John
Bingham was a Republican congressman (1855-1863; 1865-1873) and
diplomat. In February 1869, he introduced a constitutional
amendment to prohibit state discrimination in voting
qualifications based on race, color, nativity, property,
religion, or previous condition of servitude (i.e., being a
former slave). The proposal passed the House, but was replaced
by the more moderate Fifteenth Amendment, which banned federal
or state discrimination in voting qualifications “on account of
race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” He was born
on January 21, 1815, in Mercer, Pennsylvania, to Ester Bailey
Bingham and Hugh Bingham, a carpenter and local politician.
When he was 12, his mother died and he went to live with a
paternal uncle in Cadiz, Ohio. In 1831, he returned to Mercer,
where he worked for an anti-Masonic newspaper. He attended
Mercer Academy fulltime during the 1834-1835 school year. Later
in 1835, he began attending Franklin College in New Athens,
Ohio, but did not graduate, perhaps due to illness. In 1837, he
began reading law at a law office in Mercer, and three years
later was admitted to the Pennsylvania and Ohio state bars,
establishing a practice in Cadiz. Campaigning in 1840 for Whig
presidential nominee William Henry Harrison led him to debate
Edwin M. Stanton, the future U.S. attorney general and secretary
of war, who was supporting Democratic President Martin Van Buren
at the time.
Bingham settled in New Philadelphia, Ohio, in 1843, and
married his cousin, Amanda Bingham, the next year. The couple
later had eight children. In 1846, he was elected as a Whig to
be prosecutor for Tuscarawa County, but lost reelection two
years later. He spent 1850 working for a law firm in Cincinnati
before returning the next year to Cadiz, where he failed to win
election as a judge in Harrison County. When the
Kansas-Nebraska Act
of 1854 opened the Western territories to slavery, Bingham
organized the opposition in Ohio and was elected to the first of
four consecutive terms in Congress as a Republican. An
abolitionist, Bingham opposed statehood for Kansas under the
pro-slavery Lecompton
Constitution and opposed statehood for the free territory of
Oregon because it discriminated against free blacks. In 1860,
he endorsed fellow Ohioan Salmon Chase for the Republican
presidential nomination, and then campaigned in the general
election for Abraham Lincoln.
In the secession crisis, Bingham rejected efforts to
compromise with the South. During the Civil War, he pushed for
the abolition of slavery and chaired the House managers at the
removal trial of Tennessean West Humphreys, who had failed to
resign as a federal judge before accepting a Confederate
judgeship. In 1862, Bingham was narrowly defeated for
reelection. After his term ended in March 1863, he served as a
solicitor for the U.S. Court of Claims before President Lincoln
appointed him to the Judge Advocate General’s Office at the rank
of major. In the latter position, he successfully prosecuted
the court martial of William Hammond, the U.S. surgeon general,
on corruption charges. In April 1865, Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton named Bingham to the staff investigating and prosecuting
the conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln.
Bingham gave the closing argument for the prosecution.
In 1864, Bingham won the first of another four consecutive
terms in Congress. He supported most Reconstruction
legislation, including the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, the Fourteenth
Amendment, the Military Reconstruction Acts, and the Fifteenth
Amendment. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1866
because he believed Congress did not have the constitutional
power to enforce civil rights against the states. To
remedy that omission, his proposal to grant Congress such
authority became the basis for
Section One of the Fourteenth
Amendment. The Supreme Court later used the “due process”
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section One, to protect many
civil rights and liberties listed in the Bill of Rights against
interference by the states.
Although opposed to early efforts to impeach
and remove President Andrew Johnson from office, Bingham joined
the movement after the president violated the Tenure of Office
Act. The Ohio congressman served as chairman of the House
managers prosecuting the case against Johnson at the Senate
trial, where he delivered the three-day closing argument.
Bingham was implicated but not charged in the
Credit Mobilier
scandal. He lost renomination in 1872 because of
a popular groundswell to rotate the congressional seat among
politicians from the district’s other counties. After his term
ended in March 1873, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant
appointed him as the U.S. minister to Japan, where he served
until recalled by Democratic President Grover Cleveland in July
1885.
After retirement from public office, Bingham remained active
in Republican politics, campaigning for Republican presidential
nominees Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley. Bingham’s wife
died in 1891, and he spent his final years in poor health and
dire financial straits. In 1898, Congress awarded him a monthly
pension of $25. He died in Cadiz, Ohio, on March 15, 1900. |