Reverdy Johnson
 |
Reverdy Johnson |
Reverdy Johnson (
May 21,
1796 –
February 10,
1876) was a statesman and jurist from
Maryland.
Born in
Annapolis, Johnson was the son of a distinguished Maryland lawyer and politician,
John Johnson (1770 - 1824). He graduated from
St. John's College in 1812 and then studied law. He was admitted to the
bar in 1815, and then moved to
Baltimore, where he became a legal colleague of
Luther Martin,
William Pinkney and
Roger B. Taney. From 1821 until 1825 he served in the
Maryland State Senate and then returned to practice law for two decades. From 1845 to 1849, he represented Maryland in the
United States Senate as a
Whig, and from March 1849 until July
1850 he was
Attorney General of the United States under
President Zachary Taylor. He resigned that position when
Millard Fillmore took office.
A conservative
Democrat, he supported
Stephen A. Douglas in the
presidential election of 1856. He represented the
slave-owning
defendant in the infamous 1857 case
Dred Scott v. Sandford. Personally opposed to slavery, he was reportedly a key figure in the effort to keep Maryland from seceding from the
Union during the
American Civil War.
He served as a Maryland delegate to the 1861 peace convention and from 1861 to 1862 served in the
Maryland House of Delegates. After the capture of
New Orleans, he was commissioned by President
Abraham Lincoln to revise the decisions of the military commandant, General
B.F. Butler, in regard to foreign governments, and reversed all those decisions to the entire satisfaction of the administration. After the war, representing the riven points of view held by his fellow statesmen, Johnson argued for a gentler
Reconstruction effort than that advocated by the
Radical Republicans.
In 1863 he again took a seat in the United States Senate, serving through 1868. In 1866, he was a delegate to the
National Union Convention which attempted to build support for President Johnson. Senator Johnson's report on the proceedings of the convention was entered into the record of President Johnson's impeachment trial. In 1868 he was appointed minister to the
United Kingdom and soon after his arrival in England negotiated the
Johnson-Clarendon Treaty for the settlement of disputes arising out of the Civil War; this, however, the Senate refused to
ratify, and he returned home on the accession of General
Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency. Again resuming his legal practice, he was engaged by the government in the prosecution of cases against the
Ku Klux Klan as well as work compiling the reports of the decisions of the
Maryland Court of Appeals.
He died in 1876 in Annapolis and is buried in
Greenmount Cemetery at Baltimore.
*Steiner, Bernard C.,
Life of Reverdy Johnson, New Library Press.Net. ISBN 0795024525
*
Reverdy Johnson at Find-A-Grave
