Page:Men of Mark in America vol 2.djvu/67

 JOHN BROOKS HENDERSON ENDERSON, JOHN BROOKS, district school teacher, lawyer, Democratic presidential elector-at-large, 1856 and 1860, brigadier-general of state militia, 1861, United States senator, 1862-69, author of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, chairman of the Republican national convention of 1882, was born in Pittsylvania county, Virginia, November 16, 1826. His father, James Henderson, married Jane Dawson and in 1832 removed to Lincoln county, Missouri. Both his parents died before he was ten years of age. He attended the district school and gained a fair knowledge of the branches taught in the higher schools with the aid of a tutor, working on a farm to pay for his education. He taught a district school and began the study of law which he prosecuted with great diligence. He was admitted to the bar in 1848 on passing a thorough examination before the judges of the Pike county circuit court. He removed to Louisiana, Missouri, in 1849 and began the practice of the law, and entered actively the political field as a Democrat. He was elected by his party a representative in the state legislature in 1849 and again in 1857 when he organized and advocated before the legislature the state railroad and banking laws which were adopted and became operative. He was one of the presidential electors-at-large from Missouri on the Buchanan and Breckenridge ticket in 1856. In 1860 he was a delegate from Missouri to the Democratic national convention that met at Charleston, South Carolina, and adjourned to Baltimore, Maryland. Before both conventions he advocated the nomination of Stephen A. Douglas for president, and the Missouri State committee placed him at the head of the Douglas and Johnson electoral ticket which ticket was elected and, with New Jersey cast the twelve electoral votes received by Douglas and Johnson. The Democrats of his congressional district made him their candidate for representative to the thirty-seventh Congress but he was defeated at the polls by James Sidney Rollins nominated as a Conservative Democrat. He was sent as a delegate to the state convention of 1861, and there