CIVIL WAR CAP 30th PA INFANTRY CONGRESSMAN McPHERSON GETTYSBURG AUTOGRAPH SIGNED

Description

EDWARD McPHERSON
(1830 - 1895)
CIVIL WAR CONGRESSMAN FROM GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
,
CIVIL WAR CAPTAIN OF THE 30
th
PA INFANTRY,
CLERK OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES FOR AN UNPRECEDENTED 16 YEARS
&
PROMINENT PA NEWSPAPERMAN, HISTORICAL AUTHOR and ATTORNEY!
A significant part of the Battle of Gettysburg's first day of fighting occurred on property owned by McPherson, known thereafter as "
McPherson's Ridge
" in the lore of Gettysburg!
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HERE'S McPHERSON’S SIGNATURE REMOVED FROM A 19
th
CENTURY AUTOGRAPH ALBUM, and SIGNED:
“Edwd McPherson
Gettysburg
Pa”
McPHERSON’S BARN WAS THE SCENE OF HEAVY FIGHTING DURING THE OPENING HOURS OF THE INFAMOUS GETTYSBURG BATTLE.
THE DOCUMENT MEASURES 4¾” x 2” AND IS IN VERY GOOD CONDITION, with mounting traces on the verso with very slight showthru.
A RARE ADDITION TO YOUR CIVIL WAR ERA PENNSYLVANIA POLITICAL HISTORY AUTOGRAPH, MANUSCRIPT & EPHEMERA COLLECTION!
On June 30, 1863, Union cavalry under John Buford camped on the large farm inherited by McPherson west of Gettysburg in Cumberland Township. The following day, Buford's men stubbornly held the ridgeline against Confederate infantry until reinforcements arrived, including the famed Iron Brigade. Fighting raged on McPherson's farm for much of the day, with thousands of men wounded or injured in the vicinity. The battle ruined the crops and pastures of McPherson's tenant farmer, John Slentz, and caused considerable damage to fences, buildings, property and supplies, for which McPherson was never compensated. McPherson sold the farm in 1868. The National Park Service bought the property in 1904 and now maintains the McPherson barn, which still stands on the Gettysburg National Military Park.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE HONORABLE
EDWARD McPHERSON
McPherson, Edward
(31 July 1830-14 Dec. 1895), United States Congressman and Author, was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the son of John Bayard McPherson and Katherine Lenhart. He attended public schools in Gettysburg and graduated from Pennsylvania College (now Gettysburg College) in 1848. For a brief period after graduating from college McPherson studied law under Thaddeus Stevens, the U.S. representative who would earn fame by his firm stance in favor of emancipation and equal rights. McPherson eventually decided not to pursue a career in law, but Stevens remained his most influential mentor. Instead of the law, journalism became McPherson's chosen profession. In 1851 he became editor of the Harrisburg (Pa.) American, and in that same year he established an affiliation with the Independent Whig of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1855 he also contributed to the Pittsburgh Daily Times.
McPherson switched partisan affiliations from the Whigs to the Republicans in the mid- 1850s. In 1858 he published a series of articles advocating the sale of state public improvements, a position he had advocated since 1851. These articles brought him some prominence, and he was elected as a Republican representative in 1858 and again in 1860. In 1860 he was a member of the Republican National Committee. As a congressman during the first year of the Civil War, he was fairly innocuous and tended to vote with the more moderate Republicans. For example, he voted against the first "confiscation" act of 1861, which seized as enemy property all slaves used by the Confederacy for military purposes, in effect freeing those slaves. In 1862 he was appointed to replace Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri as a member of the House Committee on Military Affairs. He was defeated for reelection in 1862, losing by a narrow margin to the Democratic candidate, Alexander H. Coffroth. McPherson's district had been considered safe for the Republicans, but in the last days of the election voters lost much of their faith in the Republicans' ability to prosecute the war successfully. McPherson blamed his defeat on Robert E. Lee's invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania in mid-1862, J. E. B. Stuart's raid on southern Pennsylvania days before the election, and the enforcement of the draft in McPherson's district by federal authorities. In 1862 he married Annie Dods Crawford; they had five children.
Upon leaving the House of Representatives, McPherson was appointed deputy commissioner of internal revenue. He left the position after only six months to become clerk of the House of Representatives, a post he held from 1863 to 1875. As a practiced parliamentarian and an amateur historian, McPherson had an impressive knowledge of governmental procedure and precedent, and he made a first-rate clerk. Usually he was as placid as he had been as a congressman, with one significant exception. In December 1865, when the Thirty-ninth Congress assembled, he was instrumental in barring from their seats those southern representatives newly elected by reconstructed governments. The Republican caucus had determined that these members should not be seated, and McPherson, coached by Stevens, complied. As he called the roll, amidst jeers and protests, he simply omitted the names of the southerners, and he told the excluded members who tried to speak that they had no right to do so because they had not been called and therefore were not legally seated. Likewise, northern Democrats who tried to interrupt the process were informed by McPherson that, by congressional rules, they could not speak until the roll call was completed. In this way, McPherson deftly executed the plan of the Republican majority to deny representation to the former Confederate states.
During his years as clerk, McPherson prepared a number of useful historical and reference works. These include The Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion (1864; 2d ed., 1865; 3d ed., 1876), The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction (1871; 2d ed., 1875), A Political Manual (published annually from 1866 to 1869), and A Handbook of Politics (published biennially from 1868 to 1894).
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s McPherson was active in Republican party politics at the state and national levels. In 1875 he wrote the Pennsylvania Republican platform, which called for tariff protection, specie resumption, and civil rights for African Americans and which opposed a third term for President Ulysses S. Grant. In 1876, at the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati, he was a leading agent for James G. Blaine, who hoped to secure the presidential nomination. The Blaine faction won an initial victory by obtaining the election of McPherson as permanent chair of the convention, but on the final day of balloting, Blaine's opponents coalesced around Rutherford B. Hayes, who ultimately received the nomination. Many of Blaine's adherents blamed McPherson for the lost nomination, for McPherson had allowed some of the Pennsylvania delegates to vote against Blaine. However, in allowing delegates to vote individually rather than by the "unit rule," under which all state delegates had to cast the same ballot, McPherson was in fact acting under Blaine's orders. McPherson, no longer the clerk of the House of Representatives when Hayes was elected, was appointed by the new president as chief of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, but he held the post for only a year. In 1880 he was the secretary of the Republican Congressional Committee. From 1881 to 1883 and again from 1889 to 1891 he resumed his position as clerk of the House of Representatives. He served longer in this position than any clerk before him.
During the 1870s and 1880s McPherson continued to be active in journalism. He was a contributor to and frequent editor of the Philadelphia Press from 1877 to 1880, and he was the owner and editor of the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel from 1880 to 1895. While acting as editor for various newspapers, he edited the New York Tribune Almanac and Political Register from 1877 to 1895, and during part of this period he also edited the Almanack de Gotha. In those years that McPherson did not hold office in Washington, D.C., he resided in Gettysburg. He spent many of his later years collecting and organizing Stevens's papers, which were ultimately deposited in the Library of Congress. Like Stevens, McPherson was committed to racial equality and a centralized Union, even though his belief in the protection of personal property made him at first reluctant to support the confiscation policy of the Union during the Civil War. He died in Gettysburg after mistakenly taking poison.
Bibliography
McPherson's papers are in the Library of Congress. Many of his original letters and manuscripts are in the Thaddeus Stevens Papers, also in the Library of Congress. Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959), and Erwin Bradley, Simon Cameron, Lincoln's Secretary of War: A Political Biography (1966), both contain useful information. James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress (2 vols., 1884- 1886), records many of McPherson's activities in Congress. Particularly relevant to McPherson's activities during the early years of Reconstruction are George Fort Milton, The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals (1930), and Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1960). For McPherson in the 1870s, his busiest period in politics, see Frank B. Evans, Pennsylvania Politics, 1872-1877: A Study in Political Leadership (1966). An obituary is in the New York Times, 15 Dec. 1895. [SOURCE: AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY]
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