John C. Breckinridge: Youngest Vice President to Expelled Senator in Exile

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

John C. Breckinridge was born in Kentucky in 1821, grandson of Thomas Jefferson's attorney general, who introduced the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and the theory of nullification. His father died when he was a toddler, and after law school he left a crowded Lexington bar for Burlington in the Iowa Territory in 1841. A bout of influenza on a visit home in 1843 kept him in Kentucky, where he met and married Mary Cyrene Burch. As a Democrat he won a House seat in Henry Clay's Ashland district in 1851 and in 1853 defeated Robert Letcher, who had never lost in 14 elections. He enslaved people yet represented free Black clients and supported colonization, while backing the Dred Scott decision.

In 1854 a dispute with New York congressman Francis Cutting nearly became a duel. In 1856 the Democrats made him James Buchanan's running mate, and at 36 he became the youngest vice president, though Buchanan shut him out. In 1860 the Southern Democrats nominated him in a four-way race won by Abraham Lincoln. He backed the Crittenden Compromise, fled behind Confederate lines in late 1861, and was expelled from the Senate 36 to 0. He fought at Shiloh, Baton Rouge and New Market, became Confederate Secretary of War in February 1865, urged surrender and saved the archives, then escaped through Florida to the Bahamas and lived in exile until an 1869 amnesty. He died in 1875 at 54.

• The duel stalled because Breckinridge chose rifles at 60 paces while Cutting insisted on pistols at 10, and friends brokered peace.
• Asking at the White House to see Miss Lane, Buchanan's niece and hostess, was the code for reaching the president.
• He told constituents he was exchanging his six-year Senate term for the musket of a soldier.
• In Florida he sent his teenage son Cabell, suffering from mosquito allergies, to surrender to Union troops.
• Calling himself an extinct volcano, he declined Grant's overtures, denounced the Ku Klux Klan and backed Black testimony in Kentucky courts.