John Breckinridge
American politician
Died when: 46 years 12 days (552 months)Star Sign: Sagittarius
John Breckinridge (December 2, 1760 – December 14, 1806) was a lawyer, slave-owning planter, soldier, and politician in the U.S. states of Virginia and Kentucky.
He served several terms each in the state legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky before legislators elected him to the U.S.
Senate.He also served as United States Attorney General during the second term of President Thomas Jefferson.He is the progenitor of Kentucky's Breckinridge political family and the namesake of Breckinridge County, Kentucky.
Breckinridge's father was landowner and colonel in the local Virginia militia who married into the Preston political family.Breckinridge attended the William and Mary College intermittently between 1780 and 1784; his attendance was interrupted by the Revolutionary War and he three times won election to the Virginia House of Delegates.
One of the youngest members of that (part-time) body, this allowed him to meet many prominent politicians.In 1785, he married "Polly" Cabell, a member of the Cabell political family.
Despite making his legal and farming activities, letters from relatives in Kentucky convinced him to move to the western frontier.
He established "Cabell's Dale", his plantation, near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1793.Breckinridge continued his legal and political career and was appointed as the state's attorney general soon after arriving.
In November 1797, he resigned to campaign, then won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives.As a legislator, Breckinridge secured passage of a more humane criminal code that abolished the death penalty for all offenses except first-degree murder.
On a 1798 trip back to Virginia, an intermediary gave him Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions, which denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts.
At Jefferson's request, Breckinridge assumed credit for the modified resolutions he shepherded through the Kentucky General Assembly;Jefferson's authorship was not discovered until after Breckinridge's death.
Although Breckinridge opposed calling a constitutional convention for the new state in 1799 he was elected as a delegate.Due to his influence, the state's government remained comparatively aristocratic, maintaining protections for slavery and limiting the power of the electorate.
Called the father of the resultant constitution, he emerged from the convention as the acknowledged leader of the state's Democratic-Republican Party and fellow delegates elected him Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1799 and 1800.
Elected to the U.S.Senate in 1800, Breckinridge functioned as Jefferson's floor leader, guiding administration bills through the chamber that was narrowly controlled by his party.
Residents of the western frontier called for his nomination as vice president in 1804, but Jefferson appointed him as U.S.
Attorney General in 1805 instead.He was the first cabinet-level official from the West but had little impact before his death from tuberculosis on December 14, 1806, at the age of 46.
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