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Born: November 13, 1813
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Died: December 12, 1895
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Complete HarpWeek Biography:
Allen Thurman was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, to Mary Granberry Allen Thurman,
a teacher, and Pleasant Thurman, a minister and teacher. In 1815 his parents
manumitted their slaves and moved the family to Chillicothe, Ohio. Young Thurman
attended his mother's academy, then read law primarily under the supervision of
his uncle, William Allen. In 1835 he was admitted to the Ohio bar and became the
law partner of his uncle, who soon entered the U.S. Senate. In 1844 Thurman
married Mary Dun Thomplins; they had three children.
When Thurman was elected to Congress in 1844, he became the youngest member of
the House of Representatives. As a Democrat, he held party positions on tariff,
land, and expansion policies, and supported the Polk administration's Mexican
War. He sided with the Whigs, however, on the issue of internal improvements.
His racial prejudice led him to favor the unsuccessful Wilmot Proviso, which
would have banned slavery from any territory gained from Mexico, and to oppose
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise prohibition on slavery north of 36' 30°.
Like many of his constituents, he wanted to reserve the western territory for
the settlement of whites. Thurman decided not to run for reelection, and
returned to his private law practice. In 1851 he was appointed to the state
supreme court and served for five years, one as chief justice, before returning
to his law practice.
During the Civil War, Thurman criticized Lincoln administration policies,
especially emancipation and violations of civil liberties. He supported the war
effort, but encouraged political compromise and a peaceful settlement. In 1867
he ran for governor as an opponent of black manhood suffrage, but lost narrowly
to Rutherford B. Hayes. The next year, however, the Democratic state legislature
elected Thurman to the U.S. Senate, where he was a strong voice against the
Reconstruction policies of the Republican party. During the electoral college
crisis of 1876-1877, he helped forge the solution of creating a commission to
resolve the controversy. On monetary policy, Thurman took a hard-money,
anti-national bank position beginning in the antebellum period, but by the 1870s
he opposed both the resumption of specie payments (i.e., money redeemable in
gold) and the expansion of paper currency ("greenbacks") in the money
supply.
Thurman was elected president pro tempore of the Senate before the Ohio
legislature, now in Republican hands, replaced him with John Sherman in 1881.
Ohio Democrats nominated him as a favorite-son candidate for president in 1876,
1880, and 1884. In 1888 Grover Cleveland chose the aging Thurman to be his
vice-presidential running-mate, hoping he would appeal to conservative
Midwesterners. While Cleveland's popular percentage was higher than in 1884, the
Democratic ticket lost in the electoral college.
Source consulted: American National Biography |
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