Adlai E. Stevenson

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This page is about Grover Cleveland's Vice-President; for the Democratic Presidential candidate from the 1950s, see Adlai Stevenson; for the U.S. Senator from Illinois during the 1970s, see Adlai Stevenson III.

{{Infobox Politician | name=Adlai Ewing Stevenson I | nationality=american | image=Adlai Ewing Stevenson I head-on-shoulders.jpg |title= Vice President of the United States |term_start=1893 |term_end=1897 | party=Democrat | birth_date=October 23, 1835 | birth_place=Christian County, Kentucky | death_date=June 14, 1914 | death_place=Chicago, Illinois }} Adlai Ewing Stevenson I (October 23, 1835 – June 14, 1914) was a Congressman from Illinois and the twenty-third Vice President of the United States.

1 Early life
2 Marriage and political life, 1860-1884
3 Election of Grover Cleveland in 1884 and the U.S. Post Office
4 Vice President, 1892
5 Presidential campaigns of 1896 and 1900
6 Final years
7 References
8 External links

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Early life

Stevenson's parents, John Turner Stevenson and Eliza Ewing Stevenson, were Presbyterians of Scotch-Irish descent. John Turner Stevenson's grandfather, William, migrated from Northern Ireland about 1748, settling first in Pennsylvania and then in North Carolina. The family moved to Kentucky in 1813. Stevenson was born on the family farm in Christian County, Kentucky. He attended the common school in Blue Water, Kentucky. In 1852, when he was 16, frost killed the family's tobacco crop. His father set free their few slaves and the family moved to Bloomington, Illinois, where his father then operated a sawmill. Stevenson attended Illinois Wesleyan University at Bloomington and ultimately graduated from Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky. His father's death prompted Adlai to return from Kentucky to Bloomington to run the sawmill.

Stevenson was admitted to the bar in 1858, at age 23, and commenced practice in Metamora, in Woodford County, Illinois. As a young lawyer, Stevenson encountered such celebrated Illinois attorneys as Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, campaigning for Douglas in his 1858 Senate race against Lincoln. Stevenson also made speeches against the "Know-Nothing" movement, a nativist group opposed to immigrants and Catholics. That stand helped cement his support in Illinois' large German and Irish communities. In a predominantly Republican area, the Democratic Stevenson won friends through his storytelling and his warm and engaging personality.

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Marriage and political life, 1860-1884

In 1860, Stevenson was appointed master in chancery (an aide in a court of equity), his first public office, which he held during the Civil War. In 1864 Stevenson was a presidential elector for the Democratic ticket; he was also elected district attorney.

In 1866 he married Letitia Green, with whom he had fallen in love nine years earlier, at Centre College (her father, the Reverend Lewis Warner Green, the head of the college, had not agreed to the marriage, but he had died, and Letita and her mother - who also opposed the marriage - had subsequently moved to Bloomington). They had three daughters and a son, Lewis G. Stevenson. Letitia helped establish the Daughters of the American Revolution as a way of healing the divisions between the North and South after the Civil War, and succeeded the wife of Benjamin Harrison as the DAR's second president-general.

In 1868, at the end of his term as district attorney, he entered law practice with his cousin, James S. Ewing, moving with his wife back to Bloomington, settling in a large house on Franklin Square. Stevenson & Ewing would become one of the state's most prominent law firms. Ewingw would later became the U.S. ambassador to Belgium.

In 1874, Stevenson was elected as a Democrat to the Forty-fourth Congress, serving from March 4, 1875 to March 3, 1877. Local Republican newspapers painted him as a "vile secessionist," but the continuing hardships from the economic panic of 1873 caused voters to sweep him into office with the first Democratic congressional majority since the Civil War.

In 1876, Stevenson was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection. The Republican presidential ticket, headed by Rutherford B. Hayes carried his district, and Stevenson was narrowly lost, getting 49.6 percent of the vote. In 1878, he ran on both the Democratic and Greenback tickets and won, returning to a House from which one-third of his earlier colleagues had either voluntarily retired or been retired by the voters. In 1880, again a presidential election year, he once more lost narrowly, and he lost again in 1882 in his final race for Congress.

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Election of Grover Cleveland in 1884 and the U.S. Post Office

Stevenson served as a delegate to the Democratic convention of 1884 that nominated Grover Cleveland. When First Assistant Postmaster General Malcolm Hay, a civil service reformer, resigned due to ill health after only three months in office, Cleveland appointed Stevenson to replace him, a position that Stevenson held until 1889. Given free rein to remove Republican postmasters (appointed positions at the time), Stevenson thoroughly enjoyed swinging the axe. One Republican journalist described Stevenson as "an official axman who beheaded Republican officeholders with the precision and dispatch of the French guillotine in the days of the Revolution." Dubbed "the Headsman" for replacing some 40,000 Republicans (out of a total of 55,000 positions) with deserving Democrats, he once "decapitated sixty-five Republican postmasters in two minutes." Cleveland rewarded Stevenson with a judicial nomination to the supreme court of the District of Columbia, but Senate Republicans refused to confirm the man who had discharged so many of their postmasters. When Cleveland was defeated for reelection in 1888, President Benjamin Harrison appointed James S. Clarkson as first assistant postmaster general, and Clarkson promptly undid Stevenson's handiwork by replacing 32,335 of the fourth-class postmasters with Republicans.

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Vice President, 1892

In 1892, when the Democrats chose Cleveland once again as their standard bearer, they appeased party regulars by the nomination of the Stevenson, "headsman of the post-office," for vice president. As a supporter of using greenbacks and free silver to inflate the currency and alleviate economic distress in the rural districts, Stevenson balanced the ticket headed by Cleveland, the hard-money, gold-standard supporter. The winning Cleveland-Stevenson ticket carried Illinois, although not Stevenson's home district.

Civil service reformers held out hope for the second Cleveland administration but saw Vice President Stevenson as a symbol of the spoils system. He never hesitated to feed names of Democrats to the Post Office Department. Once he called at the Treasury Department to protest against an appointment and was shown a letter he had written endorsing the candidate. Stevenson told the treasury officials not to pay attention to any of his written endorsements; if he really favored someone he would tell them personally.

A habitual cigar-smoker, Cleveland developed cancer of the mouth that required immediate surgery in the summer of 1893. The president insisted that the surgery be kept secret to avoid another panic on Wall Street. While on a yacht in New York harbor that summer, Cleveland had his entire upper jaw removed and replaced with an artificial device, an operation that left no outward scar. The cancer surgery remained secret for another quarter century. Cleveland's aides explained that he had merely had dental work. His vice president little realized how close he came to the presidency that summer.

Adlai Stevenson enjoyed his role as vice president, presiding over the U.S. Senate, "the most august legislative assembly known to men." He won praise for ruling in a dignified, nonpartisan manner. In personal appearance he stood six feet tall and was "of fine personal bearing and uniformly courteous to all." Although he was often a guest at the White House, Stevenson admitted that he was less an adviser to the president than "the neighbor to his counsels." He credited the President with being "courteous at all times" but noted that "no guards were necessary to the preservation of his dignity. No one would have thought of undue familiarity." For his part, President Cleveland snorted that the Vice President had surrounded himself with a coterie of free-silver men dubbed the "Stevenson cabinet." The president even mused that the economy had gotten so bad and the Democratic party so divided that "the logical thing for me to do ... was to resign and hand the Executive branch to Mr. Stevenson," joking that he would try to get his friends jobs in Stevenson's new cabinet.

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Presidential campaigns of 1896 and 1900

Stevenson was mentioned as a candidate to succeed Cleveland in 1896. Although he chaired the Illinois delegation to the Democratic National Convention, he gained little support. As one Democrat noted, "the young men of the country are determined to have something to say during the next election, and are tired of these old hacks." Stevenson, 60 years old, received a smattering of votes, but the convention was taken by storm by a thirty-six-year-old former representative from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, who delivered his fiery "Cross of Gold" speech in favor of a free-silver plank in the platform. Not only did the Democrats repudiate Cleveland by embracing free silver, but they also nominated Bryan for president. Many Cleveland Democrats, including most Democratic newspapers, refused to support Bryan, but Vice President Stevenson loyally endorsed the ticket.

After the 1896 election, Bryan became the titular leader of the Democrats and frontrunner for the nomination in 1900. Much of the newspaper speculation about who would run as the party's vice-presidential candidate centered on Indiana Senator Benjamin Shively. But when reporter Arthur Wallace Dunn interviewed Shively at the convention, the senator said he "did not want the glory of a defeat as a vice presidential candidate." A disappointed Dunn said that he still had to file a story on the vice-presidential nomination, and then added: "I believe I'll write a piece about old Uncle Adlai." "That's a good idea," said Shively. "Stevenson is just the man. There you have it. Uniting the old Cleveland element with the new Bryan Democracy. You've got enough for one story. But say, this is more than a joke. Stevenson is just the man." For the rest of the day, Dunn heard other favorable remarks about Stevenson, and by that night the former vice president was the leading contender, since no one else was "very anxious to be the tail of what they considered was a forlorn hope ticket."

The Populists had already nominated the ticket of Bryan and Charles A. Towne, a pro-silver Republican from Minnesota, with the tacit understanding that Towne would step aside if the Democrats nominated someone else. Bryan preferred his good friend Towne, but Democrats wanted one of their own, and the regular element of the party felt comfortable with Stevenson. Towne withdrew and campaigned for Bryan and Stevenson. As a result, Stevenson, who had run with Cleveland in 1892, now ran with his nemesis Bryan in 1900. Twenty-five years senior to Bryan, Stevenson added age and experience to the ticket. Nevertheless, their effort never stood a chance against the Republican ticket of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

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Final years

After the 1900 election, Stevenson returned again to private practice in Illinois. He made one last attempt at office in a race for governor of Illinois in 1908, at age 72, narrowly losing. After that, he retired to Bloomington, where his Republican neighbors described him as "windy but amusing." He died in Bloomington on June 14, 1914. His body is interred in a family plot in Evergreen Cemetery, Bloomington, Illinois.

Stevenson's son, Lewis G. Stevenson, was Illinois secretary of state (1914–1917). Stevenson's grandson Adlai Ewing Stevenson II was Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956. His great-grandson, Adlai Ewing Stevenson III, was a U.S. senator from Illinois from 1970 to 1981.

A section of Interstate 55 in Chicago is named for him.

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