Zenas Clement (c.1810 - ?)
Manufacturer, state legislator and national official
Portrait by U.D. Tenney, 1888, after an earlier portrait by Walter Ingalls.
Presented to the State, 1888.

Zenas Clement was a Jackson Democrat, and a power in the state's Democratic party all his life (John Scales, Biographical Sketches of the Class of 1863, Dartmouth College (1903.) The first notice of Clement's appearance in a public forum which this biographer has found is in the June 1836 session of the State Legislature, when "the 'soulless corporations'....received [a] legislative nudge in a bill ... intended to subject the private property of stockholders to the payment of the debts of the corporation ... A bill to incorporate the Sullivan County bank, at Claremont, passed the house, but not the senate, containing a clause, moved by Mr. Zenas Clement, of that town, making the private property of the stockholders liable, to the amount of their stock, for the debts of the corporation....." ["New Hampshire in the Fourth Decade of the Passing Century", NHHS Proceedings vol. 3 (1895)]. Clement was a State Representative for Claremont in 1833, 1834 and 1835, according to O.F.R. Waite, History of Claremont, 1764 - 1894 (1895).

Clement served as State Treasurer (1837/42). Around 1842 he became a manufacturer at Sanbornton, a manufacturing center, and we learn from Clement's son (see Scales, op cit.) that Zenas Clement..."as an intimate friend of Franklin Pierce, so when that gentleman became President of the United States he remembered his friend...by appointing him Collector of Customs at Portsmouth in 1853, which office he held till the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency" [1860]. He was not removed by Pierce's successor as President, Buchanan, The bachelor President Buchanan was a conservative Democrat, and it took a Republican, Lincoln, to remove Clement from office.

Clement lived at 111 State Street in Portsmouth; in the 1860s he was a partner in Clement & Cressy, a firm which built the boat shop and carpenter shop at Portsmouth Navy-Yard in 1864.

References: John Scales, Biographical Sketches of the Class of 1863 in Dartmouth College (1883, 1903); Rev. M. T. Runnels, History of Sanbornton, vol. I Annals (1882); G. H. Preble, History of the United States Navy-Yard, Portsmouth, N.H. (1892).