Politics
A Jacksonian Democrat as well as a friend and supporter of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Meredith Marmaduke served as Saline County surveyor and county judge before being elected Lieutenant Governor of Missouri in 1840. His time in that role was relatively uneventful until the morning of February 9, 1844. It was on that day Governor Thomas Reynolds committed suicide. Assuming office in largely a caretaker for the final ten months remaining in the Governors term, nonetheless Marmaduke set the stage for major changes in the treatment of the mentally ill. In one of his final messages to the state legislature he strongly urged them to establish, in the vernacular of the time, a lunatic asylum for the housing and treatment of those with mental illness. One of his other acts as Governor likely cost him a chance to win election to the office in his own right. Marmaduke, himself a slaveholder, refused to pardon three abolitionists who had helped escaped slaves. Angered by is refusal, Missouri Democratic Party leaders bypassed Marmaduke as their candidate in the 1844 election and instead chose the eventual winner, John C. Edwards.
Though out of office, Marmaduke kept his hand in state affairs the next year, serving as Saline County delegate to the Missouri Constitutional Convention. He would make an unsuccessful bid for Governor again in 1848. In 1854, became president of the State Agricultural Society and of the district fair association, originator the first State Fair in Missouri.
Read more about this topic: Meredith Miles Marmaduke
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The real grounds of difference upon important political questions no longer correspond with party lines.... Politics is no longer the topic of this country. Its important questions are settled... Great minds hereafter are to be employed on other matters.... Government no longer has its ancient importance.... The people’s progress, progress of every sort, no longer depends on government. But enough of politics. Henceforth I am out more than ever.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)