LEWIS D. CAMPBELL.

Biographical sketch from A History and Biographical Cyclopedia of Butler County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Sketches of its Representative Men and Pioneers (Cincinnati: Western Biographical Publishing Co., 1882), pp. 329-331  

Lewis D. Campbell, once minister to Mexico, and for many years a representative in Congress, where he was chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, was born in Franklin, Warren County, Ohio, on the 9th of August, 1811. He attended school in Franklin until he was fourteen years old, when he was transferred to the farm, on which he labored until he was seventeen. From 1828 until 1831 he served an apprenticeship in the office of the Cincinnati Gazette. He began here at the lowest round of the ladder, carrying newspapers and sweeping out the office in the morning. He soon acquired much proficiency in the printer’s art, and in 1831 came to Hamilton, where he published a weekly newspaper ad­vocating the election of Henry Clay to the presidency. This was the Intelligencer. In its columns he soon began to display that keenness of retort, that power of argu­ment, and that knowledge of statistics which afterwards made him so strong in public life.  

While editing and printing his journal he studied law, and in 1835 was admitted to the bar. He soon acquired a large and valuable practice, which would have been still more profitable to him, had he abstained from polit­ical action. But this his natural temper forbade. In 1840 he was elected, as he thought, over John B. Wel­ler, the most formidable Democrat in his district, to Con­gress, but did not receive the certificate, which was awarded to Mr. Weller. Mr. Campbell, however, refused to go to Washington to contest the seat, and expressed his determination never to enter that city until he did so as a member of Congress. That opportunity came to him in 1848, when he was chosen by a majority over General Baldwin. He at once took a leading position. In 1850 he was elected over Judge Elijah Vance; in 1852, 1854, and 1856, over C. L. Vallandigham, after­wards the leader of the Peace Democracy in Ohio during the war, and in 1870 over Robert C. Schenck, one of the strongest men in Congress.  

Mr. Campbell found the great question in Congress, during the ten years he first spent there, was slavery. In 1850 Henry Clay introduced his celebrated com­promise measures, designed to pacify and conciliate the South, and to cement the Union. It was then in no serious danger, but Mr. Clay believed that it was, and enough others joined him to pass the measures through. One of these bills was vigorously opposed by the young representative from this district. It was the iniquitous fugitive slave bill. That denied to a man accused of being a slave the right to a jury trial, which was granted to every one accused of having stolen a dollar; it raised a court to decide upon a black man’s freedom, from whose decision there was practically no appeal; for if the unhappy wretch were declared a slave, he was immediately taken to a Southern State, where he had no standing in a court of law, and it allowed the commissioner sitting as judge ten dollars if he decreed slavery, five dollars if he decreed freedom. Mr. Campbell participated prominently in the debates on this and the other bills, uniformly maintaining the position that, while the Southern States should enjoy all their rights guaranteed by the Constitution, slavery should be excluded from the Territories by Congressional enactment. In the Thirty-third Congress, when the great question of repealing the Missouri Compromise came before the House of Representatives, he was selected in a conference of the opposition members as their leader on the floor. That struggle will long be remembered. Those opposed to the repeal, under the lead of Thomas H. Benton and Lewis D. Campbell, used every effort and exhausted every parliamentary device to defeat it. But it was not to be. Those in favor of the measure were stronger than those opposed, and after an all-night’s session the bill was finally passed. Being a good parliamentarian and a ready debater, with a good voice, be discharged the duties thus assigned him, during that long and ever-memorable struggle, with eminent satisfaction to the friends of freedom, meeting in discussion the ablest men of the South. The discussion between him and Hon. Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, on the relative advantages of free and slave labor, gave him rank with the ablest debaters of Congress. 

At the opening of the Thirty-fourth Congress, Mr. Campbell received the votes of a large majority of his party for the speakership, and would probably have been elected had he continued to be a candidate. But in consequence of pledges exacted of him, which he thought would dishonor him if made, he peremptorily withdrew his name. After a struggle, prolonged many weeks, N. P. Banks was elected. During this Congress Mr. Campbell served as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The arduous duties thus devolving upon him were discharged with great ability. Among the measures reported by him, which became laws, was the Tariff Act of 1857, which levied the lowest average duties on imports of any act passed within the last half century.  

It was during this Congress that Preston S. Brooks made the assault on Charles Sumner in the old Senate-chamber. Mr. Campbell was one of the first to reach the senator after he was stricken down. On the following day he introduced the resolution for an investigation, was chairman of the committee appointed for that purpose, and made a report for the expulsion of Brooks. The challenge which the latter subsequently sent Mr. Burlingame was one of the fruits of the assault on Mr. Sumner. Upon the pressing request of Mr. Burlingame Mr. Campbell took charge of the affair as his friend (General Joseph Lane, of Oregon, being the friend of Mr. Brooks). The correspondence on the part of Mr. Burlingame was wholly written by Mr. Campbell, who still retains all the original papers. It was through his skillful management that Mr. Burlingame was carried safely through without a stain upon his honor. 

When the Southern rebellion commenced Mr. Campbell at once ardently espoused the cause of the Union. In the Spring and Summer of 1861 he assisted in raising several regiments. In the Autumn following he organized the Sixty-ninth Ohio Regiment, and was commissioned as its colonel. In the Winter of 1861-2 he was in command of Camp Chase, where he received and kept as prisoners of war the officers taken at Fort Donelson and in other battles. In April following he went under orders with his regiment to Tennessee, where he served in the Army of the Cumberland until the failure of his health, when he reluctantly retired, 

This position Colonel Campbell bad taken, not because he thought he was the one best fitted for it, in a military sense, but because he could thus be a better support to the government of Tennessee. After the outbreak of the War of Secession Andrew Johnson was the only one of the senators from the seceded States who remained. His electrical appeals for the preservation of the Union gave him great popularity in the North, but of course he could not return home, as Tennessee was then under rebel rule. As soon, therefore, as our troops had opened the way, Mr. Johnson was requested to act as governor, and Colonel Campbell to act as the military commander. Mr. Johnson required some one to help him who was thoroughly familiar with public affairs, to counsel with as occasion required, and these requisites were to be found in his associate. Before Mr. Johnson went to Tennessee he made Colonel Campbell’s house his home, and from this place both went out to make stirring appeals for the Union. 

During the war, and after it, Colonel Campbell was frequently called upon to go to Washington. Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson all possessed great confidence in his patriotism, his practical experience, and his insight into men. Seward had been in the Senate while he was in the House, and they had frequently met at each other s rooms, and the New Yorker had learned to repose implicit confidence in his friend from Ohio. Lincoln~ held him in high favor, and Johnson desired him to take a seat in the Cabinet. This he refused, as his pecuniary condition at the time would not permit of the sacrifice. 

But in 1866 Colonel Campbell was appointed minister to Mexico, to succeed Thomas Corwin, who had just died. He hesitated, but finally accepted. In November of that year, accompanied by General Sherman, he proceeded on his mission. The French army of occupation and other forces of Maximilian were then in Mexico, holding the capital and other principal cities. President Juarez and his cabinet officers had been driven to a point near the north-western border. Failing to reach The government of that republic in its migratory condition, Mr. Campbell was directed by Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, to make his official residence, temporarily, in New Orleans. He remained there until June following, when, tired of that kind of service abroad, he resigned. 

 Taking his seat as a member of the Forty-second Congress in March, 1871, he was at once recognized as possessing that commanding influence which is attained only by long and honorable, public service. Acting with the minority, he was not placed in such position as to take the leading part which had fallen to his lot in previous congressional service, yet his influence was very perceptible in the promotion of salutary legislation.  

In April, 1873, immediately after the close of the Forty-second Congress, Mr. Campbell was elected a delegate to the convention to revise and amend the constitution of the State of Ohio. After the convention assembled at Columbus he was elected, on the 22d of May, its vice-president by a unanimous vote. In politics Mr. Campbell commenced his career in the school of Clay, Webster, and others, and was always an active member of the Whig party until its dissolution. Subsequently he was identified with the Republican party, but in 1860, believing that the leaders of that party were going too far, he voted for Bell and Everett. After the war of the Rebellion closed he left that party, believing that by its reconstruction and other acts it had abandoned the principles upon which the war had been prosecuted, and that its measures of centralization were anti-republican and of imperial tendency. He has since co-operated with the Democratic party, and supported Mr. Seymour for the presidency in 1868, Mr. Greeley in 1872, and Mr. Tilden in 1876. During the last twenty years Mr. Campbell has been engaged in agricultural pursuits on his large and fertile farm on the Great Miami River, near the city of Hamilton. It has fallen to the lot of few men now living to take a more prominent and influential part in the history of the country than Mr. Campbell.  

Mr. Campbell’s ancestors, paternal and maternal, emigrated from the highlands of Scotland and settled in Virginia and Pennsylvania. His maternal grandfather, Andrew Small, at the age of eighteen years enlisted in the army of the American Revolution, in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, on the first day of July, 1775, in the rifle regiment of Colonel Harris, and served in the severe northern campaign of that year under General Montgomery. He served in the war most of the time until 1781.  

Mr. Campbell’s father, Samuel Campbell, was born in Virginia. He emigrated to the Northwest Territory in the year 1796, and settled in the Miami Valley. He was out in the War of 1812, under General Harrison. Mr. Campbell’s mother was born in Pennsylvania, March 20, 1785, and now, aged ninety-seven years, lives near Franklin, Ohio, enjoying good health, on the same tract of land on which her father settled in 1796, when the Miami Valley was an unbroken wilderness. Her father served in the war of the American Revolution; her husband served in the War of 1812, and two of her sons and two of her grandsons served in the Union army in the late War of the Rebellion.

Mr. Campbell married the only daughter of John Reily, of whom a full skcteh appears elsewhere.

Internet companion to
"The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic  
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001)
Web site ©2001-2007 by Jeffrey L. Pasley