Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,876

This is the grave of Lyman Trumbull.

Born in 1813 in Colchester, Connecticut, Trumbull grew up in old New England money, his mother being the direct descendant of the Mather family of Puritan ministers. He went to a good school named Bacon Academy, but never went to college after that. Instead, he started teaching in local schools at age 18. He was somewhat restless and worked in schools not only in Connecticut, but in New Jersey and also went down to Georgia to find a job though he could not. But he didn’t really want to stick around fusty old New England. He took a job at an academy back home but also started reading for the law. He passed the bar in 1837 and moved to Illinois.

In the town of Belleville, Trumbull got a job working in the law office of John Reynolds, the former state governor. So it didn’t take long to build connections in a state like this. He also heard about the slaver murder of the abolitionist newspaper owner Elijah Lovejoy in the town of Alton and this outraged him. It began to drive him toward politics. But in 1840, when Trumbull first won an election for the state legislature, the party divide over slavery hadn’t happened yet. Both parties had anti-slavery factions and so Trumbull was a Democrat. The next year, he was appointed to replace Stephen A. Douglas as secretary of state, with the future presidential candidate going to the state supreme court. There wasn’t really that much to do, so Trumbull did his duties but mostly spent the two working on his own law practice while also getting to know everyone in Springfield. This did not end well though. He publicly rebuked the governor over state banking policy and was asked to resign over that.

But this did not stop Trumbull. He returned to his home in Belleville, got married, and became involved in the abolitionist cause. He was the lawyer in the Jarrot case, where an enslaved man sued for wages, saying that slavery was in fact illegal in Illinois. Trumbull won that case and finally forced a reluctant state to definitively ban slavery. He ran for governor in 1846 but did not win the Democratic nomination. It was right at that time that the party began to be torn apart by slavery, specifically the question of Texas and any land that the U.S. acquired from Mexico in its illegal and unjust war to expand slavery. Instead, he ran for state Supreme Court, winning in 1848. He would stay there for 5 years, running unopposed for reelection in 1852.

But Trumbull was ambitious and there were opportunities as the parties fell apart, largely around Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Act. Trumbull was an anti-Douglas Democrat in 1854 and ran for Congress that year from a quite strong southern Democratic district. But that area had also seen a lot of German immigrants come in and they voted overwhelmingly against slavery. So Trumbull won. But he then immediately ran for Senate in the Illinois legislature and they sent him instead of the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln. The odious Lewis Cass, a true doughface, tried to forbid Trumbull from being seated, based on a state law that banned judges from running from other offices, but he still was seated by a 35-8 vote. Still, that this was happening was a sign of the collapse of politics.

Trumbull became the anti-Douglas in the Senate, often rebuking his senior and more famous colleague. They started denouncing each other in the Senate, with Trumbull claiming Douglas was responsible for the violence in Kansas and Douglas saying that Trumbull was the kind of man who liked black people. He and Lincoln were close allies. Trumbull pushed his buddy into the 1858 Senate elections against Douglas. There was no way Lincoln could realistically win that, but of course it also launched him as a national candidate. Obviously, Trumbull was thrilled when Lincoln became president.

But even during the Civil War, Trumbull really set himself up as a conservative Republican. He was deeply opposed to attacks on slavery in Union states and found attacks on Copperheads, i.e., pro-southern northerners, to be a step too far. He wasn’t even much of an abolitionist by this point. By early 1864, he and Lincoln were no longer friends. Trumbull criticized Lincoln on the failures during the war and the emphasis on Black rights. Trumbull wanted William Seward gone and Lincoln refused to get rid of his Secretary of State and close advisor. Of course Trumbull did support the 13th Amendment. But he very much did not support Charles Sumner’s theory of state suicide that claimed that the treasonous states needed to be governed as territories before an eventual readmittance to the Union. On the other hand, Trumbull introduced both the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 into the Senate.

Like a lot of Republicans, Reconstruction changed Trumbull even more. He moved from being at least a nominal abolitionist to being disgusted the government was doing so much for freedmen, such as ensuring that they weren’t murdered by their former owners and being allowed to vote. It’s always important for people to remember that for probably the majority of white abolitionists, the problem with slavery was not what it did to Black people. It’s what it did to white people, i.e., cut the small holder out of the economy. Once slavery was eliminated and the ex-slaves not working for the godlike contract (which is how Republicans saw contracts at this time) then everything was good and nothing more should be done. So Trumbull was expected to vote to kick Andrew Johnson out of the presidency…but he did not, defending the drunken white supremacist. Trumbull then became one of the leading Liberal Republicans, seeking to get Ulysses S. Grant out of office in 1872 due to the corruption of his administration and the aggressive prosecution of Black rights in the South, such as using the military to crush the Ku Klux Klan.

To say the least, Trumbull had no future in electoral politics after this. Illinois was very much not going to send him back to the Senate in 1873. He left and joined the Democratic Party, going back to his law practice, now based in Chicago. He eventually migrated to the Populists by the time he died, which was in 1896. Among his last major acts was representing Eugene Debs before the Supreme Court over the injunction to stop the Pullman Strike in 1894.

Trumbull was 82 years old when he died.

Lyman Trumbull is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other senators who opposed convicting Johnson of his crimes, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Joseph Fowler is in Lexington, Kentucky (though he represented Tennessee in the Senate) and James Grimes is in Burlington, Iowa. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.