Thomas Corwin was a congressman, senator,
Ohio governor, U.S. treasury secretary, and diplomat. In 1861,
he chaired the House committee that proposed the original and unratified Thirteenth Amendment, which was offered as a way to
avoid secession and sectional conflict by protecting the
institution of slavery. He was born in Bourbon County,
Kentucky, on July 29, 1794, to Patience Halleck Corwin and
Matthias Corwin. Four years later, the family moved to a farm
outside Lebanon, Ohio. Matthias Corwin served in the Ohio House
of Representatives for 11 terms, two as speaker. Young Thomas
Corwin worked on the family farm, and then read law before being
admitted to the state bar in 1817. The next year, he was named
prosecuting attorney for Warren County, Ohio, serving ten years
in that position (1818-1828). He married Sarah Ross in 1822;
the couple later had five children.
Corwin was elected in 1822, 1823, and 1829
to one-year terms in the Ohio House of Representatives. In
1830, he was elected to the first of five consecutive terms
(1831-1840) in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he
served as chairman of the Committee on Public Lands in the
Twenty-Sixth Congress (1839-1841). First as a National
Republican and then as a Whig, he supported protective tariffs,
federal financing of internal improvements, and a national
bank. He was a talented speaker, whose sharp wit in debates
inspired a journalist to call him “the terror of the House.” He
resigned from Congress on May 30, 1840, to run as the Whig
nominee for governor of Ohio. Campaigning energetically
throughout the state, he defeated the Democratic incumbent,
Wilson Shannon. With only limited authority as governor,
Corwin’s proposals for a state bank and other financial reforms
failed to pass the Democratically controlled state senate. In
1842, he reluctantly accepted renomination by the Whig Party,
and then suffered the only electoral defeat of his career that
fall.
When the Whig Party returned to power in
1844, the Ohio legislature elected Corwin to the U.S. Senate.
As a leading critic of the War with Mexico (1846-1848), his
harsh rebukes of President James K. Polk were labeled
unpatriotic by some Democrats, while Whigs defended the
statements. In 1848, he was encouraged to seek the presidency
by a group of antislavery advocates who considered the Mexican
War to be an effort by Southerners to spread slavery. He
refused the offer, and campaigned for the Whig nominee, General
Zachary Taylor. Corwin’s anti-war stance had been based on what
he considered to have been the immorality of the conflict, not
opposition to slavery, an issue on which he did not wish to see
the Whig Party divide. He supported the
Compromise of 1850, which included both anti- and pro-slavery elements.
Following the death of President Taylor on July 9, 1850, his
successor, President Millard Fillmore, appointed Corwin to be
secretary of the treasury. Corwin’s call for a return to high
tariffs went unfulfilled by the Democratically controlled
Congress. When the Fillmore administration ended in March 1853,
he returned to a prosperous law practice in Lebanon, Ohio.
Corwin did not engage in the public debate
over the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened
the Western territories to slavery. He remained loyal to the
dying Whig Party until unenthusiastically endorsing Republican
presidential nominee John C. Frémont late in the 1856 campaign.
Two years later, he won election as a Republican to Congress,
where he sought to downplay the slavery question and emphasize
economic issues. He backed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave
Act, and served as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee in the Thirty-Sixth Congress (1859-1861).
After initially supporting Supreme Court
Justice John McLean, a fellow Ohioan, for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1860, Corwin campaigned for nominee
Abraham Lincoln in several states, and also won reelection for
himself. His electioneering effectiveness caused Republican
Robert Ingersoll to call him the “king of the stump.” In
December 1860, Corwin was named chairman of a special House
Committee of Thirty-Three, which was appointed to find a
compromise to the sectional conflict. The committee proposed a
constitutional amendment to protect slavery forever where it
existed (i.e., in the South). Congress passed the “Corwin
Amendment” in early 1861, but it failed to gain ratification by
the states.
In
March 1861, President Lincoln appointed Corwin as the U.S.
minister to Mexico, where the congressman’s earlier opposition
to the Mexican War made him a popular choice. During his tenure
there, he worked successfully to keep Mexico from recognizing
the Confederacy as an independent nation. His opposition to
French intervention in Mexico went unheeded, and he resigned on
the eve of the arrival of the French puppet emperor, Maximilian,
in May 1864. Corwin resumed practicing law in Washington, D.C.,
where he died on December 18, 1865, the day the abolitionist
Thirteenth Amendment officially became part of the U.S.
Constitution. |