Thomas Hart "Old Bullion" Benton (14 March 1782 – 10 April 1858) was a US Senator from Missouri (D) from 10 August 1821 to 4 March 1851, preceding Henry S. Geyer, and a member of the US House of Representatives (D-MS 1) from 4 March 1853 to 3 March 1855 (succeeding John Fletcher Darby and preceding Luther Martin Kennett).
Biography[]
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Harts Mill, North Carolina in 1782, and he established a law practice and a plantation near Nashville, Tennessee after graduating from the University of North Carolina. He served as an aide to Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812 and settled in St. Louis, Missouri after the war, becoming one of its inaugural US Senators upon statehood in 1821. Benton became an influential Senator and a powerful ally of Presidents Jackson and Martin Van Buren, proposing a land payment law. He called for the annexation of the Republic of Texas in 1845, supported the partition of Oregon with the British along the 49th parallel, and authored the first of the Homestead Acts, granting land to settlers willing to farm it. After the Mexican-American War, Benton came to own slavery, despite owning slaves himself; he opposed the Compromise of 1850 as too favorable to pro-slavery interests. This stance led to his popularity declining, and he lost his Senate seat in 1851. He briefly served in the US House of Representatives, but his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act again cost him re-election. Although his son-in-law John C. Fremont won the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1856, Benton remained a faithful Democrat until his death in 1858.