Charles A. Wickliffe

In 1823, Wickliffe was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served five consecutive terms.[6] Again he succeeded his cousin and friend, Ben Hardin.[13] Though a Whig, he disagreed with many of the positions of the party's founder, Henry Clay.[1] When no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes in the 1824 presidential election, the constitution mandated that the election be decided in the House.[10] Wickliffe bucked Clay's advice to vote for him and instead voted for Andrew Jackson, who was the choice of the Kentucky legislature.[10]

Historian Robert Powell opined that Wickliffe's break from party loyalty may explain his lack of committee appointments in his early years in the House.[2] Beginning in 1829, however, he chaired the Committee on Public Lands.[2] In this capacity, he attacked Clay's plan to distribute surplus revenue among the states as being unfair to younger states.[10] He also differed with Clay over Clay's willingness to limit slavery.[10] He wrote Clay concerning his slowness to respond to the problem of fugitive slaves; Clay never responded.[10] Neither was Wickliffe loyal to the Jacksonian platform, however. In a letter to his brother, he lamented Jackson's attacks on the Second Bank of the United States.[10] He publicly encouraged Kentuckians to strengthen the Whigs, despite his disagreements with Clay.[10]

In 1830, Wickliffe was chosen by his colleagues as one of the managers of the impeachment trial proceedings against Missouri District Court judge James H. Peck.[6] In 1831, he was one of several candidates proposed by the Kentucky General Assembly to succeed John Rowan in the U.S. Senate.[14] Of the sixty-nine votes needed to be elected to the seat, Wickliffe received forty-nine.[14] Other candidates included John J. Crittenden (sixty-eight votes), John Breathitt (sixty-six votes), and Richard Mentor Johnson (sixty-four votes).[14] After three days of balloting, the Assembly was still unable to fill the seat, and it was allowed to remain vacant until the next session.[14] Wickliffe did not seek re-election to his seat in the House in 1833.[6]

Wickliffe returned to the state legislature from 1833 to 1835.[6] In 1834, he defeated Daniel Breck and John L. Helm to become Speaker of the House.[15] He was elected lieutenant governor of Kentucky in 1836, defeating Democrat Elijah Hise by a margin of just over 1,300 votes.[15] Upon the death of Governor James Clark on October 5, 1839, he became acting governor and served the remaining nine months of Clark's term.[6]

As governor, Wickliffe's primary concern was the Panic of 1837.[1] He advocated raising property taxes to offset spending deficits that had climbed to $42,000 by 1839, but the legislature borrowed money to meet the current expenses instead.[1] Wickliffe maintained the state's credit by paying the interest due on state securities.[1] The only areas where he called for more spending were improvements in river navigation, preservation of state archives, and public education.[1] Aside from these concerns, he was inundated with requests for clemency.[1]

Wickliffe campaigned on behalf of the Whig ticket of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler in the presidential election of 1840.[16] Wickliffe and Tyler were friends, having shared a room when they were both in Congress.[16] When Harrison's death elevated Tyler to the office of president, Tyler appointed Wicklilffe as Postmaster General, a choice that angered Clay supporters in the party.[16] Wickliffe served in Tyler's administration until March 1845.[6]

On August 1, 1844, Wickliffe and two of his daughters boarded the steamship Georgia traveling from Old Point Comfort in Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland.[17] While en route, he was stabbed in the chest by a man wielding a claspknife.[8] The knife bounced off Wickliffe's breastbone without damaging any major internal organs, and a U.S. Navy officer prevented a second blow from hitting Wickliffe.[17] Wickliffe's attacker, J. McLean Gardner, was disarmed and arrested.[17] Later that night, he wrote Wickliffe a letter of apology.[17] Wickliffe was not seriously injured, and returned home three days after the attack.[17] Gardner was tried and found to be insane; he was later sent to an asylum.[8]

Wickliffe supported the annexation of Texas, an issue that helped seal Clay's defeat in the 1844 presidential canvass.[18] In 1845, President James K. Polk sent Wickliffe as an envoy on a secret mission to the Republic of Texas.[19] Originally, his purpose was to quash British and French attempts to forestall the U.S. annexation of Texas, but he later joined Commodore Robert F. Stockton in lobbying leaders of the Republic of Texas to order their military forces across the Rio Grande into Mexico.[20] Stockton and Wickliffe believed that if they could provoke a Texan invasion of Mexico, the United States would have a stronger case for annexing Texas.[20] Ultimately, they failed in convincing the Texans to invade, but succeeded in drumming up support for annexation.[20] Both Wickliffe's position on annexation and his willingness to carry out Polk's assignment further distanced him from the Whigs.[1]

Burial site in Bardstown, Kentucky

On February 18, 1841, the Kentucky General Assembly elected James Turner Morehead to the U.S. Senate; Wickliffe received twenty votes in this contest.[21] In 1849, he was chosen as a delegate to the state constitutional convention, despite having opposed the calling of such a convention a decade earlier.[6][21] Wickliffe's political opponents, including Thomas F. Marshall, claimed this showed Wickliffe's political inconsistency, a charge that Wickliffe denied.[21] The following year, Wickliffe was appointed to a committee charged with revising the state's code of laws.[2] On January 8, 1861, he chaired the state Democratic convention in Louisville.[22]

Wickliffe was elected to another term in Congress, serving from 1861 to 1863 as a Union Whig.[6] He opposed the idea of secession, and was a member of both the 1861 Peace Conference and the Border States Convention that attempted to stave off the Civil War.[2] In April 1861, he attended a secret meeting at the Capitol Hotel in Frankfort where participants planned to arm Union supporters in key areas of the state.[23] On May 18, President Lincoln supplied rifles – nicknamed "Lincoln guns" – for the venture.[24] After Braxton Bragg's forces destroyed the railroad trestles near Bardstown, Wickliffe personally hired Joseph Z. Aud to carry the area's mail by private carriage.[25] The trestles were rebuilt in February 1863, precluding the need for Aud's service.[25]

Near the end of his term in Congress, Wickliffe was thrown from a carriage and permanently crippled.[2] Despite his injury, he remained politically active. In 1863, he ran for governor as a Peace Democrat on an anti-Lincoln platform.[4] Military authorities considered him subversive, however, and interfered with the election; Wickliffe lost to Thomas E. Bramlette in a landslide.[1][22]

Wickliffe served as a delegate to the 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, casting his vote for George B. McClellan.[22] In the final years of his life, he became totally blind.[3] While visiting his daughter near Ilchester, Maryland, he fell gravely ill and died on October 31, 1869.[18] He was buried in Bardstown Cemetery in Bardstown.[6] During World War I, a U.S. naval ship was named in Wickliffe's honor.[26]

• Allen, William B. (1872). A History of Kentucky: Embracing Gleanings, Reminiscences, Antiquities, Natural Curiosities, Statistics, and Biographical Sketches of Pioneers, Soldiers, Jurists, Lawyers, Statesmen, Divines, Mechanics, Farmers, Merchants, and Other Leading Men, of All Occupations and Pursuits. Bradley & Gilbert. Retrieved November 10, 2008.
• Bullock, Jason (1998). The United States and Mexico at War. Macmillan Reference USA.
• United States Congress. "Charles A. Wickliffe (id: W000442)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Encyclopedia of Kentucky. New York, New York: Somerset Publishers. 1987. ISBN 0-403-09981-1.
• "Kentucky Governor Charles Anderson Wickliffe". National Governors Association. Archived from the original on October 20, 2009. Retrieved December 16, 2008.
• Harrison, Lowell H. (1992). Kleber, John E. (ed.). The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Associate editors: Thomas D. Clark, Lowell H. Harrison, and James C. Klotter. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-1772-0.
• Heck, Frank H. (2004). Lowell H. Harrison (ed.). Kentucky's Governors. The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2326-7.
• Hibbs, Dixie (2002). Bardstown: Hospitality, History and Bourbon. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 0-7385-2391-7. Retrieved February 1, 2009.
• Little, Lucius P. (1887). Ben Hardin: His Times and Contemporaries, with Selections from His Speeches. Courier-journal job printing company. Retrieved February 1, 2009.
• "The Postmaster General". Niles' National Register. Ayer Publishing. 64 (23). August 5, 1844. ISBN 0-8337-2546-7. Retrieved May 25, 2009.
• Powell, Robert A. (1976). Kentucky Governors. Danville, Kentucky: Bluegrass Printing Company. ASIN B0006CPOVM. OCLC 2690774.
• Trowbridge, John M. "Kentucky's Military Governors". Kentucky National Guard History e-Museum. Kentucky National Guard. Archived from the original on March 6, 2012. Retrieved April 23, 2010.