Elected Office
By 1840, Trumbull was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. He was appointed as Illinois Secretary of State, serving from 1841-1843. In 1848, he was appointed as a justice on the Supreme Court of Illinois, serving until 1853.
Although elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1854, he was elected by the state legislature to serve in the United States Senate before he could take his seat. He served for nearly two decades, from 1855 through 1873. During this time, he claimed party affiliations with the Democrats, the Republicans, the Liberal Republicans, and finally the Democrats again.
As chairman of the Judiciary Committee (1861–1872), he co-wrote the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited all kinds of slavery in the United States other than its use as punishment for crimes of which the party had been convicted; this became the sentence to "time at hard labor" that became assignable for certain crimes. It was also the constitutional loophole by which southern states abused convict lease labor, a practice lasting into the twentieth century.
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