March 31, 1806 marked the birth of US Senator John Hale of NewHampshire, an early leader of the Republicans' anti-slavery movement in Congress. He served in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate. He began his career as a Democrat, but turned against them because of the party's dogged defense of slavery. He then helped establish the anti-slavery Free Soil Party and joined the Republican Party after it was founded in New Hampshire.
Hale also suffered the humiliation of having his daughter's photograph found in the pocket of the by then-famous Democrat John Wilkes Booth twelve days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. This was a scandal so embarrassing that Hale was forced to publish newspaper notices attesting to his daughter's innocence. (See" Lucy Lambert Hale and John Wilkes Booth" below.)
JOHN PARKER HALE
Hale was born March 31, 1806 in Rochester, Strafford County, New Hampshire, the son of John Parker Hale and Lydia Clarkson O'Brien. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated in 1827 from Bowdoin College, where he was a classmate of Franklin Pierce and a prominent member of the Athenian Society, a literary club.
He began his law studies in Rochester and continued them in Dover. He passed the bar examination in 1830, and practiced law in Dover NH. He married Lucy Lambert, the daughter of William Thomas Lambert and Abigail Ricker.
START of his POLITICAL CAREER
In March 1832, Hale was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives as a Democrat. In 1834, President Andrew Jackson appointed him as U.S. District Attorney for New Hampshire. This appointment was renewed by President Martin Van Buren in 1838, but in 1841 Hale was removed on party grounds by President John Tyler, a Whig.
CONGRESS
In 1842, Hale was elected as a Democrat to the Congress, serving until March 3, 1845. There he spoke out against the gag rule intended to put a stop to anti-slavery petitions.
KICKED out of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY and BRANDED as a TRAITOR
Hale supported the Democratic candidates James K. Polk and George M. Dallas in the 1844 presidential election, and was renominated for his Congressional seat without opposition. Before the Congressional election, Texas annexation was adopted by the Democratic Party as part of its platform. In December 1844 the New Hampshire Legislature passed resolutions instructing its Senators and Congressmen to favor Texas annexation. Instead, Hale made a public statement opposing annexation on anti-slavery grounds.
The Democratic state convention was then reassembled in Concord under Pierce's leadership for the purpose of stripping Hale of his Congressional nomination. The reassembled convention branded him a traitor to the party, and in February 1845 his name was stricken from the Democratic ticket. In the subsequent election, Hale ran as an independent. Hale, the replacement Democratic candidate, and the Whig candidate failed to obtain a majority, so the district was unrepresented.
ANTI-SLAVERY ACTIVISM
In the face of an apparently invincible Democratic majority, Hale set out to win New Hampshire over to the anti-slavery cause. He addressed meetings in every town and village in the state, carrying on a remarkable campaign known as the “Hale Storm of 1845,” which included a June 5, 1845 debate between Pierce and Hale at the North Church in Concord. In March 1846 Hale's efforts paid off when New Hampshire chose a legislature in which the Whigs and Independent Democrats had a majority, and Whig Anthony Colby won election as governor. Hale was himself elected to the state House, and was chosen to serve as Speaker.
UNITED STATES SENATOR
Hale was elected June 9, 1846 as an Independent Democratic Candidate to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1847 to March 3, 1853, later becoming a Free Soiler. He was among the strongest opponents of the Mexican-American War in the Senate and is considered "the first U.S. Senator with an openly anti-slavery (or abolitionist) platform".
He was the only Senator to vote against the resolution tendering the thanks of Congress to Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor for their victories in the Mexican-American War. In 1849 he was joined in the Senate by anti-slavery advocates Salmon P. Chase and William H. Seward, and in 1851 he was joined by Charles Sumner.
FREE SOIL PARTY
Hale helped establish the anti-slavery Free Soil Party and was a candidate for the party's presidential nomination in 1848, but the 1848 Free Soil Convention instead nominated former President Van Buren.
Hale won the party's presidential nomination in 1852, receiving 4.9% of the popular vote in the general election.
During the remainder of his first term as senator, Hale opposed flogging and the spirit ration in the United States Navy, and secured the abolition of flogging in September 1850.
In March, 1853 Hale was succeeded in the Senate by Democrat Charles G. Atherton, and began practicing law in New York City.
RETURN to the SENATE as a REPUBLICAN
After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, Hale joined the nascent Republican Party, and with the Democrats again being overthrown in New Hampshire legislative elections, Hale was once again elected to the Senate, in 1855, as a member of the new Republican Party.
Hale was re-elected Senator in 1859, in total serving from July 30, 1855, to March 3, 1865. He served as the chair of the Senate Republican Conference until 1862. Also in 1862, Hale succeeded in repealing the Navy's spirit ration, which he had attempted during his first Senate term.
In 1865, he accepted an appointment from President Abraham Lincoln to serve as the Minister to Spain. He held that post until he was recalled in April 1869, at which point he retired from public office.
DEATH and BURIAL
Hale died in Dover on November 19, 1873. He was buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in Dover.
LEGACY
Hale's Federal style house, built in 1813, is now part of the Woodman Institute Museum.
Portraits of President Lincoln and John P. Hale hang next to each other in the chamber of the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
FAMILY
On September 2, 1834 Hale married Lucy Hill Lambert in Berwick, Maine. They were the parents of two daughters, Elizabeth and Lucy (1841–1915).
LUCY LAMBERT HALE and JOHN WILKES BOOTH
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Lucy, her parents, and her sister Elizabeth went to live at the National Hotel in Washington, D.C., and she began working for the "Sanitation Committee." She was considered to be a beautiful, beguiling young woman, and was seen at many parties, dances, and social functions and was one of the belles of Washington society. She and her mother also visited the soldiers at the front lines when there was a cessation of fighting.
On Valentine's Day, 1862, she received an anonymous note from John Wilkes Booth, a wildly popular stage actor and notorious ladies man, in which he wrote:
"My dear Miss Hale, were it not for the License with a time-honored observance of this day allows, I had not written you this poor note. ... You resemble in a most remarkable degree a lady, very dear to me, now dead and your close resemblance to her surprised me the first time I saw you. This must be my apology for any apparent rudeness noticeable. To see you has indeed afforded me a melancholy pleasure, if you can conceive of such, and should we never meet nor I see you again believe me, I shall always associate you in my memory, with her, who was very beautiful, and whose face, like your own I trust, was a faithful index of gentleness and amiability. With a Thousand kind wishes for your future happiness I am, to you,
A Stranger"
Booth's courtship of Hale was conducted with much secrecy, but by early 1865, they were often seen together in public, and became clandestinely engaged. On March 4, 1865, Booth attended Lincoln's second presidential inauguration with a ticket that Lucy had procured through her father. On March 17, his mother, Mary Ann wrote Booth:
"The secret you have told me is not exactly a secret as Edwin (Booth's brother) was told by someone, you were paying great attention to a young lady in Washington, and if the lady in question is all you desire- I see no cause why you should not try to secure her. ... Her father ... would he give his consent?"
By this time, Booth was already heavily involved in his plan to kidnap President Lincoln, which miscarried and evolved into the assassination plot. There was no reason to suspect that Hale knew anything of the plot to kill the president, nor was she aware of the deep antipathy her fiancé felt towards Lincoln. Lucy's father (as described above) was a Republican and strong supporter of Lincoln.
Hale and Booth had begun to quarrel during this time, according to Booth's sister Asia who later reported that Booth had become enraged when he saw Hale dancing with the President's son and her erstwhile admirer, Robert Todd Lincoln, one evening at the National Hotel.
On the afternoon of the assassination, April 14, Hale allegedly spent the afternoon studying Spanish with Robert Lincoln, and another former admirer, John Hay, President Lincoln's assistant private secretary. Lincoln had just appointed her father United States ambassador to Spain, and she and her mother were making preparations to accompany him to his new post. According to some witnesses, Booth and Hale had met that morning at the National Hotel and in the evening, Booth had dined with Hale and her mother; at 8.00 P.M, he allegedly looked at his watch, stood up and after taking her hand in his, recited some lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Nymph, in thy orisons (prayers), be all my sins remembered."
When Booth shot and mortally wounded President Lincoln that night at Ford's Theatre, their romance came to an abrupt end. She was devastated by the news, and found it impossible to believe her fiancé had been the assassin. Several evenings prior to the assassination, Booth had taken her to a performance at Ford's. She wrote a letter to his brother, Edwin, expressing her shock and sorrow, while her father published notices in the press denying there had ever been an "intimate connection" between his daughter and Booth.
When Booth was later shot and killed on April 26, by pursuing Federal troops, five photographs of women were discovered in his pocket, and one of them was of Lucy.
MARRIAGE and LATER LIFE of LUCY LAMBERT HALE
In the wake of the assassination, Hale accompanied her parents to Spain, where her father took up his post as United States Ambassador to Spain. She remained in Europe for five years, during which time she received and refused many offers of marriage from titled aristocrats. France, Italy, and Switzerland, were among the countries she visited; in Paris she attended the theatre with her former beaux Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Hay, and Frederick Anderson.
In 1870, she returned to America to care for her sick father, and renewed a correspondence with her first admirer, the successful corporation lawyer William E. Chandler, whose wife, Ann Gilmore had died. They were married in 1874 and in March 1875, her only son, John Parker Hale Chandler, was born. In 1882, Hale's husband became Secretary of the Navy, and in 1887, a United States senator. She immersed herself in politics at her husband's side and was a successful hostess at the many social functions Chandler held in Washington.
DEATH of LUCY
Hale died on October 15, 1915, and is buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in her hometown of Dover, New Hampshire.
Hale and Chandler's grandson, Theodore E. Chandler, later became a highly decorated Navy Admiral during World War II. He was injured when kamikazes attacked his ship in the Pacific theater on January 6, 1945. He died the following day.
IN SPORT
BASEBALL 2018: UPDATE # 1
Don’t look now, but the the Chicago White Sox are averaging 14.0 runs per game, tops in MLB. At that rate they will win a lot of games. (Vegas has them 200-1 to win the World Series. A bet of only $10 on that outcome could yield a $2,000 return in late October.)
Matt Davidson of the White Sox is averaging 3 home runs per game, a pace that would give him 486 homers for the season—which would shatter the all-time record by more than 400 home runs.
* Republicans are responsible for more than 90% of "firsts" regarding the appointments, elections, and the recognition of the heritage and contributions of minorities and women, as well as in the area of conservation and preservation of American heritage.
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