Zachariah Chandler (1813-1879)
Born at Beford, NH
Chandler was elected Senator four times, dying in office (1879).

Zachariah Chandler (1813-1879) was born at Beford, NH. He had a common school education, and after a year working on the farm his father offered Zachariah a choice: four years of college or one thousand dollars cash. Chandler took the cash and headed west to Detroit to start a drygoods store. Michigan became a state in 1837, and Detroit was its capitol 1837-1847. Chandler worked hard and was successful. He was elected Mayor of Detroit (1851), and U.S. Senator (1857). Chandler was elected Senator four times, dying in office (1879).

Chandler was against slavery. During the 1840s he helped support the Underground Railway. In 1850, when the first test of the Missouri Compromise came up in the Kansas Territory, Chandler contributed ten thousand dollars toward settlement of "Free Soil" settlers in the Territory. This was so that when Kansas became a state and held elections Kansas would become a Free state. {Kansas did not become a state until 1861; for a decade Bleeding Kansas, a figure of Liberty covered with gore, was an honored presence in Northern parades.]

Chandler was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1857. He gained a radical image when he denounced the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision that the Fugitive Slave Law was constitutional. During the Civil War Senator Chandler was founder and Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Conduct of the War. The Committee pushed President Lincoln to be more aggressive in his prosecution of the war. After the Civil War Chandler broke with his Republican Party. He voted for impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. As Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee for fourteen years, Chandler helped shape U.S. economic policy during Reconstruction.

When Chandler's third term in the Senate expired (1875) the Michigan legislature deadlocked over his nomination to a fourth term in office. President Ulysses S. Grant promptly asked Chandler to become Secretary of the Interior in his cabinet. The Michigan legislature finally caved to the pressure. Chandler was nominated and then was elected to a fourth term in the Senate. He died in office, in 1879).

See Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888); Peter W. Woodbury, Thomas Savage and William Patten, History of Bedford, New Hampshire (1903).