The political career of John C. Breckinridge included service in the state government of Kentucky, the Federal government of the United States, as well as the government of the Confederate States of America. In 1857, 36 years old, he was inaugurated as Vice President of the United States under James Buchanan. He remains the youngest person to ever hold the office. Four years later, he ran as the presidential candidate of a dissident group of Southern Democrats, but lost the election to the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.
A member of the Breckinridge political family, John C. Breckinridge became the first Democrat to represent Fayette County in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and in 1851, he was the first Democrat to represent Kentucky's 8th congressional district in over 20 years. A champion of strict constructionism, states' rights, and popular sovereignty, he supported Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act as a means of addressing slavery in the territories acquired by the U.S. in the Mexican–American War. Considering his re-election to the House of Representatives unlikely in 1854, he returned to private life and his legal practice. He was nominated for vice president at the 1856 Democratic National Convention, and although he and Buchanan won the election, he enjoyed little influence in Buchanan's administration.
In 1859, the Kentucky General Assembly elected Breckinridge to a U.S. Senate term that would begin in 1861. In the 1860 United States presidential election, Breckinridge captured the electoral votes of most of the Southern states, but finished a distant second among four candidates. Lincoln's election as president prompted the secession of the Southern states to form the Confederate States of America. Though Breckinridge sympathized with the Southern cause, in the Senate he worked futilely to reunite the states peacefully. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War, he opposed allocating resources for Lincoln to fight the Confederacy. Fearing arrest after Kentucky sided with the Union, he fled to the Confederacy, joined the Confederate States Army, and was subsequently expelled from the Senate. He served in the Confederate Army from October 1861 to February 1865, when Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed him Confederate States Secretary of War. Then, concluding that the Confederate cause was hopeless, he encouraged Davis to negotiate a national surrender. Davis's capture on May 10, 1865, effectively ended the war, and Breckinridge fled to Cuba, then Great Britain, and finally Canada, remaining in exile until President Andrew Johnson's offer of amnesty in 1868. Returning to Kentucky, he refused all requests to resume his political career and died of complications related to war injuries in 1875.
Formative years
Historian James C. Klotter has speculated that, had John C. Breckinridge's father, Cabell, lived, he would have steered his son to the Whig Party and the Union, rather than the Democratic Party and the Confederacy, but the Kentucky Secretary of State and former Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives died of a fever on September 1, 1823, months before his son's third birthday.Klotter, pp. 96–97 Burdened with her husband's debts, widow Mary Breckinridge and her children moved to her in-laws' home near Lexington, Kentucky, where John C. Breckinridge's grandmother taught him the political philosophies of his late grandfather, U.S. Attorney General John Breckinridge.Klotter in The Breckinridges of Kentucky, p. 97 John Breckinridge believed the federal government was created by, and subject to, the co-equal governments of the states.Klotter, p. 108 As a state representative, he introduced the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, which denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts and asserted that states could nullify them and other federal laws that they deemed unconstitutional.Heck, p. 1 A strict constructionist, he held that the federal government could only exercise powers explicitly given to it in the Constitution.
Most of the Breckinridges were Whigs, but John Breckinridge's posthumous influence inclined his grandson toward the Democratic Party."John Cabell Breckinridge". Encyclopedia of World BiographyKlotter in The Breckinridges of Kentucky, p. 103 Additionally, John C. Breckinridge's friend and law partner, Thomas W. Bullock, was from a Democratic family.Heck, pp. 11, 13 In 1842, Bullock told Breckinridge that by the time they opened their practice in Burlington, Iowa, "you were two-thirds of a Democrat"; living in heavily Democratic Iowa Territory further distanced him from Whiggery.Davis, p. 27 He wrote weekly editorials in the Democratic Iowa Territorial Gazette and Advisor, and in February 1843, he was named to the Des Moines County Democratic committee. A letter from Breckinridge's brother-in-law related that, when Breckinridge's uncle William learned that his nephew had "become loco-foco","Loco-foco" was by then a derogatory term used by Whigs to describe the Democratic Party; see locofocos. he said, "I felt as I would have done if I had heard that my daughter had been dishonored."Heck, p. 14 On a visit to Kentucky in 1843, Breckinridge met and married Mary Cyrene Burch, ending his time in Iowa.Heck, p. 15
Views on slavery Slavery issues dominated Breckinridge's political career, although historians disagree about Breckinridge's views. In Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol, William C. Davis argues that, by adulthood, Breckinridge regarded slavery as evil; his entry in the 2002 Encyclopedia of World Biography records that he advocated voluntary emancipation.Davis, p. 19 In Proud Kentuckian: John C. Breckinridge 1821–1875, Frank Heck disagrees, citing Breckinridge's consistent advocacy for slavery protections, beginning with his opposition to emancipationist candidates—including his uncle, Robert Jefferson Breckinridge—in the state elections of 1849.Heck, p. 163
Early influences
Breckinridge's grandfather, John, owned slaves, believing it was a necessary evil in an agrarian economy.Davis, p. 5 He hoped for gradual emancipation but did not believe the federal government was empowered to effect it; Davis wrote that this became "family doctrine". As a U.S. Senator, John Breckinridge insisted that decisions about slavery in Louisiana Territory be left to its future inhabitants, essentially the "popular sovereignty" advocated by John C. Breckinridge prior to the Civil War.Davis, p. 7 John C. Breckinridge's father, Cabell, embraced gradual emancipation and opposed government interference with slavery, but Cabell's brother Robert, a Presbyterian minister, became an abolitionist, concluding that slavery was morally wrong.Davis, p. 8Klotter in The Breckinridges of Kentucky, p. 109 Davis recorded that all the Breckinridges were pleased when the General Assembly upheld the ban on importing slaves to Kentucky in 1833.Davis, p. 17
John C. Breckinridge encountered conflicting influences as an undergraduate at Centre College and in law school at Transylvania University.Davis, pp. 14, 17 Centre President John C. Young, Breckinridge's brother-in-law, believed in states' rights and gradual emancipation, as did George Robertson, one of Breckinridge's instructors at Transylvania, but James G. Birney, father of Breckinridge's friend and Centre classmate William Birney, was an abolitionist. In an 1841 letter to Robert Breckinridge, who became his surrogate father after Cabell Breckinridge's death, John C. Breckinridge wrote that only "ignorant, foolish men" feared abolition.Davis, p. 16 In an Independence Day address in Frankfort later that year, he decried the "unlawful dominion over the bodies ... of men". An acquaintance believed that Breckinridge's move to Iowa Territory was motivated, in part, by the fact that it was a free territory under the Missouri Compromise.Davis, p. 21
After returning to Kentucky, Breckinridge became friends with abolitionists Cassius Marcellus Clay, Garrett Davis, and Orville H. Browning.Davis, p. 43 He represented freedmen in court and loaned them money. He was a Freemason and member of the First Presbyterian Church, both of which opposed slavery. Nevertheless, because blacks were educationally and socially disadvantaged in the South, Breckinridge concluded that "the interests of both races in the Commonwealth would be promoted by the continuance of their present relations".Davis, pp. 19, 44 He supported the new state constitution adopted in 1850, which forbade the immigration of freedmen to Kentucky and required emancipated slaves to be expelled from the state.Davis, p. 47 Believing it was best to relocate freedmen to the African colony of Liberia, he supported the Kentucky branch of the American Colonization Society.Klotter in The Breckinridges of Kentucky, p. 113 The 1850 Census showed that Breckinridge owned five slaves, aged 11 to 36.Heck, p. 31 Heck recorded that his slaves were well-treated but noted that this was not unusual and proved nothing about his views on slavery.
Moderate reputation Because Breckinridge defended both the Union and slavery in the General Assembly, he was considered a moderate early in his political career."John Cabell Breckinridge, 14th Vice President (1857–1861)". United States Senate In June 1864, Pennsylvania's John W. Forney opined that Breckinridge had been "in no sense an extremist" when elected to Congress in 1851. Of his early encounters with Breckinridge, Forney wrote: "If he had a conscientious feeling, it was hatred of slavery, and both of us, 'Democrats' as we were, frequently confessed that it was a sinful and an anti-Democratic institution, and that the day would come when it must be peaceably or forcibly removed."Davis, p. 59 Heck discounts this statement, pointing out that Forney was editor of a pro-Union newspaper and Breckinridge a Confederate general at the time it was published.Heck, pp. 163–164 As late as the 1856 presidential election, some alleged that Breckinridge was an abolitionist.
By the time he began his political career, Breckinridge had concluded that slavery was more a constitutional issue than a moral one. Slaves were property, and the Constitution did not empower the federal government to interfere with property rights.Klotter in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, p. 117 From Breckinridge's constructionist viewpoint, allowing Congress to legislate emancipation without constitutional sanction would lead to "unlimited dominion over the territories, excluding the people of the slave states from emigrating thither with their property".Heck, p. 33 As a private citizen, he supported the slavery protections in the Kentucky Constitution of 1850 and denounced the Wilmot Proviso, which would have forbidden slavery in territory acquired in the Mexican–American War. As a state legislator, he declared slavery a "wholly local and domestic" matter, to be decided separately by the residents of each state and territory.Klotter in The Breckinridges of Kentucky, p. 104 Because Washington, D.C., was a federal entity and the federal government could not interfere with property rights, he concluded that forced emancipation there was unconstitutional. As a congressman, he insisted on Congress's "perfect non-intervention" with slavery in the territories.Current, "John C. Breckinridge" Debating the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, he explained, "The right to establish [slavery in a territory by government sanction] involves the correlative right to prohibit; and, denying both, I would vote for neither."Harrison, p. 127
Later views