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Senate Years of Service: 1854-1864; 1865-1869 Party: Whig; Opposition; Republican; Republican
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Library of Congress
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FESSENDEN, William Pitt, (brother of Samuel Clement Fessenden and Thomas Amory Deblois
Fessenden),
a Representative and a Senator from Maine; born in Boscawen,
Merrimack County, N.H., October 16, 1806; attended the common schools;
graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in 1827; studied law;
admitted to the bar in 1827 and practiced in Bridgeton, Bangor, and Portland,
Maine; member, State house of representatives in 1832 and 1840; elected as a
Whig to the Twenty-seventh Congress (March 4, 1841-March 3, 1843); declined to
be a candidate for reelection in 1842; member, State house of representatives
1845-1846; unsuccessful Whig candidate for election to the Thirty-second
Congress; member, State house of representatives 1853-1854; elected as a Whig
to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy in the term beginning March 4,
1853, caused by the failure of the legislature to elect; reelected in 1859 as a
Republican and served from February 10, 1854, to July 1, 1864, when he resigned
to accept a Cabinet appointment; chairman, Committee on Finance (Thirty-seventh
through Thirty-ninth Congresses); appointed Secretary of the Treasury by
President Abraham Lincoln and served from 1864-1865; member of the peace
convention of 1861 held in Washington, D.C., in an effort to devise means to
prevent the impending war; again elected to the United States Senate as a
Republican and served from March 4, 1865, until his death in Portland, Maine,
September 8, 1869; chairman, Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds
(Fortieth Congress), Committee on Appropriations (Forty-first Congress),
Committee on the Library (Forty-first Congress); originally interred in Western
Cemetery in Portland, Maine; later reinterred in an unmarked grave in the
Fessenden family plot in Evergreen Cemetery.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography;
Dictionary of American Biography; Fessenden, Francis.
Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden. 1907. Reprint. New
York: Da Capo Press, 1970; Jellison, Charles.
Fessenden of Maine: Civil War Senator. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1962.
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