John C. Breckinridge

Biography

John Cabell Breckinridge was born in 1821 at his family's estate near Lexington, Kentucky, a grandson of Jefferson's attorney general John Breckinridge. He graduated from Centre College in 1838, spent a winter at the College of New Jersey and took a law degree at Transylvania University in 1841. After practising briefly in Iowa, where he became a Democrat, he returned to Kentucky, and during the Mexican-American War he served as a volunteer officer without seeing combat.

Elected to the Kentucky House in 1849 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1851, he backed Stephen Douglas on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1856 the Democrats paired him with James Buchanan, and at 36 he became the youngest vice president in U.S. history. After the party split in 1860 the Southern Democrats nominated him for president; he carried most of the South but lost to Abraham Lincoln.

He entered the Senate in 1861 and urged compromise, but when Kentucky's Unionists took control he fled south, became a Confederate general and was expelled from the Senate. He fought at Shiloh, Stones River and Chickamauga, won at New Market in 1864 and campaigned in the Shenandoah Valley. Appointed Confederate Secretary of War in February 1865, he pressed for an orderly surrender and saved the government's records, then escaped abroad. He returned to Kentucky after the 1868 amnesty and died in Lexington in 1875.