Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,397

This is the grave of Jacob Collamer.

Born in 1791 in Troy, New York, Collamer grew up in Burlington, Vermont after his family moved there in 1795. He went to the University of Vermont and received a graduate degree there too. Then he studied for the law in St. Albans, Vermont. He was admitted to the bar in 1813. He was in the Vermont militia and was part of the border conflict with Canada during the War of 1812, in which those dastardly Canadians resisted American expansion and ended up with a culture that thinks pouring gravy on fries is a delicacy. Sad story.

Anyway, in 1816, Collamer started practicing in the town of Royalton, Vermont. For the next twenty years, he was a prominent lawyer and was involved in local political activities, including helping to write the bill that created the Vermont senate in 1836. But that was about it; he was just a locally important guy.

In 1842, Collamer was elected to Congress. He was a Whig. This in itself doesn’t mean much in terms of prominence. Not only are most Congresscritters pretty forgettable unless they are the rare ones who enter leadership or sponsor a key bill, but in the North at this time, there was tremendous turnover, with people quite often only serving one term. Collamer actually served three terms, during which he strongly opposed Polk‘s war to steal half of Mexico in order to expand slavery. His passion was a high tariff, as suited a good Whig. He also was opposed to slavery, or at least its expansion.

He was a big enough deal, or at least represented a certain type of Whig who needed to be included in the Cabinet. So Zachary Taylor named Collamer Postmaster General in 1849, which was a Cabinet position at the time. This was the most minor of Cabinet positions, but was a critical patronage post, so plenty of people would want it. However, Collamer proved to be not a fitting choice for the job. See, he stood on principle that the Spoils System was a bad thing. Why, after all, should Democrats be fired from a job like delivering the mail just because a Whig was president. But Whigs said that Democrats started this under Andrew Jackson and now it was their turn to benefit. Collamer was slow to fire Democratic officers. So there was a lot of tension. Once Taylor died, Collamer’s position became untenable and he resigned to allow Millard Fillmore to name his own guy. Given Collamer’s old-school Puritan beliefs about life, I suppose such a position is not surprising. On the other hand, despite a reputation politically for being an old-time Puritan, Collamer held famous stag parties that disgusted other leading Vermont political figures, such as the famed conservationist George Perkins Marsh, who saw him as something of a libertine. Collamer and Marsh hated each other for other reasons too, even though they were neighbors in Woodstock, so who knows really.

Collamer went back to the law for a few years. Then, in 1855, Vermont sent him to the Senate. By now, he was a Republican. As such, he combined the old-time Whig financial positions with the new-founded anti-slavery positions of the Republican Party. In truth, the old Whigs tended to be a bit more reticent to center critiques of slavery than the disaffected northern Democrats, who turned on their former party’s embrace of slavery with a vengeance. For Collamer, defending the tariff remained his primary mission. But he did take a strongly opposed position against Stephen Douglas‘ attempts to railroad the Lecompton Constitution through the Senate and make Kansas a slave state over the will of the people who actually lived in the state. Collamer also led the fight against Democratic plans to turn John Brown‘s raid into a broader government prosecution of abolitionists. He was successful in that. His basic argument here was that Brown was totally insane (almost certainly true) and that no respectable person who knew what he was planning would possibly support such an action (not quite true). Also, he stated simply that Brown had been punished by a fair court of law (not quite true either) and that should be the end of the case.

Collamer was the kind of senator that made very carefully crafted arguments (all too rare!) and was considered the best legal mind in the body. He was not a showboat at all. He hated public speaking and when he did speak in the Senate, no one could actually hear him. But the arguments written down were powerful and had to be taken seriously. He actually was a favorite son candidate for the Republican nomination in 1860 by the Vermont delegation, but he withdrew after the first ballot.

As the Civil War erupted, Collamer was one on the senators who realized that the federal government simply was not equipped to fight a war. He wrote the bill to increase Abraham Lincoln‘s executive authority and grant him new war powers, which was used for things such as creating a temporary income tax and issuing greenbacks to finance the war. Collamer chaired only minor committees when Republicans gained the majority–first the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads and then the Committee on the Library. But that had as much to do as his own relative lack of ambition than his capabilities. And at least as a former Postmaster General, he was a logical choice for the former. He also strongly advocated for equalizing the pay between black and white soldiers, which was a lingering sore spot of northern racial hypocrisy during the war. He was an early advocate of emancipation as well. But he took a very conservative position on this. He argued that emancipation should happen on an individual basis, after a trial to determine whether a slave owner had really committed treason in defense of slavery. This appealed to the conservative side of the Republican Party, which valued the idea of private property over anything else, very much including the condition of slaves. But as the politics moved toward full-fledged emancipation by late 1862, Collamer was fine with it.

Collamer had no faith in the South to come back into the Union in good faith. So he was an active opponent of Lincoln’s early statements for a gentle Reconstruction that would allow the South to return quickly. It’s impossible to know what Lincoln would have actually done. He was a man who did not reveal much to anyone. As a centrist in his own political party, I have trouble believing Lincoln would have gone ahead with the Reconstruction plans he issued in 1864. But those plans is what we had announced and Andrew Johnson was happy to use them for his own purposes. So Collamer very quickly opposed Johnson, even before most other Republican senators.

Collamer would have been a really useful guy in the Senate for the fight for a real Reconstruction. But it didn’t work out. That’s because he died while back in Vermont in 1865. Not sure why. But he was 74 years old, so that was pretty old for 1865. His last speech was advocating for Congress, i.e., Republicans, to control Reconstruction. Alas.

Jacob Collamer is buried in River Street Cemetery, Woodstock, Vermont.

If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in the 1854-55 cycle, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George Pugh is in Cincinnati and Alfred Iverson, Sr., is in Columbus, Georgia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.