Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/United States/Benton, Thomas Hart

Benton, Thomas Hart (1782-1858), was born near Hillsborough, N.C., March 14, 1782. Removing to Tennessee in 1799, he studied law, was admitted to the bar, and entered the life of a frontier lawyer and politician. Andrew Jackson, then the leading figure of Nashville, made him his aide-de-camp, and obtained for him the command of a Tennessee regiment. Quarrels and a street-fight in 1813, in which Jackson was nearly killed, made Tennessee an unpleasant residence for Benton, and, after two years of service as lieutenant-colonel of a United States regiment, he settled in St Louis, Mo. From 1821 to 1851 he served as United States senator from Missouri. During all this period he was one of the most prominent members of the senate. He became a recognized leader of the Democratic party, and on the entrance of Jackson into national politics, he became one of his warmest supporters. Benton's knowledge of Spanish land-law made him an authority on all subjects into which that question entered; and his sympathy with the feelings of the Western settlers made him their mouth-piece on all such matters as the proposed annexation of Oregon. His pronounced aversion to all forms of paper currency procured him the popular name “Old Bullion,” in which he took great satisfaction. Benton was always a pronounced Union man, and, when the slavery struggle had gone far enough to make the thought of disunion a political possibility, his supremacy in Missouri was over. He was defeated, after forty ballots, in the attempt to return to the senate for a new term in 1851. He served in the house of representatives, 1853-55, but was defeated in the next election as well as in the election for governor in 1856. He died at Washington, April 10, 1858. He has left two works of political value, Thirty Years in the United States Senate (2 vols.), and a most useful Abridgment of the Debates in Congress from 1789 until 1850 (16 vols.).—See Roosevelt's Life of Benton, in the American Statesmen Series.