Francis Preston Blair Lee

Francis Preston Blair Lee

Francis Preston Blair Lee (born August 9, 1857 in Silver Spring , Maryland , † December 25, 1944 in Norwood , Maryland) was an American politician of the Democratic Party . He represented the state of Maryland in the US Senate between 1914 and 1917 . His great-grandfather Richard Henry Lee was President of the Continental Congress and first US Senator for Virginia , and his grandson Blair Lee was Governor of Maryland from 1971 to 1979 .

Lee, whose father Samuel Phillips Lee served as Rear Admiral in the US Navy , attended public schools and then Princeton University , where he graduated in 1880. Two years later, he graduated from the law school of Columbian College , later George Washington University . In 1883 he was inducted into the District of Columbia and Montgomery Counties bar associations and began practicing in Maryland.

In 1896 Lee first applied for a political mandate, but missed the election to the US House of Representatives . For this he moved into the Maryland Senate in 1905 , of which he was a member until 1913. In 1911 he ran for governor of Maryland, but was subject to Phillips Lee Goldsborough .

On November 4, 1913, Blair Lee was then elected US Senator. He succeeded William Purnell Jackson in Congress , who in turn took the place of the late Isidor Rayner but did not run in the by-election for the mandate. Lee was the first directly elected Senator in the United States because the electoral law reform was in effect in April 1913, after the last regular Senate election. He took up his mandate on January 28, 1914. Lee took over the chairmanship of the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department , but resigned from the Chamber of Parliament after a failed re-election in 1917. After that he worked as a lawyer again.

Web links

• Francis Preston Blair Lee in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Francis Preston Blair Lee in the database of Find a Grave (English)