Jonathan Trumbull Governor of Connecticut 1797–1809
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Jonathan Trumbull was a Representative and a Senator from Connecticut; born in Lebanon, Conn., March 26, 1740. He graduated from Harvard College in 1759 and was a member of the Conneticut State legislature 1774-1775, 1779-1780, 1788, and served as speaker of the house in 1788.
Between 1778-1779 Trumbull served in the Continental Army as a paymaster and as comptroller of the treasury. He was appointed secretary and aide-de-camp to General George Washington in 1781 and was elected to the First, Second, and Third Congresses (March 4, 1789-March 3, 1795). Trumbull did not seek reelection, having become a candidate for Senator. He became Speaker of the House of Representatives during the Second Congress and was elected to the United States Senate where he served from March 4, 1795, to June 10, 1796, when he resigned.
Trumball became lieutenant governor of Connecticut from 1796 until the death of the Governor in December 1797, when he became the Governor. He was reelected for eleven consecutive terms, and served from 1797 until his death in Lebanon, Conn., August 7, 1809.
Harry Ives Thompson
Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives No. 2005.016.002 Source: <a href="http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=T000389">Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress </a><br /><br />Seal of the Governor of Connecticut - Wikimedia
Harry Ives Thompson
1880
Harry Ives Thompson
Harry Ives Thompson
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Trumbull_Jr.">Wikipedia</a>
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1959 - 1977 Hiram Leong Fong - First Asian American elected to the U.S. Senate
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Senator Hiram Leong Fong became one of Hawaii’s first two U.S. Senators in 1959, upon the state’s admission to the Union. The son of Chinese immigrants, Fong was also the first U.S. Senator of Asian ancestry. During his nearly 18 years in the Senate, Fong advocated civil rights and voting rights legislation and immigration reform that sought to prevent discrimination against Asians. Known for his devotion to Hawaii and his constituents, Fong’s state pride can be seen in a 1983 oral history interview with Capitol Police Inspector Leonard Ballard, who fondly remembered pointing out to Senator Fong a pineapple light fixture in the U.S. Capitol Building.
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Hiram Leong Fong: 1906-2004<br /><br />Sources: Congressional Research Service - <a href="https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/97-398.pdf">Asian Pacific Americans in the United States Congress</a> and <a href="http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Featured_Bio_Fong.htm">United States Senate</a>
Library of Congress
c. 1960-1970
Library of Congress
Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress: <a href="http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c01134">Digital ID</a>
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1928-1929 Octaviano Larrazolo - First Hispanic American U.S. Senator
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Octaviano Larrazolo was the first Hispanic to serve in the United States Senate and was in office during the Seventieth Congress 12/07/ 1928 – 03/03/1929. He was born (1859) in Allende in the Mexican state of Chihuahua (1859), where he lived until he was eleven years old. J.B. Salpoint, a French-born Bishop of Arizona, took Larrazolo to Arizona (1870) and instructed him in theology. When Reverend Salpoint moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico (1875), Larrazola accompanied him, and completed his studies at St. Michael's College there (1877). That same year he began a career as an educator, teaching in Tucson for a year before moving to San Elizaro, Texas, where he worked as a principal for seven years.
Larrazolo's interests in politics led him to become active in the Democratic Party and in 1885 Larrazolo was appointed clerk of the U.S. District and Circuit Courts at El Paso. A year later he was elected clerk of the 34th District Court at El Paso and was re-electedthe following year. While he worked as a court clerk, he studied law with one of the judges and he was admitted to the Texas bar in 1888. Two years later he was elected state attorney for Texas' Western District; he subsequently was reelected for one more term. In 1895 Larrazolo moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico and opened a law office. From 1900 to 1908 he ran three times as the Democratic Party candidate for the position of Territorial Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, but was defeated each time.
When the New Mexican Constitutional Convention met (1910), although Larrazolo was not present, he was influential in helping write strong provisions into the Constitution that guaranteed protection of the Spanish-speaking voters from disfranchisement and discrimination on account of language or racial descent. A year later he resigned from the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party because the State Convention of the Democratic Party had denied his request that one-half of all statewide nominees be Hispanic to represent the sixty percent of the population of New Mexico that was Hispanic. He was elected Governor of New Mexico and while in office, enacted laws that created the Girls' Welfare Home, the Child Welfare Board, and the State Health Board.
Larrazolo position on the income tax bill at the time became a point of contention between him and the Republican Party. In his effort to strengthen the income tax law, he lost support from Republicans. He also supported the women's suffrage amendment. This alienated both Republicans and some of his Hispanic supporters. In 1922 the Republican Party did not re-nominate him for governor. In 1927 and 1928 he served in the New Mexico House of Representatives and a year later was elected to fill the unexpired term of Democratic Senator Andieus A. Jones, who had died in office. While in the Senate, Larrazolo served on the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, Public Surveying Committee, and the Territories and Insular Affairs Committees. He fell ill and served only six months before he returned to Albuquerque where he died on April 7, 1930.
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Octaviano Larrazolo: 1859-1930 <br /><br />Source: U.S. Library of Congress - <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/congress/larrazolo.html">Hispanic Americans in Congress, 1822-1995</a>
Library of Congress
1919
Library of Congress
Library of Congress
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octaviano_Ambrosio_Larrazolo">Wikipedia</a>
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1921-1923 Rebecca Latimer Felton - First Woman to serve as a U.S. Senator
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Rebecca Felton’s 1835-1930, was born in De Kalb County, Georgia. She is the first Woman to join the U.S. Senate, (67th 1921-23). Her brief and essentially symbolic service in the Senate stood in contrast to her decades of participation in Georgia politics and civic affairs. It was her participation in managing Georgia’s exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 held in Chicago that sparked her interest in national politics. Felton had come into contact with other women activists from around the nation and endorsed many of the crusades of Southern progressivism, including temperance and prison reform. Rebecca also was a gifted writer. It was through her writings that Felton became a visible presence in Georgia politics. She supported women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and public education, especially vocational training for girls, while fighting the state’s system of convict leasing.
Library of Congress - National Photo Company Collection
Wikimedia & Alchetron<br /><br />Rebecca Latimer Felton. First Woman to serve as a U.S. Senator, 1921-23 <br /><br />Source: <a href="http://history.house.gov/People/Detail/13054?ret=True">U.S. House of Representatives</a>
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Between 1909 and 1932
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Library of Congress
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1907 - 1925 Robert Latham Owen - First US Senator of Native American Descent
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Oklahoma Sen. Robert L. Owen (1907-1925) was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1856, to Robert Owen, president of the Virginia and Tennessee Railway, and Narcissa Clark Chisholm. As a ten-year-old, Owen attended school near Baltimore and later graduated from Washington and Lee University with honors and a master’s degree in 1877.
The family’s fortune was lost to unexplained circumstances, likely related to the Civil War and reconstruction. The loss, and the death of his father, forced Owen and his mother, who was of Native American descent, to move to the Indian Territory, where they were entitled to tribal property. While living in what later became Oklahoma, Owen briefly taught school at the Cherokee Orphan Asylum before studying law and gaining admittance to the bar in 1880. In 1885, he was appointed head of the United States Union Agency for the Five Civilized Tribes.
Owen owned and edited a newspaper in Vinita, Oklahoma, and in 1890 established the First National Bank of Muskogee, where he served as president until 1900.
When Oklahoma was granted statehood in 1907, Owen was appointed to represent the state by the Oklahoma legislature. With the selection, Owen was not only one of the state’s first two senators but also one of the nation’s first two senators of Native American decent.
Owen was a leader in the direct election of senators and the Child Labor Act, among other issues. The highlight of his Senate career, however, arguably was his involvement with the Federal Reserve Act. “The whole country owes you a debt of gratitude and admiration,” President Woodrow Wilson wrote to Owen. “It has been a pleasure to be associated with you in so great a piece of constructive legislation.”
After retiring from the Senate in 1925, Owen practiced law in Washington, DC, but devoted much of his time to promoting an international alphabet that he hoped would make English a universal language. The system, which was inspired by an eighty-five-character alphabet created by the Cherokee Chief Sequoia in 1823, was unsuccessful, but it received a significant amount of media attention.
After the death of his wife, Daisy Hester, in 1946, Owen lived the final months of his life alone in an apartment near Washington’s Meridian Hill Park. After being hospitalized for several weeks with an illness and undergoing an operation, he died in 1947 at the age of ninety-one. Today, Owen and Glass are both buried in Lynchburg’s Spring Hill Cemetery.
Note: Written by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
US Library of Congress
Robert Latham Owen, 1856-1947 <br /><br />Source: Library of Congress. <a href="http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b22781">Digital ID</a>
Library of Congress
c. 1910 Dec. 31
Library of Congress
Library of Congress
See also: <a href="http://www.federalreservehistory.org/People/DetailView/92">Federal Reserve History</a>
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1869-1871 Hiram Rhodes Revels - First African American appointed to serve in the U.S. Senate
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Hiram Rhodes Revels: 1827-1901. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina . Revels is the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress (41st, 1869-1871). He was a member of the Republican Party. Revels was ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. His first pastorate was likely to have been in Richmond, Indiana, where he was elected an elder to the AME Indiana Conference in 1849. Revels traveled throughout the country, carrying out religious work and educating fellow African Americans in Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. He arrived in Washington to serve in elected office as a Senator for Mississippi at the end of January 1870, but could not present his credentials until Mississippi was readmitted to the United States on February 23.
Library of Congress Photoduplication Service
Photoprint made by Library of Congress Photoduplication Service, from original glass negative: Brady-Handy Collection <br /><br />Source: <a href="https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/20291?ret=True">United States House of Representatives</a>. Kenneth H. Williams, “Revels, Hiram Rhoades,” American National Biography 18 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Library of Congress
1870
Mathew Brady & Levin Corbin Handy
Library of Congress
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Rhodes_Revels">Wikipedia</a>
Medium: Photomechanical Print
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1845-51 & 1855-61 David Levy Yulee - First Jewish American U.S. Senator
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David Levy Yulee was a Delegate and a Senator from Florida; born David Levy in St. Thomas, West Indies, June 12, 1810. At the age of nine was sent to the United States to Norfolk, Virginia to attend a private school. He studied law in St. Augustine, Florida, was admitted to the bar in 1836 and practiced in St. Augustine. Levy was delegate to the State constitutional convention in 1838; clerk to the Territorial legislature in 1841; elected as a Whig-Democrat, and a Territorial delegate to the Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth Congresses (March 4, 1841-March 3, 1845). He did not seek renomination, having become a candidate for the Senate.
When Florida was admitted as a State into the Union. Levy was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate and served from July 1, 1845, to March 3, 1851. He served as chairman of: the Committee on Private Land Claims (Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Congresses); and Committee on Naval Affairs (Thirty-first Congress). By an act of the Florida Legislature and at his request his name was changed to David Levy Yulee in 1846.
Levy was again elected to the United States Senate in January 1855 and served from March 4, 1855, until his withdrawal January 21, 1861. He served as chairman of the Committee on Post Office and Post Roads (Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Congresses),
Due to his support of the Confederacy, Levy
was a prisoner at Fort Pulaski in 1865.
He was also the president of the Florida Railroad Company 1853-1866; president of Peninsular Railroad Company, Tropical Florida Railway Company, and Fernandina and Jacksonville Railroad Company; and was known as the “Father of Florida’s railroads”.
Levy moved to Washington, D.C., in 1880 and died in New York City, October 10, 1886. He is intered in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C.
Mathew Brady
Source: <a href="http://www.senate.gov/states/FL/timeline.htm">Biographical Directory of the United States Congress</a> <br /><br />Related Bibliography - American National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Hühner, Leon.<br /><br />“David L. Yulee, Florida’s First Senator.” In Jews in the South, edited by Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, pp. 52-74. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973 <br /><br />Whitfield, James B. “Some Legal Phases of the Senatorial Contest Between David L. Yulee and Stephen R. Mallory, Sr., in 1851." Florida Law Journal 19 (October 1945): 251-55.
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1855-1865
Mathew Brady
Library of Congress
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Levy_Yulee">Wikipedia</a>
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