Pomeroy, Samuel C.

Born: 1816-01-03 Massachusetts

Died: 1891-08-27 Massac County, Illinois

Flourished: 1854 to 1865 Kansas Territory

Samuel C. Pomeroy, public official and Kansas Free-State activist, was born in Southampton, Massachusetts, where he was raised on his family’s farm and attended local schools. He studied at several academies in Massachusetts and briefly attended Amherst College beginning in 1836 before teaching school in Onondaga County, New York, for four years. In 1842 Pomeroy returned to Southampton and became involved in politics as a member of the Liberty Party, serving in local offices and in the Massachusetts General Court in 1852 and 1853. He was an organizer and financial agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company in 1854, and moved to Kansas Territory with a group of settlers that same year. Pomeroy resided first in Lawrence, then on the instructions of the New England Emigrant Aid Company moved to Atchison about 1857 with the intention of establishing a Free State settlement. He became prosperous through his involvement in banking and land speculation, and was appointed president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad in 1863. Pomeroy was a leader of the independent Free State Party in Kansas, which became the Republican Party by 1859. He represented Kansas at the 1856 Republican National Convention, where he received eight votes for the office of vice president, and served as mayor of Atchison in 1858 and 1859. Following the admission of Kansas to the union in 1861, Pomeroy was elected by the state legislature to represent Kansas in the U.S. Senate, where he served two terms as a Republican. In August of 1862, Abraham Lincoln chose Pomeroy to be commissioner of African colonization, but a proposed plan to settle African Americans in Central America was ultimately abandoned. In 1864 Pomeroy aligned himself with Radical Republicans and chaired a committee that sought to make Salmon P. Chase rather than Lincoln the party’s candidate for president in the election of 1864. Pomeroy was married three times; first, to Annie Pomeroy who died in 1843, secondly in 1846 to Lucy Ann Gaylord who died in 1863, and finally to Martha S. Mann Whiting in 1865. Only the first marriage produced a child, who did not survive to adulthood. Pomeroy died in Whitinsville, Massachusetts.

Mark A. Plummer, “Pomeroy, Samuel Clarke,” American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17:649-50; Wendell H. Stephenson, “Pomeroy, Samuel Clarke,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. by Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 15:54-55; Biographical Directory of the American Congress 1774-1996 (Alexandria, VA: CQ Staff Directories, 1997), 1675; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Southampton, Hampshire County, MA, 66; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 2, Atchison, Atchison County, KS Terr., 34; Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 5:371; The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 24 August 1862, https://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1862-08-24; Massachusetts, U.S., Marriage Records, 1840-1915, 20 September 1865, Boston (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2013); Worcester Morning Daily Spy (MA), 28 August 1891, 6:1.