Photograph as originally submitted to this page in the Historical Marker Database www.HMdb.org. Click on photo to resize in browser. Scroll down to see metadata.

Photographer: Allen C. Browne
Taken: February 16, 2015
Caption: Thomas Hart Benton
Additional Description: This 1861 portrait by Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.

“Thomas Hart Benton was a major political figure in the period, serving as a Democratic senator from from Missouri for thirty years. Politically, Benton helped implement ‘manifest destiny’ with his wholehearted support of national expansion. He wrote in 1818: ‘In a few years the Rocky Mountains will be passed and the “children of Adam” will have [marched] west to … the Pacific.’ To fulfill this vision of America as a new Eden, Benton promoted homesteading, the western railroad, the Pony Express. annexation, and other measures. But his career foundered on the issue of slavery. A believer in the Union and an opponent of slavery, he voted against the Compromise of 1850, which deferred conflict on the slavery issue. Benton's intransigence outraged the Missouri legislature, and they replaced him with a proslavery Whig in 1850.” — National Portrait Gallery
Submitted: April 23, 2015, by Allen C. Browne of Silver Spring, Maryland.
Database Locator Identification Number: p306128
File Size: 1.956 Megabytes

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