Theodore Frelinghuysen (March 28, 1787 – April 12, 1862) was an American politician who represented New Jersey in the United States Senate. He was the Whig vice presidential nominee in the election of 1844, running on a ticket with Henry Clay.
Frelinghuysen married Charlotte Mercer in 1809, but she died in the same year. They had no children together, but when Theodore's brother, Frederick Frelinghuysen (1788–1820) died, Theodore adopted his son, Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen (1817–1885), who would later become Secretary of State. Theodore Frelinghuysen remarried in 1857 to Harriet Pumpelly.
He graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1804 and studied law under his brother John Frelinghuysen, and later, Richard Stockton. He was admitted to the bar as an attorney in 1808 and as a counselor in 1811, and set up a law practice in Newark during this time period. In the War of 1812, he was a captain of a company of volunteers.[3]
This early daguerreotype possibly depicts Frelinghuysen around 1839. Making it one of the earliest known photographs of an American.
As a Senator, he led the opposition to Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830.[4] His six-hour speech against the Removal Act was delivered over the course of three days, and warned of the supposed dire consequences of the policy:
Let us beware how, by oppressive encroachments upon the sacred privileges of our Indian neighbors, we minister to the agonies of future remorse.
Jackson supporters chided Frelinghuysen for mixing his evangelical Christianity with politics, and the Removal Act was passed.1
At the 1844 Whig National Convention, competing with Millard Fillmore, John Davis and John Sergeant, he was selected as the Whigvice-presidential candidate. He took the lead on the first ballot and never lost it, eventually being chosen by acclamation. The Whig presidential candidate, Henry Clay, was not present at the convention and expressed surprise upon hearing the news. Frelinghuysen's rectitude might have been intended to correct for Clay's reputation for moral laxity, but his opposition to Indian removal may have put off those southern voters who had suffered from their raids (William Lloyd Garrison praised his speech opposing removal in the poem "To the Honorable Theodore Freylinghusen, on reading his eloquent speech in defence of Indian Rights"[5]). Frelinghuysen was also unpopular with Catholics because groups of which he was a member, such as the Protestant American Bible Society, promulgated the idea that Catholics should convert to Protestantism. Clay and Frelinghuysen lost the 1844 election.
Institutional positions
Theodore Frelinghuysen campaign poster
Frelinghuysen was the second president of New York University between 1839 and 1850 and seventh president of Rutgers College between 1850 and 1862. He was president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1841 – c. 1857), American Bible Society (1846–1862), and American Tract Society (1842–1846), as well as vice president of the American Sunday School Union (1826–1861), and American Colonization Society (ACS). In his public advocacy for colonization, or the deportation of free people of color from the United States, Frelinguysen described black people as “licentious, ignorant, and irritated” and therefore not suited for full citizenship within their present country.[6] His moniker was the "Christian Statesman."
^1 Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pp. 68–9, and Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, Volume I (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 204–5.
