Eli Thayer

Eli Thayer (born June 11, 1819 in Mendon , Worcester County , Massachusetts , †  April 15, 1899 in Worcester , Massachusetts) was an American politician . Between 1857 and 1861 he represented the state of Massachusetts in the US House of Representatives .

Eli Thayer

Life

Eli Thayer attended public schools in his home country as well as the Worcester Manual Labor School . Between 1835 and 1836 he taught in Douglas as a teacher. In 1842 he practiced this profession in Hopkinton ( Rhode Island ). In 1844 he ran a boys' school in Providence . At the same time he continued his own education by studying at Brown University in Providence until 1845 . Then he was a teacher at Worcester Academy until 1848 . Thayer also studied law, but without ever working as a lawyer. In 1848 he founded a girls' school called the Oread Collegiate Institute ; at the same time he embarked on a political career. He served on the Worcester City School Committee in 1852, and served on its borough council in 1852 and 1853. From 1853 to 1854 he was a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts . Politically, he became a member of the Republican Party founded in 1854 . He was involved in the founding of the New England Emigrant Aid Company , which brokered colonists in what would later become the state of Kansas . These settlers were consistently opponents of slavery and were intended to prevent the area from falling to the slave-friendly south . However, bloody clashes between both sides did break out in Kansas .

In the congressional election of 1856 Thayer was elected to the United States House of Representatives in Washington, DC in the ninth constituency of Massachusetts , where he succeeded Alexander De Witt on March 4, 1857 . After being re-elected, he was able to complete two legislative terms in Congress until March 3, 1861 . These were shaped by the events in the immediate run-up to the civil war . From 1859 Thayer was chairman of the committee for the administration of public properties. In 1860 he was not re-elected. In May of that year he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago , where Abraham Lincoln was nominated as a candidate for president.

After his time in the US House of Representatives, Eli Thayer also worked in the railroad business, among other things. In 1872 he sought unsuccessfully to return to Congress. He died in Worcester on April 15, 1899. His son John (1857-1917) was also a member of Congress.

Web links

• Eli Thayer in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Eli Thayer in the database of Find a Grave (English)