David Rice Atchison


David Rice Atchison was a mid-19th century Democratic United States Senator from Missouri. He served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate for six years. Atchison served as a major general in the Missouri State Militia in 1838 during Missouri's Mormon War and as a Confederate brigadier general during the American Civil War under Major General Sterling Price in the Missouri Home Guard. He is best known for the claim that for 24 hours—Sunday, March 4, 1849 through noon on Monday—he may have been Acting President of the United States. This belief, however, is dismissed by nearly all historians, scholars, and biographers.
Atchison, owner of many slaves and a plantation, was a prominent pro-slavery activist and Border Ruffian leader, deeply involved with violence against abolitionists and other free-staters during the "Bleeding Kansas" events.

Early life

Atchison was born to William Atchison in Frogtown, which is now part of Lexington, Kentucky. He was educated at Transylvania University in Lexington, where his classmates included five future Democratic senators. Atchison was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1829.

Missouri lawyer and politician

In 1830 he moved to Liberty in Clay County in western Missouri, and set up practice there, where he also farmed. Atchison's law practice flourished, and his best-known client was Latter Day Saint Movement founder Joseph Smith. Atchison represented Smith in land disputes with non-Mormon settlers in Caldwell County and Daviess County.
Alexander William Doniphan joined Atchison's law practice in Liberty in May 1833. The two became fast friends and spent many leisure time hours playing cards, going to the horse races, hunting, fishing, attending social functions and political events. Atchison, already a member of the Liberty Blues, a volunteer militia in Missouri, got Doniphan to join.
Atchison was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1834. He worked hard for the Platte Purchase, which extended the northwestern boundary of Missouri to the Missouri River in 1837.
When the earlier disputes broke out into the so-called Mormon War of 1838, Atchison was appointed a major general in the state militia and took part in suppression of the violence by both sides.
In 1838 he was re-elected to the Missouri State House of Representatives. Three years later, he was appointed a circuit court judge for the six-county area of the Platte Purchase. In 1843 he was named a county commissioner in Platte County, where he then lived.

Senate career

In October 1843, Atchison was appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy left by the death of Lewis F. Linn. He thus became the first senator from western Missouri. At age 36, he was the youngest senator from Missouri up to that time. Atchison was re-elected in 1849.
Atchison was very popular with his fellow Senate Democrats. When the Democrats took control of the Senate in December 1845, they chose Atchison as President pro tempore, placing him third in succession for the Presidency, and also giving him the duty of presiding over the Senate when the Vice President was absent. He was then only 38 years old and had served in the Senate just two years. In 1849 Atchison stepped down as President pro tempore in favor of William R. King. King in turn yielded the office back to Atchison in December 1852, since King had been elected Vice President of the United States. Atchison continued as President pro tempore until December 1854.
As a Senator, Atchison was a fervent advocate of slavery and territorial expansion. He supported the annexation of Texas and the U.S.-Mexican War. Atchison and Missouri's other Senator, the venerable Thomas Hart Benton, became rivals and finally enemies, though both were Democrats. Benton declared himself to be against slavery in 1849, and in 1851 Atchison allied with the Whigs to defeat Benton for re-election.
Benton, intending to challenge Atchison in 1854, began to agitate for territorial organization of the area west of Missouri so it could be opened to settlement. To counter this, Atchison proposed that the area be organized and that the section of the Missouri Compromise banning slavery there be repealed in favor of popular sovereignty, under which the settlers in each territory would decide themselves whether slavery would be allowed.
At Atchison's request, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which embodied this idea, in November 1853. The Act became law in May 1854, establishing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

Border Ruffians

Both Douglas and Atchison had assumed that Nebraska would be settled by Free-State men from Iowa and Illinois, and Kansas by pro-slavery Missourians and other Southerners, thus preserving the numerical balance between free states and slave states. In 1854 Atchison helped found the town of Atchison, Kansas, as a pro-slavery settlement. The town were named for him.
In fact, while Southerners welcomed the opportunity to settle Kansas, very few actually chose to do so. Instead, most free-soilers preferred Kansas. Furthermore, anti-slavery activists throughout the North came to view Kansas as a battleground and formed societies to encourage free-soil settlers to go to Kansas and ensure that both Kansas and Nebraska would become free states.
It appeared as if the Kansas Territorial legislature to be elected in March 1855 would be controlled by free-soilers and ban slavery. This was viewed as a breach of faith by Atchison and his supporters. An angry Atchison called on pro-slavery Missourians to uphold slavery by force and "to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district" if necessary. He recruited an immense mob of heavily armed Missourians, the infamous "Border Ruffians". On the election day, March 30, 1855, Atchison led 5,000 Border Ruffians into Kansas. They seized control of all polling places at gunpoint, cast tens of thousands of fraudulent votes for pro-slavery candidates, and elected a pro-slavery legislature.
The outrage was nonetheless accepted by the Federal government. When Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder objected, he was fired by President Pierce.
Despite this show of force, far more free-soilers than pro-slavery settlers migrated to Kansas. There were continual raids and ambushes by both sides in "Bleeding Kansas". But in spite of the best efforts of Atchison and the Ruffians, Kansas did reject slavery and finally became a free state in 1861.
Charles Sumner, in the epic "Crimes Against Kansas" speech on May 19, 1856, exposed Atchison's role in the invasion, tortures, and killings in Kansas. Speaking in the flamboyant style he and others used, lacing his prose with references to Roman history, Sumner compared Atchison to Roman Senator Catiline, who betrayed his country in a plot to overthrow the existing order. For two days, Sumner listed crime, after crime, in detail, complete with documentation by newspapers and letters of the time, showing the tortures and violence by Atchison and his men.
Two days later, Atchison gave his own speech, totally unaware as yet that he was exposed on Senate floor in such a fashion. Atchison's speech was to the Texas men he just met, hired and paid for, Atchison reveals in his speech, by "authorities in Washington". They are about to invade Lawrence Kansas. Atchison makes the men promise to kill and "draw blood," and boasts of his flag, which was red in color for "Southern Rights" and the color of blood. They would press "to blood" the spread of slavery into Kansas. He revealed in this speech that the immediate goal of the invasion was to stop the newspaper in Lawrence from publishing anti-slavery material. Atchison's men had made it a crime to publish anti-slavery newspapers in Kansas.
Atchison made it clear the men are to kill and draw blood, told the men they will be "well paid," and encouraged them to plunder from the homes that they invaded. That was after the hundreds of dozens of tortures and killings that Sumner had detailed in his Crimes Against Kansas speech. In other words, things were about to get much worse since Atchison had his hired men from Texas.

Defeated for re-election

Atchison's Senate term expired on March 3, 1855. He sought election to another term, but the Democrats in the Missouri legislature were split between him and Benton, while the Whig minority put forward their own man. No Senator was elected until January 1857, when James S. Green was chosen.

Railroad proposal

When the First Transcontinental Railroad was proposed in the 1850s, Atchison called for it to be built along the central route, rather than the southern route. Naturally, his suggested route went through Atchison.

American Civil War

Atchison and A. W. Doniphan would fall out over the politics preceding the Civil War and on which direction Missouri should proceed. Atchison favored secession, while Doniphan was torn and would remain for the most part non-committal. Privately Doniphan favored the Union, but found it hard to go against his friends and associates.
During the secession crisis in Missouri at the beginning of the American Civil War, Atchison sided with Missouri's pro-Confederate governor, Claiborne Jackson. He accepted an appointment as a major general in the Missouri State Guard. Atchison actively recruited State Guardsmen in northern Missouri and served with Missouri State Guard commander General Sterling Price in the summer campaign of 1861. In September 1861, Atchison led 3,500 State Guard recruits across the Missouri River to reinforce Price, and defeated Union troops that tried to block his force in the Battle of Liberty.
Atchison continued to serve through the end of 1861. In March 1862, Union forces in the Trans-Mississippi theater won a decisive victory at Pea Ridge in Arkansas and secured Union control of Missouri. Atchison then resigned from the army over reported strategy arguments with Price and moved to Texas for the duration of the Civil War. After the war he retired to his farm near Gower, and was noted to deny many of his pro-slavery public statements made prior to the Civil War. In addition, his retirement cottage outside of Plattsburg, Missouri burned to the ground before his death in 1886. This included the complete loss of his library containing books, documents, and letters which documented his role in the Mormon War, Indian affairs, pro-slavery activities, Civil War activities, and other legislation covering his career as a lawyer, senator, and soldier.

Purported one-day presidency

—March 4—fell on a Sunday in 1849, and so President-elect Zachary Taylor did not take the presidential oath of office until the next day. Even so, the term of the outgoing president, James K. Polk, ended at noon on March 4. On March 2, outgoing vice president George M. Dallas relinquished his position as President of the Senate, at which time Atchison was elected President pro tempore. In 1849, according to the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, the Senate president pro tempore immediately followed the vice president in presidential line of succession. As Dallas's term also ended at noon on the 4th, and as neither Taylor nor Vice President-elect Millard Fillmore had been sworn-in to office on that day, it was claimed by some of Atchison's friends and colleagues that on March 4–5, 1849, Atchison was Acting President of the United States.
Historians, constitutional scholars and biographers all dismiss the claim. They point out that Atchison's Senate term had ended on March 3. When the Senate of the new Congress convened on March 5 to allow new senators and the new vice president to take the oath of office, the secretary of the Senate called members to order, as the Senate had no president pro tempore. Furthermore, the Constitution doesn't require the President-elect to take the oath of office to hold the office, just to execute the powers. Also, as Atchison never swore the presidential oath either, he could not have acted as President. Most historians and scholars assert that as soon as the outgoing President's term expires, the President-elect automatically assumes the office, although some claim instead that the office is vacant until the taking of the oath.
In September 1872, Atchison, who never himself claimed that he was technically president, told a reporter for the Plattsburg Lever:

Death

Atchison died on January 26, 1886, at his home near Gower, Missouri at the age of 78. He was buried at Greenlawn Cemetery in Plattsburg, Missouri. His grave marker reads "President of the United States for One Day."

Legacy