Blair, Austin

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Austin Blair
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    4
    Family
    George Blair (father), Rhoda Blackman Mann (mother), Sarah L. Ford (wife)
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    Union College (NY)
    Occupation
    Politician
    Attorney or Judge
    Educator
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Political Parties
    Whig
    Free Soil
    Republican
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
    Government
    US House of Representatives
    Governor
    State legislature
    Local government

    Austin Blair (Congressional Biographical Directory)

    Reference
    BLAIR, Austin, a Representative from Michigan; born in Caroline, Tompkins County, N.Y., February 8, 1818; attended the common schools, Cazenovia Seminary, and Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y.; was graduated from Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., in 1837; studied law in Oswego; was admitted to the bar in Tioga County, N.Y., in 1841; moved to Michigan and settled in Eaton Rapids, where he commenced the practice of his profession in 1842; county clerk of Eaton County; moved to Jackson, Mich., in 1844; elected to the State house of representatives in 1845; delegate to the Free-Soil National Convention at Buffalo, N.Y., in 1848; elected prosecuting attorney of Jackson County in 1852; elected to the State senate in 1854; was present at the organization of the Republican Party in Jackson, Mich., on July 6, 1854, and was a member of the platform committee; delegate to the Republican National Convention at Chicago in 1860; Governor of Michigan from January 1, 1861, to January 1, 1865; elected as a Republican to the Fortieth, Forty-first, and Forty-second Congresses (March 4, 1867-March 3, 1873); chairman, Committee on Private Land Claims (Forty-first and Forty-second Congresses); was not a candidate for renomination in 1872, but was an unsuccessful Liberal Republican candidate for Governor; resumed the practice of law in Jackson, Mich., and died there August 6, 1894; interment in Mount Evergreen Cemetery.
    “Blair, Austin,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774 to Present, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000521.

    Austin Blair (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    In 1854, at the close of his first two-year term as prosecuting attorney of Jackson County, Blair rejoined the vanguard of third-party politics when he helped form the Republican party. He was a key participant in the party's organizational meetings in Jackson, Kalamazoo, and Detroit, and he helped draft the party's first platform. Fittingly, he was elected to the state senate later that year. As a member of the legislature's newly elected Republican majority, he worked on a litany of reform issues, including a temperance measure, a bill to establish an endowment for a women's college, and an act to establish property rights for married women. He also cowrote Michigan's personal liberty law, which obstructed federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
    Robert W. Burg, "Blair, Austin," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/04/04-00109.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Blair, Austin," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/32269.