William Morris Stewart (August 9, 1827 â€" April 23, 1909) was an American lawyer and politician.
Biography
Stewart was born in Wayne County, New York. As a child he moved with his parents to Trumbull County, Ohio. As a young man he was a mathematics teacher in Ohio. In 1849 he began attending Yale University but left in 1850 to move to California. Like many young men during that time, he came to California because of the Gold Rush. He arrived in San Francisco, California and soon left to begin mining near Nevada City, California. In 1852 he stopped mining and decided to become a lawyer in Nevada City. He almost immediately became a district attorney, and served as attorney general of California briefly during 1854, at the age of 27.
In 1860 Stewart moved to Virginia City, Nevada where he participated in mining litigation and helped the development of the Comstock Lode. As Nevada was becoming a state in 1864, he helped the state develop its constitution. Stewart’s role as a lawyer and politician in Nevada has always been controversial. He was the territory’s leading lawyer in mining litigation, but his opponents accused him of bribing judges and juries. Stewart accused the three Nevada territorial judges of being corrupt, and he barely escaped disbarment.
Political career
In 1864, Stewart was elected to the United States Senate as a Republican. He served in the Senate from 1865 until 1875 when he retired and practiced law again in Nevada and California. In 1873, Stewart's palatial residence, nicknamed Stewart's Castle, was built in Washington, D.C. and became a center of the city's social scene. He was elected to the Senate again in 1887 and reelected in 1893 and 1899. During the 1890s he left the Republican Party to join the Silver Party, which supported the Free Silver movement. He caucused with the Silver Republicans
During his many years in the Senate, Stewart drafted or co-authored important legislation, including several mining acts and laws urging land reclamation by irrigation. Most famously, Stewart is given credit for authoring in 1868 the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution protecting voting rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. During his time as senator, Stewart received 50,000 acres of land for his service on the Committee on Pacific Railroads. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant offered Stewart a seat on the United States Supreme Court. Stewart declined. Stewart was also involved in an international scandal where he promoted the sale of a worthless worked out Emma Silver Mine at Alta, Utah for millions of pounds to unsuspecting English citizens.
Post political career
Stewart retired from the Senate in 1905. He was a co-founder of the city of Chevy Chase, Maryland, along with Francis G. Newlands, a fellow Senator from Nevada. Stewart remained in Washington, D.C. and died there four years later. He was cremated and the ashes were originally kept in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco before being moved to Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California. Note: According to the book Reminiscences of William M. Stewart (1908) in May 1905 he moved to the Bullfrog Mining District (Nevada) with his new wife and her daughter where he started a law firm and law library.
References
- United States Congress. "William Morris Stewart (id: S000922)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.Â
His story was dramatized in an early episode of the TV western series, "Death Valley Days."
External links
- William M. Stewart, The Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania
- Media related to William M. Stewart at Wikimedia Commons
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