James Baird Weaver (June 12, 1833 – February 6, 1912) was an American politician in Iowa who was a member of the United States House of Representatives and two-time candidate for President of the United States. He joined the Republicans, opposed slavery, and served as an officer in the Union army during the Civil War, but after 1876 he switched to the Greenbacks, then the Populists, and finally the Democrats. He trained as a lawyer. Late in his career he served as mayor of Colfax, Iowa. He wrote A Call to Action: An Interpretation of the Great Uprising, Its Source and Causes published in 1892 when he was a Populist Party candidate for the U.S. presidency, he later wrote a history of Jasper County, Iowa.
Born in Ohio, he moved to Iowa as a boy when his family claimed a homestead on the frontier. He became politically active as a young man and was an advocate for farmers and laborers. He joined and quit several political parties in the furtherance of the progressive causes in which he believed. After serving in the Union Army in the American Civil War, Weaver returned to Iowa and worked for the election of Republican candidates.
After several unsuccessful attempts at Republican nominations to various offices, and growing dissatisfied with the conservative wing of the party, in 1877, Weaver switched to the Greenback Party, which supported increasing the money supply and regulating big business. As a Greenbacker with Democratic support, Weaver won election to the House in 1878. The Greenbackers nominated Weaver for president in 1880, but he received only 3.3percent of the popular vote. After several more attempts at elected office, he was again elected to the House in 1884 and 1886. In Congress, he worked for expansion of the money supply and for the opening of Indian Territory to white settlement.
As the Greenback Party fell apart, a new anti-big business third party, the People's Party ("Populists"), arose. Weaver helped to organize the party and was their nominee for president in 1892. This time he was more successful and gained 8.5percent of the popular vote and won five states, but still fell far short of victory. The Populists merged with the Democrats by the end of the 19th century, and Weaver went with them, promoting the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908. After serving as mayor of his home town, Colfax, Iowa, Weaver retired from his pursuit of elective office. He died in Iowa in 1912. Most of Weaver's political goals remained unfulfilled at his death, but many came to pass in the following decades.
Early years James Baird Weaver was born in Dayton, Ohio, on June 12, 1833, the fifth of thirteen children of Abram Weaver and Susan Imlay Weaver. Weaver's father was a farmer, also born in Ohio, and a descendant of Revolutionary War veterans. He married Weaver's mother, who was from New Jersey, in 1824. Shortly after Weaver's birth, in 1835, the family moved to a farm nine miles north of Cassopolis, Michigan. In 1842, the family moved again to the Iowa Territory to await the opening of former Sac and Fox land to white settlement the following year. They claimed a homestead along the Chequest Creek in Davis County. Abram Weaver built a house and farmed his new land until 1848, when the family moved to Bloomfield, the county seat.
Abram Weaver, a Democrat involved in local politics, was elected clerk of the district court in 1848; he often vied for election to other offices, usually unsuccessfully. James Weaver's brother-in-law, Hosea Horn, a Whig, was appointed postmaster the following year, and through him James Weaver secured his first job, delivering mail to neighboring Jefferson County. In 1851 Weaver quit the mail route to read law with Samuel G. McAchran, a local lawyer. Two years later, Weaver interrupted his legal career to accompany another brother-in-law, Dr. Calvin Phelps, on a cattle drive overland from Bloomfield to Sacramento, California. Weaver initially intended to stay and prospect for gold, but instead booked passage on a ship for Panama. He crossed the isthmus, boarded another ship to New York, and returned home to Iowa.
Upon his return, Weaver worked briefly as a store clerk before resuming the study of law. He enrolled in the Cincinnati Law School in 1855, where he studied under Bellamy Storer. While in Cincinnati, Weaver began to question his support for the institution of slavery, a change biographers attribute to Storer's influence. After graduating in 1856 Weaver returned to Bloomfield and was admitted to the Iowa bar. By 1857, he had broken with the Democratic Party of his father to join the growing coalition that opposed the expansion of slavery, which became the Republican Party.
Weaver traveled around southern Iowa in 1858, giving speeches on behalf of his new party's candidates. That summer, he married Clarrisa (Clara) Vinson, a schoolteacher from nearby Keosauqua, Iowa, whom he had courted since he returned from Cincinnati. The marriage lasted until Weaver's death in 1912 and the couple had eight children. After the wedding, Weaver started a law firm with Hosea Horn and continued his involvement in Republican politics. He gave several speeches on behalf of Samuel J. Kirkwood for governor in 1859 in a campaign that focused heavily on the slavery debate; although the Republicans lost Weaver's Davis County, Kirkwood narrowly won the election. The next year, Weaver served as a delegate to the state convention and, although not a national delegate, traveled with the Iowa delegation to the 1860 Republican National Convention, where Abraham Lincoln was nominated. Lincoln carried Iowa and won the election, but Southern states responded to the Republican victory by seceding from the Union. By April 1861, the American Civil War had begun.
Civil War
After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 men to join the Union Army. Weaver enlisted in what became CompanyG of the 2nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and was elected the company's first lieutenant. The 2nd Iowa, commanded by Colonel Samuel Ryan Curtis, a former Congressman, was ordered to Missouri in June 1861 to secure railroad lines in that border state. Weaver's unit spent that summer in northern Missouri and did not see action. Meanwhile Clara gave birth to the couple's second child and first son, named James Bellamy Weaver after his father and Bellamy Storer.
Weaver's first chance at action came in February 1862, when the 2nd Iowa joined Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant's army outside the Confederate Fort Donelson in Tennessee. Weaver's company was in the thick of the fight, which he described as a "holocaust to the demon of battles", and he took a minor wound in the arm. The rebels surrendered the next day, the most important Union victory of the war to date. The 2nd Iowa next joined other units in the area at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, to mass for a major assault deeper into the South. Confederate forces met them there, in the Battle of Shiloh. Weaver's regiment was in the center of the Union lines, in the area later known as the "hornets' nest", and retreated amid fierce fighting. The next day, the Union forces turned the tide and forced the rebels off the field in what Weaver called a "perfect rout". The carnage at Shiloh (some 20,000 killed and wounded on both sides) was on a scale never before seen in American warfare, and both sides learned that the war would end neither quickly nor easily.
After Shiloh, Weaver and the 2nd Iowa slowly advanced to Corinth, Mississippi, where he was promoted to major. Rebel forces attacked the Union armies there in the Second Battle of Corinth, where Weaver's courage in that Union victory convinced his superiors to promote him to colonel after the regiment's commanding officer was killed. After Corinth, Weaver's unit took up garrison duty in northern Mississippi. In the summer of 1863 they were redeployed to the Tennessee–Alabama border, again on occupation duty around Pulaski, Tennessee. They rejoined the action at the Battle of Resaca, a part of the Atlanta campaign, then continued with Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea in 1864. Weaver's enlistment ended in May 1864, and he returned to his family in Iowa. On October 12, 1864, he would be selected to lead a local militia in Davis County after it was reported that Confederate partisans were actively raiding the area. He remained in command of the militia until November 7 when the partisans surrendered. After the war ended Weaver received a promotion to brevet brigadier general, backdated to March 13, 1865.
Republican politics
Soon after returning from the war Weaver became editor of a pro-Republican Bloomfield newspaper, the Weekly Union Guard. At the 1865 Iowa Republican State Convention, he placed second for the nomination for lieutenant governor. The following year, Weaver was elected district attorney for the second judicial district, covering six counties in southern Iowa. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson appointed him assessor of internal revenue in the first Congressional district, which extended across southeastern Iowa. The job came with a $1500 salary, plus a percentage of taxes collected over $100,000. Weaver held that lucrative position until 1872, when Congress abolished it. He also became involved in the Methodist Episcopal Church, serving as a delegate to a church convention in Baltimore in 1876. Membership in the Methodist church coincided with Weaver's interest in the growing movement for prohibition of the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. His income and prestige grew along with his family, which included seven children by 1877. Weaver's success allowed him to build a large new home for his family, which still stands.
Weaver's work for the party led many to support his nomination to represent Iowa's 6th congressional district in the federal House of Representatives in 1874. Many party insiders, however, were wary of Weaver's association with the Prohibition movement and preferred to remain uncommitted on the divisive issue. At the convention, Weaver led on the first ballot, but ultimately lost the nomination by one vote to Ezekiel S. Sampson, a local judge. Weaver's allies attributed his loss to "the meanest kind of wire pulling", but Weaver shrugged off the defeat and aimed instead at the gubernatorial nomination in 1875. He launched a vigorous effort, courted delegates around the state, and explicitly endorsed Prohibition and greater state control of railroad rates. Weaver attracted many delegates' support, but alienated those who were friendly to the railroads and wished to avoid the liquor issue. Opposition was scattered among several lesser-known candidates, mostly members of Senator William B. Allison's conservative wing of the party. They united at the convention when a delegate unexpectedly nominated former governor Kirkwood. The nomination carried easily and, after Allison's associates persuaded him to accept it, Kirkwood was nominated, and went on to win the election. In a further defeat, the delegates refused to endorse Prohibition in the party platform. Weaver had small consolation in a nomination to the state Senate, but he lost to his Democratic opponent in the election that fall.
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