Stevenson, Adlai Ewing
STEVENSON, ADLAI EWING (1835- ), American political leader, was born in Christian county, Kentucky, on the 23rd of October 1835. He removed with his family to Bloomington, Illinois, in 1852; was educated at the Illinois Wesleyan University at Bloomington and at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky; and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1857. He was master in chancery for Woodford county, Illinois, in 1860-1864, and district-attorney for the twenty-third judicial district of that state from 1865 to 1869, when he removed to Bloomington. He was a Democratic representative in Congress from Illinois in 1875-1877 and again in 1879-1881; was first assistant postmaster-general in 1885-1889, and was severely criticized for his wholesale removal of Republican postmasters. He was a delegate to the national Democratic conventions in 1884 and 1892, and in the latter year was elected vice-president of the United States on the ticket with Cleveland, serving from 1893 to 1897. In 1897 he was a member of the commission (Senator Edward O. Wolcott and General Charles J. Paine being the other members) appointed by President McKinley to confer with the governments of Great Britain, France and Germany with a view to the establishment of international bimetallism. He 1 In accordance with his own wish he was buried in a small graveyard rather than in one of the regular city cemeteries, and on his tombstone is the following epitaph written by himself: " I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but, finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this, that I might illustrate in my death the principles I advocated through a long life-^ Equality of man before his Creator." He bequeathed a part of his estate to found a home for white and negro orphans the present Thaddeus Stevens industrial school at Lancaster.
was again Democratic nominee for vice-president in 1900, but was defeated. He published Something of Men I have Known; With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical and Retrospective (1909).
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
