In 1857, 36 years old, he was inaugurated as Vice President of the United States under James Buchanan. Four years later, he ran as the presidential candidate of a dissident group of Southern Democrats, but lost the election to Abraham Lincoln. 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. In 1875, he refused all requests to resume his political career and died of complications related to war injuries in 1875.
About Political career of John C. Breckinridge in brief
In 1857, 36 years old, he was inaugurated as Vice President of the United States under James Buchanan. 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. 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. In 1875, he refused all requests to resume his political career and died of complications related to war injuries in 1875. 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. 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. He believed the federal government was created by, and subject to, the co-equal governments of the states. His father, Cabell Breckinridge, died of a fever on September 1, 1823, months before his son’s third birthday. He was the Kentucky Secretary of State and former Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives.
His grandmother taught him the political philosophies of his late grandfather, U. S. Attorney General John Breck inridge. John C. BreckInridge’s posthumous influence inclined his grandson toward the Democratic Party. His friend and law partner, Thomas W. Bullock, was from a Democratic family; by the time they opened their practice in Burlington, Iowa, they were two-thirds of a Democrat; living in heavily Democratic Iowa Territory. He wrote in the Iowa Territorial Gazette that he felt dishonored as I had been in Kentucky. On a visit to Iowa in 1843, he said, ‘I would have done as my nephew had been dishonored in Kentucky if I had heard that my daughter-in-law had been loco-foco,’ referring to his nephew’s uncle. He died in 1872. He is buried in the University of Kentucky’s College of Law. He had been a member of the Democratic National Committee since 1841. He also served as a member and advisor to the Democratic State Executive Committee from 1841 to 1843. He never married and died in 1896. He left a son, John C., who was a prominent lawyer in Kentucky and served as the state’s governor from 1849 to 1851. His daughter, Mary, was the first Democrat to represent Kentucky’s 8th congressional district in over 20 years. She was elected to the Kentucky Senate in 1859, and served until her death in 1868. She served as Kentucky’s first female member of Congress.
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