Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IX.djvu/856

 836 KING curing our seamen against impressment, he re- newed his request to be relieved ; and accord- ingly a successor was appointed, and Mr. King returned to his country in 1804, and withdrew to a farm at Jamaica, L. I. In 1813, during the war with Great Britain, he took his seat for the third time as United States senator. Yield- ing no blind support to the administration, and offering to it no partisan opposition, he yet was ever ready to strengthen its hands against the common enemy. When the capitol at Washington was burned by the British forces, he resisted the proposal to remove the seat of government to the interior, and rallied the na- tion to defend the country and avenge the out- rage. His speech on this occasion in the senate was one of those that marked him as a great orator. At the close of the war he applied himself to maturing the policy which should efface its evils as speedily as possible, and build up permanent prosperity. To a bill, however, for a United States bank with a capital of $50,000,000, he made earnest opposition. He resisted the claim of Great Britain to exclude us from the commerce of the West India islands ; and to his intelligent exposition of the laws of navigation and of the mercantile interests and rights of the United States we are indebted for the law of 1818. He likewise early discerned the danger of the sales on credit of the public lands, and by his bill substituting cash payments and a fixed but reduced price for these lands, and stipulating a remission of interest and of a portion of the principal of the debt then due therefor, he averted a great political peril, and gave order and security to the receipts from the sale of those lands. In 1819 he was reflected to the senate, as in the previous instance by a legislature of adverse politics to his own. In 1816 he had been, without his knowledge, named as the candi- date of the federal party for governor of New York. He reluctantly accepted the nomina- tion, but was not elected. Shortly afterward the so-called Missouri question began to agitate the nation. Mr. King was pledged against the extension of slavery ; and when therefore Missouri presented herself for admission as a state with a constitution authorizing the hold- ing of slaves, he was inexorably opposed to it. The state of New York, by an almost unanimous vote of its legislature, instructed him to resist the admission of Missouri as a slave state; and the argument made by Mr. King in the senate, though but partially reported, has been the repertory for almost all subsequent arguments against the extension of slavery. He also opposed the compromise in- troduced by Mr. Clay, which partially yielded the principle, and voted to the last against it. His fourth term in the senate expired in March, 1825, when he took leave of that body, and as he hoped of public life, in which for 40 years he had been engaged. One of his latest acts was to present a resolution, Feb. 16, 1825 : "That as soon as the portion of the existing funded debt of the United States for the pay- ment of which the public land of the United States is pledged shall have been paid off, then and thenceforth the whole of the public land of the United States, with the net proceeds of all future sales thereof, shall constitute and form a fund which is hereby appropriated, and the faith of the United States is pledged that the said fund shall be inviolably applied, to aid the emancipation of such slaves within any of the United States, and to aid the removal of such slaves and the removal of such free persons of color in any of the said states, as by the laws of the states respec- tively may be allowed to be emancipated or removed to any territory or country without the limits of the United States of America." The resolution was read, and, on motion of Mr. Benton of Missouri, ordered to be printed. John Q. Adams, now become president, urged Mr. King to accept the embassy to England, with which country unadjusted questions of moment were pending, and which the president believed Mr. King was specially qualified to manage. He reluctantly accepted the mission ; but his health gave way, and after a few months spent in England, where he was warmly wel- comed, he resigned and came home. His son JOHN ALSOP, born in New York, Jan. 3, 1788, was several times elected to the state legisla- ture, was a member of congress in 1849-'51, and governor of the state in 1857-'9. He was for many years president of the state agricul- tural society, and died in Jamaica, Long Island, July 8, 1867. His second son, CHARLES, born in March, 1789, was for some time a merchant, member of the legislature in 1813, from 1823 to 1845 editor of the "New York American," afterward associate editor of the " Courier and Enquirer," and from 1849 to 1864 president of Columbia college. He died in Frascati, Italy, Sept. 27, 1867. He was the author of a " Me- moir of the Croton Aqueduct" (1843), "His- tory of the New York Chamber of Commerce," "New York Fifty Years Ago," and other his- torical pamphlets. KING, Thomas Starr, an American clergyman, born in New York, Dec. 16, 1824, died in San Francisco, March 4, 1864. He was preparing to enter Harvard college when the sudden death of his father left the family in a measure de- pendent upon him, and from the age of 12 to 20 he was employed either as a clerk or school- master, devoting his leisure hours to theologi- cal studies. In September, 1845, he preached for the first time in the town of Woburn, and in 1846 he was settled over his father's former parish in Charlestown, whence he was called in 1848 to the Unitarian church in Hollis street, Boston, with which he remained connected until the early part of 1860. In April of the latter year he sailed for San Francisco, to take charge of the Unitarian congregation in that city. Apart from his labors in the pulpit, he acquired an extended reputation as a lecturer, and for 15 years addressed large audiences every