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Rh Canning Company and a director in various local railroads, the Utica City National Bank and the Troy Public Works. He was the Republican candidate for mayor of Utica in 1884 and was elected in March of that year by a substantial majority although the city had for years been carried by the Democrats. He was a delegate to the Republican national convention of 1892 and chairman of the state Republican conventions of 1895 and 1900. He was elected Republican representative from the twenty-third congressional district of New York to the fiftieth Congress in November, 1886 by a plurality of one thousand four hundred and ninety-four votes, and he took his seat December, 1887, and served on the committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice and on that on the eleventh Census. He was reelected to the fifty-first Congress in November, 1888, by a plurality of one thousand seven hundred and thirty-one votes and on the assembling of that congress he was made chairman of the committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice and a member of the committee on the Judiciary. He was defeated for the fifty-second Congress in the twenty-fifth district in November, 1890, by Henry W. Bentley, Democrat, who received five hundred and sixteen plurality. He was, however, reelected from that district to the fifty-third Congress over Representative Bentley by a plurality of eight hundred and forty-six votes; and was made a member of the committee on Indian Affairs and Reform in the Civil Service. He was reelected to the fifty-fourth, fifty-fifth and the fifty-sixth Congresses and in the fifty-fourth Congress he was made chairman of the committee on Indian Affairs and a member of the committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce and of the joint committee on the Washington Centennial. Reelected to the fifty-seventh Congress, in addition to the standing committees on which he had served in the fifty-sixth, he was made a member of the special committee on Industrial Arts and Expositions. He was reelected to the fifty-eighth Congress in 1902, and served on the same committees. He became a member and served as president and governor of various fraternities, societies and clubs including the Sigma Phi, Royal Arcanum, Elks, University and Republican of New York and the Fort Schuyler, Yahurdasis and Sadaquad of Utica, New York. As a member of the Presbyterian church he has been interested in all the movements of that denomination toward the spread of the gospel and the amelioration of the condition of mankind.