Politics
Frelinghuysen was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention from New Jersey and from 1861 to 1867 was Attorney General of New Jersey. He was a delegate to the Peace conference of 1861 in Washington, and in 1866 was appointed by the Governor of New Jersey, as a Republican, to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate. In the winter of 1867, he was elected to fill the unexpired term, but a Democratic majority in the New Jersey Legislature prevented his re-election in 1869.
In 1870, he was nominated by President Ulysses S. Grant, and confirmed by the Senate, as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom to succeed John Lothrop Motley, but declined the mission. From 1871 to 1877 he was again a member of the United States Senate, in which he was prominent in debate and in committee work, and was chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs during the Alabama Claims negotiations.
He was a strong opponent of the Reconstruction measures of President Andrew Johnson, for whose conviction he voted (on most of the specific charges) in the impeachment trial. He was a member of the joint committee which drew up and reported (1877) the Electoral Commission Bill, and subsequently served as a member of the Electoral Commission that decided the 1876 Presidential election. As a Republican, he voted with the eight-member majority on all counts.
On December 12, 1881, he was appointed United States Secretary of State by President Chester A. Arthur to succeed James G. Blaine, and served until the inauguration of President Grover Cleveland in 1885.
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Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“The politics of the exile are fever,
revenge, daydream,
theater of the aging convalescent.
You wait in the wings and rehearse.
You wait and wait.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)