James B. Beck
Template:Use mdy dates Script error: No such module "infobox".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".Script error: No such module "Check for conflicting parameters". James Burnie Beck (February 13, 1822Template:Spaced ndashMay 3, 1890) was a Scottish-American United States Representative and Senator from Kentucky.
Life
Born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, Beck migrated to the United States in 1838 and settled in Wyoming County, New York. He moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1843 and graduated from Transylvania University in 1846. Beck was admitted to the bar and commenced the practice of law in Lexington. Until shortly before the Civil War, he was a law partner of John C. Breckinridge, the U.S. Vice President who became a Confederate general; during the Civil War, Beck was interrogated by a military commission about his knowledge of his former partner's activities.
After the war, Beck was elected as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives serving Kentucky's 7th congressional district. He was appointed to the Select Committee on Reconstruction where it was expected that as a newcomer and an immigrant he would be no obstacle to Republican intentions, but he immediately became a tenacious advocate of the rights of the defeated states. A White supremacist, he opposed civil rights for African Americans.[1] He was reelected three times as a Representative, serving from March 4, 1867, to March 3, 1875.
In 1876, Beck was appointed a member of the commission to define the boundary line between Maryland and Virginia. He was then elected to the United States Senate in 1876, being reelected twice, serving from March 4, 1877, until his death in Washington, D.C. on May 3, 1890. Long-time Washington journalist Benjamin Perley Poore described Beck during his time in the Senate as "a stalwart, farmer-like looking man, with that overcharged brain which made his tongue at times falter because he could not utter what his furious, fiery eloquence prompted."[2] While in the Senate, Beck was the Democratic Conference Chairman from 1885 to 1890, and the chairman of the Committee on Transportation Routes to the Seaboard. He was prominent in the discussion of tariff and currency questions.
He is interred at Lexington Cemetery. His son, George T. Beck, was a noted politician and entrepreneur in the state of Wyoming.
See also
- List of United States senators born outside the United States
- List of United States Congress members who died in office (1790–1899)
Notes
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- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Poore, Ben. Perley, Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, Vol.2, p.360 (1886).
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References
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- U.S. Congress. Memorial Addresses for James Beck. 51st Cong., 2nd sess. from 1890 to 1891. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1891.
- Template:Cite NIE
- Template:Cite Appletons'
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- Pages with script errors
- 1822 births
- 1890 deaths
- British emigrants to the United States
- Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Kentucky
- Democratic Party United States senators from Kentucky
- Kentucky lawyers
- People from Dumfries and Galloway
- People from Wyoming County, New York
- Transylvania University alumni
- 19th-century American lawyers
- Burials at Lexington Cemetery
- 19th-century members of the United States House of Representatives
- 19th-century United States senators