Walter Leak Steele (18 April 1823 - 16 October 1891) was a U.S. Congressman from North Carolina between 1877 and 1881.
Born near Rockingham in Richmond County, North Carolina, Steele attended common schools near his home and then Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, Wake Forest College, and finally the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1844.
Steele was elected to two-years terms in the North Carolina House of Commons in 1846, 1848, 1850, and 1854; he rose to the North Carolina Senate, serving there between 1852 and 1858, and in 1852, he was named as a trustee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a post he held until his death.
A delegate to the 1860 Democratic National Conventions in Charleston and Baltimore, Steele chaired the 1861 state convention which passed the ordinance of secession at the beginning of the American Civil War. Steele studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1865 and practiced law in his hometown of Rockingham.
Steele was elected to the 45th and 46th U.S. Congress, serving from March 4, 1877 to March 3, 1881. He declined to run again in 1880 and returned to cotton manufacturing and banking.
Walter L. Steele died in Baltimore, Maryland in 1891 and is buried in Leak Cemetery near Rockingham, North Carolina.
Famous quotes containing the words walter, leak and/or steele:
“TV has changed!”
—Roger Spottiswoode, U.S. screenwriter, Walter Hill, and Larry Gross. Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy)
“The office ... make[s] its incumbent a repair man behind a dyke. No sooner is one leak plugged than it is necessary to dash over and stop another that has broken out. There is no end to it.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“When a Man is in a serious Mood, and ponders upon his own Make, with a Retrospect to the Actions of his Life, and the many fatal Miscarriages in it, which he owes to ungoverned Passions, he is then apt to say to himself, That Experience has guarded him against such Errors for the future: But Nature often recurs in Spite of his best Resolutions, and it is to the very End of our Days a Struggle between our Reason and our Temper, which shall have the Empire over us.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)