Briggs, James A.

Born: 1811-02-06 Brooklyn, New York

Died: 1889-08-22 Brooklyn, New York

Orphaned at a young age, James A. Briggs moved from Brooklyn to Bennington, Vermont. He studied law with his uncle, George N. Briggs, a Whig who served several terms as Governor of Massachusetts. James Briggs relocated to Cleveland, where he earned admittance to the Ohio bar. He practiced law sparingly, devoting himself primarily to politics. He made speeches for William Henry Harrison and John Tyler during the presidential campaign of 1840, and remained an effective orator for the Whig Party in 1844 and 1848. In 1848, he joined the Free Soil Party, and in the 1850s moved into the Republican Party. In 1856, he moved to New York City and became head of the Ohio State Agency. Briggs attended Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church, where he served on the lecture committee. A political ally of Salmon P. Chase, he supported Chase for the presidency in 1860, working with anti-Seward forces in New York to reduce William H. Seward's chances of getting the Republican nomination. He also voiced Chase's view on protective tariffs to audiences in New York and New Jersey. Hoping to weaken Seward's power in the East, Briggs urged alternative candidates from the West to come East and lay their claim to the Republican standard. He invited Abraham Lincoln to speak at Plymouth Church, an invitation that eventually led to the Cooper Union Speech. During the Civil War, Briggs served as a special agent in the Treasury Department.

New-York Tribune (NY), 24 August 1889, 7:5; The New York Herald (NY), 25 August 1889, 16:2; Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 10; Reinhard H. Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944), 47, 79.