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Edward Everett Biography

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EVERETT, Edward (1794-1865). An American statesman, orator, and scholar. He was born at Dorchester, Mass., April 11, 1794; was at one time a pupil in a Boston school of which Daniel Webster, in the absence of his brother Ezekiel, was the teacher; graduated at Harvard in 1811; and in 1813 became the pastor of the Brattle Street Church (Unitarian) in Boston. As a preacher, his career was brilliant though brief. He resigned his pastorate early in 1815, when not quite 21 years of age, to accept the Eliot professorship of Greek literature at Harvard. To fit himself more completely for this position he went to Europe, studied for two years in the University of Göttingen, where he received the degree of Ph.D., and then traveled extensively in England and on the Continent. Upon his return in 1819 he entered upon the duties of his professorship, delivering at the outset a course of lectures on ancient Greece, which he afterward repeated in Boston. From 1820 to 1824 he was also the editor of the North American Review, to which he contributed a great number of articles. In 1824 he was elected to Congress from the Cambridge district and was subsequently elected four successive times. During the whole 10 years he was a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and in the Twentieth Congress was its chairman. In 1836 he became Governor of Massachusetts, which office he held by annual reëlection until 1840, having been defeated for an additional term, in the election of 1839, by a single vote. From 1841 to 1845 he was Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States to Great Britain. Returning in 1846, he reluctantly accepted the presidency of Harvard University, which position, however, he resigned in 1849. He then established himself in Boston with the purpose of entering upon literary tasks long postponed. He was summoned to fill the place of Secretary of State in the cabinet of President Fillmore, made vacant by Mr. Webster's death (1852). He held this position only four months, retiring at the close of President Fillmore's administration. Before leaving the Department of State he was elected to the Uni ted States Senate. Everett represented the conservative Whigs and was looked upon as Webster's political executor, insisting upon the inviolability of the Constitution and recognizing the presence and possible continuance of slavery. His health failing, he resigned his seat in the Senate in May, 1854, and retired to private life. In 1860 he was nominated for Vice President of the United States by the Constitutional Union party (q.v.). The ticket received 590,631 votes out of a total of 4,680,193, and 39 electoral votes, those of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee, out of 303. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he took his stand promptly with those who were determined to maintain the Union at every hazard. In the great crisis of 1864, when Lincoln was reëlected, Everett's name headed the list of presidential electors of Massachusetts, and the casting of his vote for Lincoln was the last act in his political career. On Jan. 9, 1865, he spoke in Faneuil Hall in behalf of the needy and suffering citizens of Savannah, and on the following Sunday, the l5th, he died. His orations and speeches have been published in four volumes (Boston, 1850-92), but there is no adequate biography. Considerable biographical material, however, is contained in A Memorial of Edward Everett from the City of Boston (Boston, 1865); and in Dana, An Address upon the Life and Services of Edward Everett (Cambridge, 1865).