Lyman Trumbull
Illinois senator who drafted the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.
Overview
A Democrat turned Republican, Trumbull served in the Senate from 1855 to 1873, winning the seat in a famous 1855 legislative contest in which he outlasted Abraham Lincoln. As Judiciary Committee chairman he authored the Confiscation Acts and the Thirteenth Amendment, sponsored the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills of 1866, and wrote the amendment's enforcement basis. Disillusioned with Reconstruction corruption, he was one of seven Republicans whose not-guilty vote acquitted Andrew Johnson in 1868. He later joined the Greeley coalition and practiced law into the 1890s, defending labor causes.
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