Later Political Career
When the Whigs won the 1848 election and returned to power in 1849, Everett resigned from Harvard and resumed political activity in Washington. He assisted Webster, now Secretary of State, and when Webster died in November 1852, President Fillmore appointed him to serve the remaining four months of Webster's term, to March 1853.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts elected Everett to the Senate, for a term starting March 4, 1853. As a Senator he angered Massachusetts anti-slavery men by not voting on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Everett was nominally anti-slavery, but seemed overly concerned with placating pro-slavery Southerners to avoid civil war. This did not satisfy the increasingly vehement anti-slavery Massachusetts public. In April 1854, he presented a petition from the people of Dedham against the Missouri Compromise and one from the people of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in favor of securing religious freedom for Americans abroad. On June 1, 1854, after only a little more than one year of a six year term, Everett resigned.
Read more about this topic: Edward Everett
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or career:
“In a town-meeting, the great secret of political science was uncovered, and the problem solved, how to give every individual his fair weight in the government, without any disorder from numbers. In a town-meeting, the roots of society were reached. Here the rich gave counsel, but the poor also; and moreover, the just and the unjust.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)