BOTTS, John Minor, a Representative from Virginia; born in Dumfries, Va., September 16, 1802; attended the common schools in Richmond, Va.; studied law; was admitted to the bar in 1830 and commenced practice in Richmond, Va.; moved to Henrico County and engaged in agricultural pursuits; member of the State house of delegates 1833-1839; elected as a Whig to the Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Congresses (March 4, 1839-March 3, 1843); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1842 to the Twenty-eighth Congress; elected to the Thirtieth Congress (March 4, 1847-March 3, 1849);

Although a Whig, he aligned with the Constitutional Union party, a coalition led by Howell Cobb, Alexander Stephens, and Robert Toombs that hoped to sustain the Compromise of 1850 as the final settlement of the major differences between the North and South. Hill served on the party's executive committee until it disbanded in 1853. The Kansas-Nebraska debate prompted him to run for Congress in 1854, losing only by twenty-four votes.

A Democrat since childhood, Palmer was elected probate justice of the peace in 1843. He was subsequently elected as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1847, county judge in 1848, and state senator in 1852. During his successful campaign for reelection to the senate in 1854, he exhibited an independence that would mark the remainder of his career. Rebuffing pressure from Democrats to support the Douglas policy on slavery in Kansas and Nebraska, Palmer ran instead as an Anti-Nebraska Democrat.

A chance meeting with William Lloyd Garrison in 1830 drew May into the abolitionist movement. At great personal cost--alienating family, friends, and professional colleagues in the Unitarian ministry over his antislavery principles--May joined Garrison in founding the radical antislavery movement and helped organize the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1832), the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), and the Garrisonian peace organization, the New England Non-Resistance Society (1838).

With the coming of the Civil War, Gatling began working on improvements in weaponry. His first inventions in this area were a marine steam ram and a rapid-fire, or machine gun, with which his name has ever since been identified; both were patented in 1862. The gun may have been invented because of a suggestion of Colonel R. A. Maxwell that the Union army would require just such a specialized weapon during the coming war. Before the end of that same year, he had produced a working model of this weapon, a hand-cranked .58 caliber version with six barrels, rotated around a central axis.