Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,598

This is the grave of Abel Upshur.

Born in 1790 in Northampton County, Virginia, grew up in the southern elite. His grandfather was a state leader of the Federalists, he had other male relatives who were planters and naval officers. He went to Princeton, already the home of higher education for the southern elite. He was kicked out for being involved in some kind of student rebellion. Then he went to Yale, but dropped out. It didn’t really matter. He was rich. He ended up back in Virginia, where William Wirt took him under his wing to teach him the law.

Upshur was admitted to the bar in 1810 and started a practice in Baltimore, but when his father died, he returned to Virginia to run the plantation. The Upshur family owned a lot of humans. He would own 17 people in 1830 and 21 in 1840. He would parlay this human capital into his ambition. The slaves provided the work that he could use to become a big man in Virginia politics. His father had served in the state legislature and he would do the same. He was first elected to the House of Delegates in 1812 and then was the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Richmond from 1816-23. He would win various state offices in his life, often serving in the House of Delegates or having an elected legal position. He didn’t really have a national profile until 1841.

But what Upshur did have was a belief in southern extremism. Early in his adult life, Upshur still held to the family’s Federalist traditions. But not only did he leave that, he really left it. He became perhaps the most prominent person in Virginia politics support South Carolina’s Nullification insanity in the 1830s, which stopped after Andrew Jackson publicly threatened to hang John C. Calhoun. It was too soon for southern extremism. The South Carolina elites had not built enough support for treason. But Virginia probably had the second most intense set of extremists and Upshur was right at the forefront. He went back and revisited Jefferson and Madison’s Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions from the late 1790s to push the idea that states nullifying federal law was a great idea.

Upshur was also a staunch conservative on other issues too, always defending the privileges of his bigtime slaveowning class. One thing about the southern extremists as they moved toward the Civil War is that they began to reject democracy outright. Disgusted by the democratic reforms such as universal white male suffrage that they believed led to northern insanity like abolitionism and the women’s suffrage movement and also articulating their beliefs of themselves as little medieval rulers over their plantations where regular people simply had no business participating in decision-making, they moved to just rule without any democratic process. As always, this was farthest along in South Carolina, where there wasn’t even any real debate over secession. In Virginia, Upshur was pushing these ideas as early as the late 1820s, opposing changes to the state constitution that would expand Jacksonian democratic ideas to the state. He lost that of course, but it’s worth noting how there were different forms of southern reactionaries in these years and Upshur always was at the farthest right point.

After Jackson’s refusal to support Nullification, some of the far-right extremists left the Democratic Party and became Whigs. They shared nothing in common with the mainline Whigs except hating Andrew Jackson, but that was enough. In 1840, Upshur’s buddy and fellow far-right Virginian extremist John Tyler was placed in the VP spot for the Whigs to build a coalition that could defeat Martin Van Buren. It succeeded. Then William Henry Harrison refused to wear a coat in his inauguration parade, got sick, and died a month later. All of sudden, John Tyler was president. Tyler might have been a technical Whig, but again, he shared almost nothing in common with Henry Clay or Daniel Webster. He governed that way too. He simply flushed the Whig agenda down the toilet and tried to reshape the nation as an aggressively pro-slavery state. This moved the nation significantly down the road to the Civil War, especially when Tyler made the annexation of Texas his central policy issue.

All of this led most of the Harrison Cabinet to resign in disgust. That allowed Tyler to put his friends in high places. Tyler then tapped Upshur, still really only known in Virginia and at the time nothing more than a Virginia circuit court judge, as Secretary of the Navy. He actually did an OK job there and took the whole thing seriously. He reorganized the office corps and fought for higher appropriations and wanted a sizably expanded Navy. People found this odd. As John Quincy Adams stated about Upshur, “This new-born passion of the South for the increase of the navy is one of the most curious phenomena in our national history. From Jefferson’s dry-docks and gunboats, to admirals, three-deckers, and war-steamers equal to half the navy of Great Britain, is more than a stride—there is a flying-fish’s leap.” But for men like Upshur, who feared British interference in slavery, a strong Navy was protecting their beloved institution.

In 1843, Daniel Webster became the last Whig to resign from the Cabinet, having worked out the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with the British to settle the Maine border. So Calhoun tapped Upshur again. Upshur, like Tyler, was all-in on annexing Texas and expanding the nation’s slave states and slave territories. He moved forward that process considerably.

But Upshur would not be Secretary of State for long. On February 28, 1844, the Navy had an exhibition of its big new ship, the USS Princeton, on the Potomac River. They were showing off what it could do. That included firing its guns. But with the entire power structure of the United States on board, one gun exploded. It wounded the captain, Richard Stockton (best known for having a New Jersey rest stop named for him). It killed Tyler’s father-in-law and Tyler’s personal valet and slave. It killed the Maryland politician Virgil Maxey and Beverley Kennon, he Chief of the Bureau of Construction, Engineering, and Repairs in the Navy. It also killed Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer and it killed Abel Upshur.

The explosion could have easily killed Tyler, but he had stepped below deck shortly before the gun blew up. Since presidents did not name new VPs if they moved up themselves, Willie Magnum, president pro tempore of the Senate, would have become president. He was another southern planter, but someone not quite as extreme as Tyler or Upshur. So I doubt it would have changed history.

Anyway, Upshur was 53 years old upon his death.

Abel Upshur is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C. This is not his first grave. He was initially buried in Congressional Cemetery, also in Washington, and was moved to Oak Hill in 1874. Not sure of the story as to why.

If you would like this series to visit other Secretaries of State, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Tyler replaced Upshur with John C. Calhoun, one of the most disastrous choices in American history. Calhoun is buried in Charleston, South Carolina. Polk then named James Buchanan his Secretary of State, but I visited that doughface long ago. Taylor then named John Clayton to the job and he is in Dover, Delaware. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.