of nationalism, and a builder of the nation in an era of change.

Benton believed that the great American West held the promise of the American future. He pressed for the development of the area from Missouri to Oregon and California and believed this region would provide unparalleled opportunity for the common person and unparalleled prosperity for the nation. To this end, more than anyone in American history, Benton stands as the champion of cheap land, developing policies and procedures that anticipated the great homestead movement later in the century.

To remove the benefits of privilege in a democratic society, he fought vigorously against the use of paper currency. It was his view that a financial system based upon the use of specie would protect “the people” from exploitation by people of influence. He was, thus, the leader of Jackson’s war against the Bank of the United States and was the author of Jackson’s famous and controversial Specie Circular.

In order to advance the cause of union and American nationalism, Benton sought to suppress the issue of slavery on the national political scene. He believed that this could best be accomplished by preventing the extension of slavery into the territories. His great emphasis upon this may have had much to do with keeping Missouri in the Union when the great crisis of nationalism came in 1861.

Bibliography

Benton, Thomas Hart. Thirty Years’ View: Or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1854-1856. An autobiographical summary of Benton’s senatorial career. A valuable political commentary for insight into Benton and American politics of the era.

Chambers, William Nisbet. Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West. Boston: Little, Brown, 1956. A well-researched biography of Benton based upon extensive manuscript material. Follows Benton’s life in chronological order and provides numerous quotations from his speeches and writings. This is the most widely used biography of Benton.

Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955. This well-known book contains a laudatory chapter on Benton, clearly emphasizing his great individualism and political independence. Kennedy finds Benton’s opposition to the extension of slavery in the face of Missouri’s perspective to be a courageous act of principle.

Meigs, William M. The Life of Thomas Hart Benton. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904. An early biography of Benton that depends much upon Benton’s autobiography and the memoirs of his brilliant daughter Jessie and her husband John C. Frémont. Now outdated by the research of Chambers and Smith.

Oliver, Robert T. History of Public Speaking in America. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1965. A good analysis of Benton’s oratorical skills with several examples of his most striking comments and most famous speeches. Incorporates the observations from several doctoral and masters’ analyses of Benton’s speaking methods.

Roosevelt, Theodore. Thomas Hart Benton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. A biography in the American Statesmen series by President Theodore Roosevelt. Badly dated but reflects the interpretation of Benton held at the end of the nineteenth century. Roosevelt viewed Benton not as a great intellect but as a person unique for his hard work, determination, and speaking abilities.

Sandweiss, Eric. St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View Beyond the Garden Wall. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Collection of essays commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Shaw, a St. Louis entrepreneur and philanthropist. The essays describe life in nineteenth century St. Louis, including information about Benton and other prominent residents of the city.

Smith, Elbert B. Francis Preston Blair. New York: Macmillan, 1980. An excellent biography of Francis Blair, who was a Jacksonian editor and close personal friend of Benton. Provides good insight into Benton from the perspective of his closest friend and friendly biographer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1958. A very well-written biography of Benton based exclusively upon manuscript and original sources. Provides excellent coverage of Benton’s senatorial career and his role on the national political scene. Especially good coverage of Benton’s role in the bank war.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Nineteenth Century

April 24, 1820: Congress Passes Land Act of 1820; January 19-27, 1830: Webster and Hayne Debate Slavery and Westward Expansion; July 10, 1832: Jackson Vetoes Rechartering of the Bank of the United States; September 4, 1841: Congress Passes Preemption Act of 1841; March 2, 1853-1857: Pacific Railroad Surveys; May 20, 1862: Lincoln Signs the Homestead Act.