 |
| Governor Shelby Moore Cullom. |
By the time he died in 1914 at the age of 84, Shelby Cullom
had been a force in Illinois and national government for half a century, a
political career spanning from the days just before the Civil War to the eve of
World War I, and one which had put him in the orbit of almost every American
President from Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson.
Shelby Moore Cullom was born in Kentucky in 1829, the last
of a line of Illinois Governors to be born in the Bluegrass State. He came to
Tazewell County, Illinois, as an infant, and lived the rest of his life in
Illinois. His father, Richard, was a Whig state legislator. This was how he
came to know Lincoln, who advised him to study law in a local Springfield firm.
Tragedy struck the young lawyer when his wife, Hannah, died. With two daughters
to care for, Cullom soon married his late wife’s sister, Julia.
He was admitted to the bar in 1855 and almost immediately
went into politics, winning the office of Springfield city attorney in his
first year. Cullom was elected to the Illinois House in 1856, lost in 1858 and
came back and won in 1860. With the storm clouds of the Civil War gathering,
his colleagues in the 22nd General Assembly elected him Speaker of
the House, the first Republican to hold that post. But higher office called
him, and in 1862 he sought a seat in the Illinois Senate. With bad news from
the battlefront dragging down the Party of Lincoln that fall, he was defeated.
Cullom’s old friend in the White House appointed him to a
board overseeing War Department procurement in Illinois, a post helpful to the
war effort, but one which was not uniformed military service. Years later it
would be revealed that Cullom may have been exempted from military service
because of a heart condition which caused fainting spells. Nevertheless, his
lack of military service kept him from membership in the most powerful
political group of the late 19th Century, the Union veterans
organization called the Grand Army of the Republic, a non-association which
makes his political success in the following decades even more of a feat.
Cullom didn’t stay on the political sidelines for long,
running for and winning a seat in Congress in 1864. He was a faithful ally of
Lincoln, and when the President was assassinated in 1865, he was a member of
the funeral party in Springfield. During the post-war period of westward
expansion he chaired the House Committee on Territories. He was defeated for
re-election in 1870 and returned home to Springfield, where he became President
of the State National Bank. He retained enough political clout that in 1872 he
was selected to head the state’s delegation to the Republican National
Convention. There he nominated his fellow Illinoisan Ulysses S. Grant for a
second term in the Presidency, giving what is believed to be the shortest
convention nominating speech in history: a single 82-word sentence.
Back home, Cullom found himself embroiled in a local fight
which would restore him to elected office. An effort was being made to move the
state’s capital city northwest to Peoria, and Cullom, by now a longtime
Springfield resident, helped lead the fight to stop it. With the state’s sixth
(and current) Capitol Building under construction in downtown Springfield,
Cullom was successful in the fight to keep the seat of government in the city.
He was returned to the Illinois House, and once again served as its Speaker.
By the 1870s, railroads were crisscrossing the nation, and
much Illinois commerce was dependent on the locomotives and freight cars which
delivered it to markets. Railroad regulation was becoming a critical issue in
statehouses and in Washington. Speaker Cullom succeeded where previous
legislatures had failed and saw a law regulating railroad rates enacted, and
upheld as Constitutional.
But his reward was to be once again removed from power,
losing the Speakership to Elijah Haines. Once again, he set his sights higher
and sought the Governorship in 1876. The field included a group of former
Generals and other Army officers, including the incumbent Governor, John
Beveridge, a veteran of Gettysburg. But Cullom worked the nominating convention
in advance and arrived with just enough delegates to secure the nomination. In
the fall he won by just under 7000 votes, the closest Illinois gubernatorial
election in over 50 years.
 |
| A portrait of former Illinois Governors. Governor Cullom is seated second from the right. Photo from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum. |
Coming to office amidst the lingering economic depression of
the 1870s, Cullom advocated austerity in government, seeking to confine state
government’s activities to a few, basic functions, while still caring for the
poor and financing public education. He sought to offload the Illinois and
Michigan Canal, which he argued had become obsolete in the era of railroads. He
modernized the state militia; now known as the National Guard; at a time when
labor unrest was growing in large and small cities in the state.
Cullom held off intense challenges in both the primary and
the general election in 1880 to become only the second Illinois governor to be
re-elected to a consecutive term, winning with the same percentage of the vote
as in his narrow 1876 race. Early in his second term, Cullom reported that the
state was at long last debt-free, this after nearly four decades of effort to
pay down debt accumulated from failed state banking and infrastructure policies
of the 1840s. The state’s phenomenal growth in population and economic activity
was the main driver of the settlement of the debt.
Halfway through his second term, Cullom heard Washington
calling once again. With U.S. Senators appointed by state legislatures in those
days, Cullom saw his chance when Republicans won majorities in the legislature
in 1882. He bested former Governor and Senator Richard Oglesby and a handful of
other candidates for the seat, and in 1883 Shelby Moore Cullom began a 30-year
career as a U.S.
Senator.
As soon as he arrived in Washington the issue of railroad
regulation flared into controversy once again. State after state had attempted
to regulate the railroads, only to see their efforts struck down as
unconstitutional. Only the Illinois law which Cullom had shepherded to passage
a decade earlier had been able to pass muster, and now he sought to apply its
lessons to the federal government. His
efforts led in part to the 1887 creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission
to exercise Congress’s Constitutional role under the commerce clause to
regulate commerce, “among the several states.”
In the Senate, Cullom chaired the committee overseeing
interstate commerce, as well as eventually foreign relations and “expenditures
of public money.” He helped write the laws for the newly-acquired Hawaii
territory, and served as a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution for almost
three decades.
Cullom developed a reputation which today would be described
with the cliché: “a workhorse, not a show horse.” He built relationships with
his fellow legislators and accomplished legislative goals through one-on-one
persuasion, not soaring oratory. He also assembled a patronage army in
Illinois, known as the “federal crowd.” It was sufficient to keep him in office
for five terms, (while every other Senator from Illinois who served alongside
Cullom failed to win re-election) but it could not get him the Presidential
nomination he sought on at least three occasions.
Only once did a political adversary get the better of him in
Illinois: in 1896 an up-and-coming utility executive named Charles Dawes helped
his candidate for the Presidency, William McKinley, to overcome the opposition
of Cullom’s organization and win the nomination. Dawes would go on to serve as Vice
President of the United States in the 1920s.
Again and again, Cullom survived contests at the ballot box,
from sitting and former Governors, war heroes and any number of challengers.
But by 1912, the octogenarian Senator faced a new and different test. The
progressive era of the early 20th century had brought about the idea
of popularly electing Senators, rather than having them chosen by state
legislatures. Though it would not be required by law until the enactment of the
17th Amendment in 1913, Illinois held an advisory Senate primary in
1912. Cullom finished in second place, behind former Speaker of the House and
Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Sherman. He could have asked the incoming state
legislature to grant him another term anyway, but he reluctantly decided to retire.
On his way out the door of the Senate chamber in Washington,
however, he was chosen for a great honor. Nearly fifty years after the death of
his friend and political mentor, an effort had been launched in Washington to
construct a memorial in honor of President Lincoln. Members of Congress could
think of no one more appropriate to head up such an endeavor as the retiring
Senator from Illinois, who by now was the only member of the Lincoln funeral
party from 1865 who was still alive. He accepted the honor and as chairman and
resident commissioner, he helped guide the design of the Lincoln
Memorial during the last year of his life. Construction began one month
after his death.
Shelby More Cullom died in January 1914. His 30 years in the
Senate remain the longest such term of office for any Senator from Illinois. He
was buried in Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, just yards from the tomb of his
friend Abraham Lincoln.