Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,738
By This is the grave of William Eaton.
Born in Tolland, Connecticut in 1816, Eaton grew up there and went into business. He moved to South Carolina for awhile for business purposes and was very cool with slavery, given the money it brought in and his own deeply held white supremacy that would be a cancer on Connecticut in the coming deacdes. He ended up back home though. He passed the bar in Connecticut in 1837 and practiced there. He also became involved in Democratic Party politics. He was a clerk of courts in Tolland County and then went to the state legislature in 1847. He was mostly just an insider, without that exciting of a career, for a long time. He served terms in both houses of the legislature off and on over the next few decades. He eventually moved to Hartford to be where the action was in Connecticut for his law practice. He was the Democratic nominee for Senate in 1860, but that was not exactly a good year for Democrats in New England given that, at best, they supported wiping themselves with the Missouri Compromise and that included Eaton.
Eaton was a Peace Democrat and became one of the leaders of that movement in the state. Peace Democrats were traitors riding on political principles to cover up the fact that they were pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy. Eaton pushed this line that the Constitution was a choice and that a state could unratify it as much as it could ratify it and that there was no difference between the two. So if the South wanted to secede, they should not only be allowed to do so but really encouraged. It was state sovereignty baby! As he stated in March 1861:
It is heresy to say that allegiance is due to the government of the United States. No such allegiance as that is demanded by your oath as freemen. Your allegiance is due to the sovereign State of Connecticut. … The proudest epitaph that can be written on the tomb of any man here will be that he belonged to that gallant band of the democracy who in 1861 struck down foul principles of abolition.
That might sound all principled and what not to you, I don’t know. But more to the point, when, before the Fort Sumter began the official war, he heard that Massachusetts was putting together volunteers of troops, Eaton stated, “If the soldiers of Massachusetts try to pass through this state to fight their brothers in the South, they will have to pass over my dead body.” Unfortunately, that did not occur.
Well, of course the war went on and Eaton continued to lead the minority position in Connecticut that Lincoln was the worst person in human history. That really went into overdraft in 1863 with the draft. Eaton stated:
“Is any man so low as to be loyal to any man – to Abraham Lincoln, the accidental President? The Democrats of Connecticut will not sustain a war waged for the destruction of the Union. We will tell Lincoln that he cannot come into Connecticut and take men from their homes, that he cannot come into Connecticut and compel men to serve in the army.”
What an asshole. The Hartford Courant responded that this was “shameless abuse and misrepresentation of the Administration, a determination to resist its authority, with nary a word against the rebels, or the wickedness of the rebellion.”
Mostly Eaton was in the political wilderness here. Let’s just say that such positions were not popular in Connecticut. But he had his law practice and he was powerful within the party.
In 1875, Democrats did control the state legislature. That happened after the Panic of 1873 combined with increasing northern indifference to the fate of freed slaves and the South’s extreme violence to lead to Democratic wave elections in 1874. In 1875, shortly before the end of his term, Senator William Buckingham died. The legislature then named Eaton to complete his term. That was just a month, so they named him for the next term too, and he remained in the Senate until 1881. He wasn’t very exciting really, but he did become the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations when Democrats took the Senate majority during the 1878 midterms. They would hold that majority until the 1882 midterms.
By 1880, Republicans again controlled the state legislature and they were not sending Eaton back to Washington. In fact, no Democrat would again represent Connecticut in the Senate until 1932. So Eaton went back to his law practice, mostly. He did run for Congress in 1882 and won. But he only served one term, losing in 1884. While in the House, he did take on one big passion–Chinese exclusion, which first passed in 1882 but there were a series of laws to expand it over the next several years. He stated, in terms that would sound about right to a Trumper today:
“We do not desire the that people here. We say this country is a home for the oppressed. So it is. We say it is a home for the exile. So it is. But it is not for China to vomit 100,000,000 of its 400,000,000 million upon our shores.”
Eaton died in 1898, at the age of 81.
William Eaton is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut.
If you would like this series to visit other senators sent to Washington in the 1874-75 cycle, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Allen Caperton is in Union, West Virginia and Samuel McMillan is in St. Paul, Minnesota. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.