Blaine, James Gillespie

Blaine, James Gillespie

(1830–93) U.S. representative/senator, secretary of state; born in West Brownsville, Pa. The son of a Scotch-Irish businessman, he taught at the Pennsylvania Institute for the Blind (1852–54), earning his law degree at night. Moving to Maine, where his wife was from, he became an editor of the Kennebec Journal and then the Portland Advertiser. He championed the new Republican Party in 1854 and became one of its founding members. He served in the state legislature (1858–62), and went to the U.S. House of Representatives (1863–76); he supported black suffrage but opposed the Radical Republicans' harsh reconstruction measures. As Speaker of the House (1869–75) he allied with Western "Half-Breed" Republicans like James Garfield, alienating the powerful New Yorker Roscoe Conkling. Dubbed "The Plumed Knight" because of his image as a crusading liberal, in 1876 he was the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, but he lost out when the Democrats charged him with railroad grafting and Conkling supported Rutherford Hayes. Moving up to the U.S. Senate (1876–81), he lost the 1880 presidential nomination to Garfield, whom he served as secretary of state in 1881. Blaine stayed in Washington to write Twenty Years of Congress. The Republican presidential candidate in 1884, he lost to Grover Cleveland. Choosing not to run in 1888, he became President Benjamin Harrison's secretary of state (1889–92) championing Pan Americanism and the annexation of Hawaii.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.