Edward J. Phelps
| Edward John Phelps | |
|---|---|
Edward John Phelps
|
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| Born |
July 11, 1822 Middlebury, Vermont |
| Died | March 9, 1900 (aged 77) New Haven, Connecticut |
| Nationality | American |
| Education |
Middlebury College Yale Law School |
| Occupation | Lawyer, politician, educator |
| Known for | Controller of the United States Treasury, ambassador to England, one of the founders and President of the American Bar Association |
Edward John Phelps (July 11, 1822 – March 9, 1900) was an American lawyer and diplomat from Vermont.
Phelps' father Samuel S. Phelps had been a U.S. Senator from Vermont. Edward Phelps was born in Middlebury, graduated from Middlebury College in 1840, and worked as a school teacher and principal in Virginia. He studied law at the Yale Law School, completed his studies in the office of Horatio Seymour, and began practicing in Middlebury in 1843. Phelps moved to Burlington in 1845.
From 1851 to 1853 he was second controller of the United States Treasury. He then practiced law in New York City until 1857, when he returned to Burlington. Originally a Whig, after that party's demise he became a Democrat. He served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1870.
Phelps was one of the founders of the American Bar Association and was its president in 1880-1881. From 1881 until his death he was Kent Professor of Law at Yale Law School.
In 1880 Phelps was the Democratic nominee for Governor of Vermont. Democrats were a perpetual minority in Vermont, and lost every statewide election from the 1850s to the 1960s. 1880 was no exception, and Phelps was excoriated as an unrepentant Copperhead:
Had he maintained his resolution to accept no political nomination, the memory of his attitude during the memory of his attitude from 1860 to 1865 might have quite died; but the Democratic nomination and his speech of acceptance, in which, with surprising want of tact, he aired afresh his old hatred of the African and attacked the Southern Republicans, white and black, with a virulence which few Southern Democrats could equal … have brought it into strong prominence. Still stronger light has been thrown on it by the publication of a careful stenographic report of a speech made by Mr. Phelps in September, 1864, before a little club of Copperheads in Burlington. In this he called Mr. Lincoln a 'wooden-head' and a 'twentieth-rate back country attorney,' declared that the North was fighting simply to 'turn loose all the [racial epithet]' and 'whitewash the [racial epithet] in the blood of millions[.].
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