Anson Burlingame

Anson Burlingame (1859)

Anson Burlingame (born November 14, 1820 in New Berlin , Chenango County , New York , †  February 23, 1870 in Saint Petersburg , Russia ) was an American diplomat and politician . Between 1855 and 1861 he represented the state of Massachusetts in the US House of Representatives ; later he was the American envoy to Austria and China .

Career

In 1823 Anson Burlingame came to Seneca County in Ohio with his parents ; in 1833 the family moved to Detroit , Michigan . He attended private schools in his respective homeland. He then studied at the University of Michigan branch in Detroit. After studying law at Harvard University and being admitted to the bar in 1846, he began to work in this profession in Boston . At the same time he embarked on a political career as a member of the American Party . In 1852 he was a member of the Massachusetts Senate . The following year he was a delegate at a meeting to revise the state constitution .

In the congressional election of 1854 , Burlingame was elected to the United States House of Representatives in Washington, DC in the fifth constituency of Massachusetts , where he succeeded William Appleton on March 4, 1855 . After being re-elected as a candidate for the Republican Party , of which he had meanwhile become a member, he was able to complete two terms in Congress until March 3, 1859 . These were shaped by the events in the immediate run-up to the civil war . In 1860 he was not re-elected.

After his time in the US House of Representatives, Burlingame worked in the diplomatic service of the federal government. In 1861 he was appointed envoy in Vienna to succeed Jehu Glancy Jones ; but there he was rejected because of some of his views on some parts of the Danube monarchy. Between 1861 and 1867 he was the successor to John Elliott Ward as American ambassador to China. After that, he also worked for the Chinese government by helping to draft state treaties. Anson Burlingame died on February 23, 1870 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he was negotiating contracts, and was buried in Cambridge .

Web links

Commons : Anson Burlingame  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Anson Burlingame in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Anson Burlingame in the database of Find a Grave (English)