Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,692
By This is the grave of Richard Brodhead.
Born in 1811 in Lehman Township, Pennsylvania, Brodhead grew up in that small town and then moved to the big city in 1830. Yep, Easton. Now, laugh if you will, but Easton was a much bigger deal then than it is today. OK, it wasn’t Philadelphia, but it was a serious place back then and you can see what that town was like when you drive through because, well, it ain’t like that today. In any case, Brodhead read for the law in Easton and passed the bar in 1836.
Like so many young lawyers in American history, the law was a path to politics. Brodhead became a member of the Pennsylvania House in 1837, as a Democrat. He most certainly held the standard Democratic position that government expenditures for much of anything were bad and should be eliminated. He constantly bemoaned the public debt, opposing even things such as commissions to explore coal and iron deposits in the state when he was in the legislature. He rose pretty fast and married Jefferson Davis’ niece. Of course Davis was not that well known when that happened, but it gives you a sense of the circles Brodhead ran in. He also named one of his sons Jefferson Davis Brodhead. I wonder how that worked out for the kid during the Civil War?
Brodhead became treasurer of Northampton County in 1841. Then in 1843, Brodhead ran for Congress. He won and served three terms. Then, after two years out of Washington, the Pennsylvania legislature chose him for the Senate in 1851. This was a fractious time of course. The Democratic Party was becoming the party of the slave power and that was led by such Keystone State Doughfaces as James Buchanan. He Buchanan represented different sides of the Democratic Party though, at least at this time, and he had tried to turn Franklin Pierce against Buchanan for a Cabinet position in 1852.
Brodhead was a pretty minor figure in the Senate. He chaired the Senate Commission on Claims for the entire six years, which dealt with private petitions. It was one of the first standing committees in the Senate and that stuff did matter back then when there was very little space between Washington and everyday people and it stuck around until 1947, giving something for many minor senators to do. Looking at the list of people who chaired that committee, I’ve only heard of a few of them. But this issue was actually a total mess. There were so many claims!!! Brodhead noted that his committee now spent two full days a week on these private bills and they were still completely overwhelmed by it all. So his major contribution to American society is pushing for a Court of Claims to solve these issues. And I mean, what about senators suggest they were a good choice to handle this anyway? He also complained constantly about having to fund Washington, D.C., which itself was dumb since, well, you could have just created a state out of it?
Brodhead’s other contribution, such as it was, consisted of him being a complete hack of the Slave Power. During the Kansas-Nebraska Act debates, Brodhead was a consistent supporter of whatever the South wanted. He had initially been somewhat resistant to this, but I guess for political ambition’s sake just went all in and gave up on being a moderate. Opponents of the bill were “lazy and godless sectionalists” and he hoped that the bill would destroy the Whig Party, as indeed it did. But he also totally dismissed that this would have any real impact on the North, noting that the region always came around to the latest controversy over slavery just fine. Well, maybe not this time, and he would not have anticipated the rise of the Republican Party and the election of Abraham Lincoln just six years later. Brodhead made some dumb arguments through this whole process. For example, he stated that there was no reason to worry about Stephen Douglas‘ principle of popular sovereignty over slavery being in Kansas because the climate didn’t allow for the kind of southern plantation crops anyway, so how big could slavery be. While that’s reasonably true about the Kansas climate, it completely ignores all the other ways in which people could use slaves. But in truth, he just didn’t care.
In fact, politically the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a complete disaster for the Democratic Party. Most of the state’s voters were disgusted by their leaders going pro-slavery. Many disaffected Democrats joined the new Republican Party, along with their one-time enemy the Whigs. For that matter, over time, those disaffected Democrats tended to be more anti-slavery, anti-South, and pro-Black rights than the old Whigs. Buchanan himself noted that the upshot of this was a disaster for the state party. In 1857, Republicans had taken one house of the Pennsylvania legislature, but not both. There was no way they were going to send Brodhead back, not with a divided legislature. Instead, they chose Simon Cameron, later notorious as Lincoln’s corrupt and incompetent first Secretary of War. But that’s a few years off. In fact, Cameron and Brodhead were personal friends and Cameron more or less asked Brodhead for his blessing.
Oh, Brodhead also played a big role in empowering the government to use engineers to determine the best route for a transcontinental railroad, which is kinda important, if not particularly related to the other major issues of his career. But this helped end the impasse between different regions and their interests over which route such a railroad would take.
Brodhead moved back to Easton, where he died in 1863. He was 52 years old.
Richard Brodhead is buried in Easton Cemetery, Easton, Pennsylvania.
If you would like this series to visit other heads of the Senate Commission on Claims, and who doesn’t want this kind of stimulation every morning, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Alfred Iverson, who replaced Brodhead, is in Columbus, Georgia, and Daniel Clark, who was after that, is in Manchester, New Hampshire. What a gallery of Senate legends!!! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.