Adlai Ewing Stevenson (October 23, 1835 – June 14, 1914) was an American politician who served as the 23rd vice president of the United States from 1893 to 1897. He had served as a U.S. Representative from Illinois in the late 1870s and early 1880s. After his appointment as assistant postmaster general of the United States during Grover Cleveland's first administration (1885–1889), he fired many Republican postal workers and replaced them with Southern Democrats. This earned him the enmity of the Republican-controlled Congress, but made him a favorite as Grover Cleveland's running mate in 1892, and he was elected vice president of the United States.
In office, he supported the free-silver lobby against the gold-standard men like Cleveland, but was praised for governing in a dignified, non-partisan manner.
In 1900, he ran for vice president with William Jennings Bryan. In doing so, he became the fourth vice president to run for that post teamed with two different presidential candidates (after George Clinton, John C. Calhoun and Thomas A. Hendricks). Stevenson was the grandfather of Adlai Stevenson II, a Governor of Illinois and the unsuccessful Democratic presidential nominee in both 1952 and 1956.
Ancestry
Adlai Ewing Stevenson was born in Christian County, Kentucky, on October 23, 1835, to John Turner and Eliza Ewing Stevenson, Wesleyans of Scots-Irish descent. The Stevenson family is first recorded (as the Stephensons) in Roxburghshire, Scotland, in the early 18th century. The family appears to have had some wealth, as a private chapel in the Archdiocese of St Andrews bears their name. At some point, probably shortly after the Jacobite rising of 1715, the family migrated to County Antrim, Ireland, near Belfast. At least one Stephenson was a police officer. William Stephenson, the great-grandfather of Adlai, was a tailor who specialized in millinery. After William's father died in the 1730s, his family moved to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; William joined when his apprenticeship was completed in 1748.
In 1762, the family moved to North Carolina in what is now Iredell County. Including lands given to his children, William Stephenson (Stevenson after the American Revolution) had amassed of land by the time of his death. One branch of the family, including Adlai Stevenson's father, then moved to Kentucky in 1813.
Early life
Stevenson was born on the family farm in Christian County. He attended Blue Water School in what is now Herndon, Kentucky. In 1850, when he was 14, frost killed the family's tobacco crop. Two years later, his father set free their few slaves and the family moved to Bloomington, Illinois, where his father then operated a sawmill. Stevenson attended Illinois Wesleyan University at Bloomington and ultimately graduated from Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky; at the latter he was a part of Phi Delta Theta. His father's death prompted Stevenson to return from Kentucky to Illinois to run the sawmill.
Stevenson studied law with Bloomington attorney Robert E. Williams. He was admitted to the bar in 1858, and commenced practice in Metamora. As a young lawyer, Stevenson encountered such celebrated Illinois attorneys as Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, and he campaigned for Douglas in his 1858 Senate race against Lincoln. Stevenson's dislike of Lincoln might have been prompted by a contentious meeting between the two, at which Lincoln made several witty quips disparaging Stevenson. Stevenson also made speeches against the "Know-Nothing" movement, a nativist group opposed to immigrants and Catholics. That stand helped cement his support in Illinois' large German and Irish communities. In a predominantly Republican area, the Democratic Stevenson won friends through his storytelling and his warm and engaging personality.
Marriage and political life, 1860–1884
Stevenson was appointed master in chancery (an aide in a court of equity), his first public office, which he held during the Civil War. In 1864 Stevenson was a presidential elector for the Democratic ticket; he was also elected district attorney.
In 1866, he married Letitia Green. They had three daughters, Mary, Julia and Letitia, and a son, Lewis Stevenson. Letitia helped establish the Daughters of the American Revolution as a way of healing the divisions between the North and South after the Civil War, and succeeded the wife of Benjamin Harrison as the DAR's second president-general.