John Jordan Crittenden was an American statesman and politician from Kentucky. He twice served as United States Attorney General in the administrations of William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. He was also the 17th governor of Kentucky and served in the state legislature. Although frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the presidency, he never consented to run for the office.
About John J. Crittenden in brief
John Jordan Crittenden was an American statesman and politician from Kentucky. He represented the state in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U. S. Senate. He twice served as United States Attorney General in the administrations of William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. He was also the 17th governor of Kentucky and served in the state legislature. Although frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the presidency, he never consented to run for the office. He died in 1863 but died before the election took place. His father had surveyed land in Kentucky with George Rogers Clark, and settled there just after the end of the American Revolution. On his father’s side, he was of Welsh ancestry, while his mother’s family was French Huguenot. One of his sons, George B. Critt enden, became a general in the Confederate Army. Another son, Thomas Leonidas Critt Enden, was a general in the Union Army. He supported the Union. However, he criticized many of the policies of President Abraham Lincoln and the United States Congress, including the Emancipation Proclamation and the admission of West Virginia to the union. He later became close friends with Thomas P. Marshall and Francis Francis Blair, and later became friends with Hugh Lawson and Hugh Lawson. He moved to the Lexington, Kentucky, home of Judge George M. Bibb to study law at Washington College in Lexington, Virginia.
He became a college preparatory teacher at Pisgah Academy in Woodford County. He went on to become a judge at the University of Kentucky, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He also served as secretary of state of Kentucky from 1841 to 1842. In 1848, he resigned as governor to help Zachary Taylor win Kentucky’s vote in the 1848 presidential election. He refused a post in his cabinet, fearing he would be charged with making a ‘corrupt bargain’, as Henry Clay had been in 1825. In the mid-1850s, he joined the Know Nothing Party and urged compromise on the issue of slavery. He sought out moderates from all parties and formed the Constitutional Union Party, though he refused the party’s nomination for president in the 1860 election. In December 1860, he authored the Crittendeden Compromise, a series of resolutions and constitutional amendments he hoped would avert the Civil War, but Congress would not approve them. He never ran for re-election to the House in 1863 and died in office in 1863. He is buried in the Kentucky State Cemetery in Lexington. He had four sons and five daughters, all but one of whom survived infancy, and one of them survived infancy. He married his second wife, Judith Harris, in 1858. The couple had four children and had one son and one daughter who died in childbirth in 1869. The elder Critten was a lawyer, while the younger one was a farmer.
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