CIVIL WAR IOWA COLONEL CONGRESSMAN SENATOR IOWA PRES CAND 1888 AUTOGRAPH SIGNED!

Description

Here’s an Autograph of Civil War Colonel and Congressman
WILLIAM BOYD ALLISON
(1829 - 1908)
CIVIL WAR IOWA COLONEL ON THE STAFF OF IOWA GOVERNOR SAMUEL J. KIRKWOOD
UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR CONGRESSMAN FROM IOWA 1863-1871
US SENATOR FROM IOWA 1873-1908
-&-
LEADING CONTENDER FOR THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION IN
1888
.
In 1888 Allison was a Leading Contender for the Republican Presidential Nomination, but was defeated by President Benjamin Harrison!
During the Civil War, in 1864 Allison joined the Radical wing of the Republican Party in opposition to Lincoln's moderate plan for Reconstruction and was rewarded by being assigned to the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
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HERE'S ALLISON’S SIGNATURE MOUNTED TO A YELLOW ALBUM LEAF, SIGNED and DATED:
“I am yours truly
W. B. Allison~~,
Nov
.r
7, 1898.”
The piece measures 5 x 3” and is in VERY FINE CONDITION, save for a small section of light offset toning.
A FINE RELIC OF IOWA POLITICAL and CIVIL WAR MILITARY HISTORY.
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BIOGRAPHY OF THE HONORABLE WILLIAM BOYD ALLISON
Allison, William Boyd
(2 Mar. 1829-4 Aug. 1908), U.S. senator, was born near Ashland, Ohio, the son of John Allison and Margaret Williams, farmers. After one year at Allegheny College, he taught in a country school for two years, earning enough money to enter Western Reserve College in 1850. Again he left college after only a year's residence and returned home to read law. In 1852 he opened a law office in Ashland, where over the next four years he entered into three different partnerships, none of which was successful. In 1854 he married Anna Carter, the daughter of the most prosperous farmer in the county. They had no children.
One of the major determinants in Allison's decision to enter law was his interest in politics. Following the Mexican War, the two major parties were wracked by internal divisions over the question of the extension of slavery, and Allison, like many others, was seeking new answers to old issues. For a brief time he showed interest in the Native American Know Nothing party, but after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, he was one of the first in his county to join an alliance of Free Soil Democrats and Conscience Whigs in establishing the Republican party in Ohio. He went as a delegate in 1855 to the state's first Republican convention. The following year he received the party's nomination for county attorney, but Ashland remained an island of Democratic strength in a state rapidly converting to Republicanism. Allison's crushing defeat in no way dampened his enthusiasm for his new political allegiance. It only prompted him to seek a more hospitable environment.
In 1857 Allison headed west in search of a new political base. He considered settling in either Chicago or Galena but was persuaded by his older brother Matthew Allison to join him in Dubuque. Through his brother's influence, Allison was admitted as a partner in a firm whose two senior partners represented the extremes in the political spectrum. Benjamin Samuels was a Democrat, while Dennis Cooley was an abolitionist Republican. Shortly after Allison joined the firm, the partnership was dissolved. Allison remained with Samuels, who was personally more congenial and, being a Democrat, would not be his competitor for preeminence within the Republican party. Allison realized that the smallness of the Republican field in Dubuque gave him as a newcomer an opportunity for advancement.
Advance he did. In 1860 Allison was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Initially supporting Salmon P. Chase of Ohio for the nomination, he wisely joined the Lincoln bandwagon before the final tally. Allison campaigned vigorously in Iowa for both Abraham Lincoln and William Vandever, the Republican candidate for Congress in his district. Vandever was running against Allison's own partner Samuels, but this apparently did not effect the two partners' relationship.
In the midst of this political activity, Allison received news in the summer of 1860 that his wife had died. She had not joined him in Iowa, so except on his rare visits to Ohio, Allison lived as a bachelor. The loss of his wife apparently made little difference in Allison's lifestyle, for he was married to politics.
The flourishing law firm of Samuels and Allison further boosted Allison's political prominence. His most important case was that of Gelpke v. The City of Dubuque (1862). Herman Gelpke brought suit against Dubuque for its failure to pay interest on the railroad bonds issued to promote the building of the Dubuque Pacific Railroad. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city on the grounds that the legislature had no authority under the Iowa constitution to delegate its power of taxation to a municipality, and consequently, the bondholders had no valid claim on the city. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, reversed that judgment. Accepting Allison's arguments, it declared that a state supreme court's interpretation of its own constitution may be subject to a higher authority and, moreover, that the impairment of contract clause could be used against state judicial as well as state legislative action. Allison's victory on behalf of the supremacy of federal constitutional law endeared him to the railroads, and he was now firmly ensconced in their camp. Since the railroads would be the most powerful force in Iowa politics for the next forty years, his political future was assured.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Allison was appointed military aide to Governor Samuel Kirkwood with the rank of lieutenant colonel, giving him a claim to service in the Union cause, which was a sine qua non for political preferment in Iowa. Following the census of 1860, the state's representation was increased from two to six in the House of Representatives, and Allison declared his candidacy to represent his newly reorganized district. After a fierce convention fight, he received the Republican nomination and won an easy victory.
Early in his congressional career, Allison made evident his commitment to the railroad interests of his state by introducing a bill providing federal land grants for the construction of two new railroads in Iowa. He thus gave further evidence that he was precisely the man that the state Republican powers, headed by railroad builder Grenville Dodge, wanted. In return Allison asked only that he be continued in office, and he was.
No political figure was ever less of an ideologue. His political philosophy was best summarized by a statement made to a friend, "I always like to vote if I can, so as to not be called upon to explain too much at home." Even when the dictates of the Dodge machine forced him to take a stand on the controversial issues of the day--protective tariff, railroad subsidies, or sound currency--Allison was remarkably successful in remaining friendly with the opposition and finding an acceptable compromise whenever necessary. His critics often joked that Allison was the only man who could walk on piano keys from Washington to Iowa and never once strike a note.
Early in 1864 Allison joined the Radical wing of the Republican party in opposition to Lincoln's moderate plan for Reconstruction and was rewarded by being assigned to the powerful Ways and Means Committee. There he found his proper niche and in time emerged as the expert in the fields of transportation, tariff, and finance. Although Allison had from the first attached himself to the powerful Iowa senator, James W. Grimes, he occasionally differed with his mentor on specific issues. He lived with the Grimes family in Washington, D.C., and not even the bitter fight over the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson disrupted that friendship. Allison voted with the Republican majority in the House for impeachment, but unlike the other Iowa congressmen, he never raised his voice in criticism when Grimes cast the deciding vote against the conviction of the president in the Senate.
In 1870 Allison, with Grimes's blessing, became a candidate to succeed his good friend in the Senate, but his close ties with the man who had become a pariah in Iowa doomed his bid. Out of office, Allison at once began his campaign to replace Senator James Harlan (1820-1899) in 1872. Harlan, seeking his fourth term, was a formidable opponent, but Allison had the support of the railroad magnates. After one of the nastiest campaigns in Iowa history, Allison received the Republican nomination, which was tantamount to election. For the next thirty-five years, Allison was the political boss of his state. The term "boss," however, did not suit Allison's personality or his method of operating. He preferred the more benign appellation "regency," which included such powerful railroad executives as Dodge of the Union Pacific, Charles E. Perkins and Joseph Blythe of the Burlington, and Nathaniel Hubbard of the Chicago Northwestern. There was never any question, however, as to who headed this coalition of political power.
In the Senate Allison won a place on the Committee on Appropriations and later also on the Committee on Finance. From these vantage points he influenced the direction of the major domestic legislation of the day. Considering his long tenure, Allison's name appeared on few acts, the most notable being the Bland-Allison Silver Purchase Act of 1878, a masterpiece of compromise. Allison always preferred working the cloakrooms rather than shining in the limelight of the Senate floor.
Even after Grimes's death in 1872, Allison remained a member of the Grimes household in Washington. In 1873 he married Mary Neally, Grimes's wife Elizabeth's niece and the adopted daughter of the late senator. She was twenty years younger than Allison and generally regarded as one of the most beautiful and gracious women in the nation's capital, but this second marriage proved to be even more unfortunate than Allison's first. Mary Allison soon suffered a serious mental depression, necessitating constant nursing care. On 13 August 1883 she drowned herself in the Mississippi River. They had no children.
In 1888 Allison was a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. He was very nearly successful, but after losing the New York delegation's vote, Allison was defeated by Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901). Allison made another bid for the nomination in 1896, but again a rival candidate, William McKinley, won the prize. Allison was offered cabinet positions by Presidents James A. Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley, but he refused all offers. If he couldn't have the White House, he preferred the Senate.
In the 1890s Allison was at the apogee of his senatorial power. He, Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, John Spooner of Wisconsin, and Orville Platt of Connecticut comprised the Big Four of the Senate and largely determined congressional policy. Within this elite coterie, Aldrich was recognized as "the manager," Allison as "the conciliator and adjuster." Over the years Allison had ample opportunity to demonstrate his talents as repeatedly the majority party split: the Radicals and the Liberals in the 1860s and 1870s, the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds in the 1880s, the Silverites and the Goldbugs in the 1890s, and finally the Conservatives and the Progressives at the turn of the century. Although always belonging to the conservative business interests, Allison repeatedly found ways to adjust differences over silver and tariff policies and, in his last term in the Senate, over Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to regulate railroads, which resulted in the Hepburn Act of 1906.
In 1907 Allison was in such poor health that the Progressive governor of Iowa, A. B. Cummins, challenged him for the Republican senatorial nomination. In the first primary ever held in Iowa, Allison turned back Cummins's bid. It was Allison's last hurrah. Two months after the primary, he died at his home in Dubuque. Although generally believed to be as wealthy as many of his millionaire colleagues in the Senate, Allison left only a modest estate. [Source: American National Biography]
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