Breckinridge, John Cabell

(text excerpted from Britannica Online)

(b. Jan 21, 1821, near Lexington. KY, U.S., d. May 17, 1875, Lexington KY) U.S. vice president (1857-61), unsuccessful presidential candidate of Southern extremists (November 1860), and Confederate officer during the Civil War (1861-65).

Descended from an old Kentucky family distinguished in law and politics, Breckinridge, an attorney, began his political career in 1849 as a member of the state legislature. In 1851 he was elected to the US House of Representatives. During this troubled antebellum period, he established his reputation as a faithful Democrat, and when his party nominated James Buchanan of Pennsylvania for president in 1856, Breckinridge was a natural choice to "balance the ticket" between North and South. Once in office, however, Buchanan and Breckinridge were unable to fend off the sectional conflict. Challenged by the newly formed Republican Party, which resisted extension of slavery into the territories, the Democrats broke apart at their national convention in the summer of 1860. The Northern wing nominated Stephan A. Douglas on a platform favouring popular sovereignty (local option), while the Southerners chose Breckinridge on a separate ticket demanding federal intervention in behalf of slave property in the territories. Breckinridge insisted that he was not anti-Union, but held that slavery could be banned in a territory only after it had become a state. Defeated in the November election by Republican Abraham Lincoln, Breckinridge succeeded John J. Crittenden as U.S. senator from Kentucky in March 1861, but he resigned later that year. He never ceased working for accommodation and compromise, but after the firing on Fort Sumter, SC (April 12, 1861), he maintained that the Union no longer existed and urged Kentucky to feel free to secede (it temporarily remained neutral).

His formal expulsion from the U.S. Senate in December was a formality because he had already been commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate Army in November. After the battle of Shiloh in the following year (April 6-7, 1862), in which he commanded the reserve, he was promoted to the rank of major general andthereafter took part in many campaigns, including Vicksburg (June 1863), the Wilderness (May 1864), and Shenandoah Valley (1864-1865). In the final months of the war, Breckinridge served as Confederate Secretary of War, and at the end of hostilities he fled to England. After a self-imposed exile of three years, he returned to resume his law practice in Lexingron, where he died seven years later. Biographies include A.J. Hanna, Flight into Oblivion (1938).

(text excerpted from Britannica Online)

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