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History and Government—Congressional Biographies—MassachusettsGeorge Sewel BOUTWELL
(1818-1905)
Senate Years of Service:
1873-1877Party: RepublicanBOUTWELL, George Sewel, a
Representative and a Senator from Massachusetts; born in Brookline,
Mass., January 28, 1818; attended the public schools; taught school
in Shirley, Mass.; engaged in mercantile pursuits in Groton, Mass.,
1841; appointed postmaster of Groton 1841; studied law; member,
State house of representatives 1842-1844, 1847-1850; unsuccessful
Democratic candidate for election to both Congress and the
governorship on several occasions between 1844 and 1850; State bank
commissioner 1849-1851; Governor of Massachusetts 1851-1852; member
of the State constitutional convention in 1853; secretary of the
State board of education 1855-1861; member of the board of
overseers of Harvard University 1850-1860; member of the peace
convention of 1861 held in Washington, D.C., in an effort to devise
means to prevent the impending war; served on the military
commission under the War Department in 1862; first Commissioner of
Internal Revenue in 1862 and 1863; elected as a Republican to the
Thirty-eighth and to the three succeeding Congresses and served
from March 4, 1863, to March 12, 1869, when he resigned; one of the
managers appointed by the House of Representatives in 1868 to
conduct the impeachment proceedings against President Andrew
Johnson; appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Ulysses
Grant 1869-1873, when he resigned; elected as a Republican to the
United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation
of Henry Wilson and served from March 17, 1873, until March 3,
1877; chairman, Committee on the Revision of the Laws of the United
States (Forty-fourth Congress); appointed by President Rutherford
Hayes as commissioner to codify and edit the Statutes at Large in
1877; United States counsel before the French and American Claims
Commission 1880; declined appointment as Secretary of the Treasury
in 1884; practiced law in Washington, D.C.; counsel for Haiti in
1885, for Hawaii in 1886, and for Chile in 1893 and 1894; president
of the Anti-Imperialist League 1898-1905; died in Groton, Middlesex
County, Mass., February 27, 1905; interment in Groton Cemetery.
Bibliography
American National Biography; Dictionary of American
Biography; Boutwell, George S. Reminiscences of Sixty Years
in Public Affairs. 1902. Reprint. New York: Greenwood Press,
1968; Brown, Thomas M. George Sewall Boutwell, Human Rights
Advocate. Groton, MA: Groton Historical Society, 1989.
Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present
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