
Rufus Paine Spalding (3 May 1798-29 August 1886) was a member of the US House of Representatives (R-OH 18) from 4 March 1863 to 3 March 1869, succeeding Sidney Edgerton and preceding William H. Upson.
Biography[]
Rufus Paine Spalding was born in West Tisbury, Massachusetts in 1798, and he became a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1819. He then moved to Warren, Ohio in 1821 and to Ravenna, Ohio in 1835, and he went on to serve in the State House from 1839 to 1842, a Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court from 1849 to 1852, and in the US House of Representatives from 1863 to 1869. He was a originally a Democrat, but he later defected to the Free Soil Party and then to the Republican Party due to his opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act. He died in 1886.