Zachariah Chandler (1813 - 1879)
Born at Bedford (NH); died at Chicago (IL).
Businessman and four-term U.S. Senator.
Portrait by unknown artist, after photograph.
Presented to the State by descendant, 1915.

Zachariah Chandler had a "common-school" education. After school he taught school and managed the family farm for a year; then his father offered Chandler a choice between a college education or $1,000 cash - a considerable sum in those days. Chandler opted for the money, and with it started a dry-goods business at Detroit, the capitol city of Michigan. Michigan became a state in 1837 and Detroit was the capitol city 1837 - 47; Chandler worked hard and was the leading merchant in Detroit during the 1850s. He was elected Mayor of Detroit in 1851; a year later he was a (defeated) Whig Party candidate for governor.

Chandler was opposed to slavery as an institution, both as it existed and to its extension into new American territories. He supported the Underground Railway, helping slaves escape from slave states. He contributed $10,000 toward the settlement of "free soil" (anti-slavery) settlers in the Kansas Territory. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1857, Chandler attacked the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which upheld the Fugitive Slave Law. Dred Scott upheld the return of fugitive slaves to slave states; Chandler declared he "would support the constitution as its Fathers had made it, not as the Supreme Court has altered it." [See History of Bedford, New Hampshire(1903).] In the Lincoln administration, Chandler was the founding member and a leader of the important Senate Committee On The Conduct Of The War. He consistently urged Lincoln to pursue more aggressive actions than Lincoln wanted to take.

Chandler was elected to the United States Senate three times, and he held to his radical image throughout his Senate career. In 1868 he broke with his party and voted to impeach President Andrew Johnson. In 1869, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce (a post he held for fourteen years), Chandler called for a) resumption of specie payments; b) establishment of a national banking system nationwide; and c) imposition of protective tariffs, so that industries suffering post-war recession might rebuild. He helped shape legislation which determined the nation's economic course for the next twenty years.

When Chandler's third Senate term expired (1875), deadlock in the Michigan legislature prevented his reelection. President Ulysses S. Grant (1868 - 1880) promptly asked Chandler to join his cabinet as Secretary of the Interior. During the 1876 - 1880 term Chandler eliminated extensive corruption in that government department.

Chandler managed Grant's successful 1876 campaign for reelection. He was elected to a fourth term in the U.S. Senate, but died midway through his term.

[See Rev. Stephen G. Abbott, The First Regiment of New Hampshire Volunteers (1890); Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888); and Peter B. Woodbury, Thomas Savage, and William Patten, History of Bedford, New Hampshire (1903).]

Location: First Floor, State House