Kenneth Rayner

Kenneth Rayner (born June 20, 1808 in Bertie County , North Carolina , †  March 4, 1884 in Washington, DC ) was an American politician . Between 1839 and 1843 he represented the state of North Carolina in the US House of Representatives .

Career

Kenneth Rayner first attended the Tarborough Academy . After a subsequent law degree and his admission to the bar in 1829, he began to work in Hertford County in this profession. At the same time he embarked on a political career as a member of the Whig Party . He was originally a supporter of Andrew Jackson . On the question of the rights of the individual states, however, he turned away from this and joined John C. Calhoun . He then became a member of the Whigs. In 1835 he was a member of a convention to revise the North Carolina state constitution.

Between 1835 and 1850 Rayner sat several times as a member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina . In the congressional election of 1838 he was elected to the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC in the first constituency of North Carolina , where he succeeded Samuel Tredwell Sawyer on March 4, 1839 . After two re-elections, he was able to complete three legislative terms in Congress by March 3, 1845 . These were determined by the tension between the Whigs and President John Tyler since 1841 . In addition, a possible annexation of the Republic of Texas , which had been independent of Mexico since 1836, was increasingly debated in Congress .

In 1844, Kenneth Rayner renounced another congressional candidacy. In 1848 and 1850 he was again a member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina. In 1854 he was elected to the State Senate. In 1848 he was a candidate for his party's vice-presidential nomination. He narrowly failed because of Millard Fillmore , who succeeded the then elected Zachary Taylor in 1850 as President of the United States. In 1861 Rayner was a member of the assembly that resolved the withdrawal of the State of North Carolina from the Union. In 1864 he was a member of the commission that handed the state capital Raleigh over to the Union forces under General William T. Sherman . He later became a member of the Republican Party . In 1874, Rayner was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to the commission that investigated events surrounding the Confederate warship Alabama during the Civil War . From 1877 to 1884 Rayner worked for the Federal Ministry of Finance.

He died on March 4, 1884 in the federal capital Washington. Kenneth Rayner was married to Susan Spratt Polk, with whom he had eight children.

Web links

• Kenneth Rayner in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Kenneth Rayner in the database of Find a Grave (English)