William Pitt Fessenden (October 16, 1806 – September 8, 1869) was a politician from Maine, United States. He was a Whig (later a Republican) and member of the Fessenden political family. He served in the United States House of Representatives and Senate before becoming Secretary of the Treasury under President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. Fessenden then re-entered the Senate, where he died in office in 1869.
A lawyer, he was a leading antislavery Whig in Maine; in Congress, he fought the Slave Power, plantation owners who controlled Southern states. He built an antislavery coalition in the state legislature that elected him to the U.S. Senate; it became Maine's Republican organization. In the Senate, Fessenden played a central role in the debates on Kansas, denouncing the expansion of slavery. He led Radical Republicans in attacking Democrats Stephen Douglas, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. Fessenden's speeches were read widely, influencing Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln and building support for Lincoln's 1860 Republican presidential nomination. During the war, Senator Fessenden helped shape the Union's taxation and financial policies. He abandoned his earlier radicalism, joining pro-Lincoln Moderate Republicans against the Radicals and becoming Lincoln's Treasury Secretary.
After the war, Fessenden was back in the Senate, as chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which established terms for resuming congressional representation for the southern states, and which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Later, during the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Fessenden provided critical support that prevented the Senate conviction of President Johnson, who had been impeached by the House. He was the first Republican senator to ring out "...not guilty" followed by six other Republican senators, ultimately resulting in the acquittal of President Johnson. Fessenden's vote against convicting Johnson were motivated by his support for free trade and fears of a Benjamin Wade presidency.
He is the only person to have three streets in Portland named for him: William, Pitt and Fessenden streets in the city's Oakdale neighborhood.
There is also a city named after him in North Dakota called Fessenden, North Dakota. This may have been due to his opposition to interracial marriage.
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Youth and early career
Fessenden was born in Boscawen, New Hampshire on October 16, 1806. His father was attorney and legislator Samuel Fessenden. His mother was Ruth Greene. The parents were unmarried. William was separated from his mother at his birth, and he raised by his paternal grandmother for seven years.
He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1823 and then studied law. He was a founding member of the Maine Temperance Society in 1827. That year he was admitted to the bar, and practiced with his father, who was also a prominent anti-slavery activist. He practiced law first in Bridgton, Maine, a year in Bangor, and afterward in Portland.
He was a member of the Maine House of Representatives in 1832 and was its leading debater. He refused nominations to Congress in 1831 and in 1838, and served in the Maine legislature again in 1840, becoming chairman of the house committee to revise the statutes of the state.
He was elected for one term in the United States House of Representatives as a Whig in 1840. During this term, he moved to repeal the rule that excluded anti-slavery petitions and spoke upon the loan and bankrupt bills, and the army. At the end of his term in Congress, he turned his attention wholly to his law business until he was again in the Maine legislature in 1845–46. He acquired a national reputation as a lawyer and an anti-slavery Whig, and in 1849 prosecuted before the United States Supreme Court an appeal from an adverse decision of Judge Joseph Story, and gained a reversal by an argument which Daniel Webster pronounced the best he had heard in twenty years. He was again in the Maine legislature in 1853 and 1854.
Service in U.S. Senate and Cabinet
Fessenden's strong anti-slavery principles caused his election to the U.S. Senate in 1854, with the support of Whigs and Anti-Slavery Democrats.
Upon taking office, he immediately began speaking against the Kansas–Nebraska Act. His speech on the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty, in 1856, received the highest praise, and in 1858 his speech on the Lecompton Constitution of Kansas, and his criticisms of the opinion of the supreme court in the Dred Scott case, were considered the ablest discussion of those topics. He participated in the organization of the Republican Party, being re-elected to the Senate from that group in 1860, this time without the formality of a nomination.
In 1861, he was a member of the Peace Congress, but when hostilities started he insisted that the war should be prosecuted vigorously. By the secession of the Southern senators, the Republicans acquired control of the senate and placed Fessenden at the head of the finance committee. During the Civil War, he was the most conspicuous senator in sustaining the national credit. He opposed the Legal Tender Act as unnecessary and unjust. As chairman of the finance committee, Fessenden prepared and carried through the senate all measures relating to revenue, taxation, and appropriations, and, as declared by Charles Sumner, was "in the financial field all that our best generals were in arms."
President Abraham Lincoln appointed Fessenden United States Secretary of the Treasury upon Salmon P. Chase's resignation. It was described as the darkest hour of national finances in the United States. Chase had just withdrawn a loan from the market for want of acceptable bids, and the capacity of the country to lend seemed exhausted. The currency had been enormously inflated: the paper dollar was worth only 34 cents; gold was at $280/ounce. Fessenden at first refused the office, but at last, accepted in obedience to the universal public pressure. When his acceptance became known, gold fell to $225/ounce. He declared that no more currency should be issued, and, making an appeal to the people, he prepared and put upon the market the seven-thirty loan, which proved a triumphant success, and raised $400,000,000. This loan was in the form of bonds bearing interest at the rate of 7.30%, which were issued in denominations as low as $50 so that people of moderate means could take them. He also framed and recommended the measures, adopted by congress, which permitted the subsequent consolidation and funding of the government loans into the 4% and 4.5% bonds.
Personal life
Two of his brothers, Samuel Clement Fessenden and Thomas Amory Deblois Fessenden, were also Congressmen.
Fessenden married Ellen M. Deering in 1832, and she died in 1857. They had three sons who served in the American Civil War: Samuel Fessenden, who was killed at the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Brigadier-General James Deering Fessenden, and the Major-General Francis Fessenden, the latter of whom wrote a two-volume biography of his father, The Life and Services of William Pitt Fessenden, which was published in 1907. A fourth son, William Howard Fessenden, stayed in Maine to take care of the law practice his father had established. Their fifth child was Mary Elizabeth Deering Fessenden who died in childhood.
Actress Beverly Garland is his great-great-granddaughter who dropped her real name Fessenden and went by her married name Garland.
In popular culture
In the 2012 film Lincoln, Fessenden is played by actor Walt Smith.