| George Ticknor Curtis (1812–1894) |
Non-Mormon attorney/lobbyist
for the Church, 1886 through at least 1887, recommended or perhaps
also engaged by Senator Leland Stanford.
Basic source: Webster's
American Biographies, 242.
| Mormon lobbyist | A successful attorney and historian, Curtis wrote pro-Mormon articles for New York newspapers and magazines, most notably the New York Evening Post, July 14, 1887, and The Forum, November 1887. | |||
| Education Patent attorney |
Born November 28, 1812 in Watertown, Massachusetts, Curtis graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the bar in 1836 and worked as a patent attorney for Charles Goodyear, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Cyrus H. McCormick. | |||
| Massachusetts
House Cotton Whig and Democrat Fugitive Slave Law |
He served in the Massachussetts House of Representatives (1840–1843). was one of the “Cotton Whigs,” allied with associated with Daniel Webster, who joined the Democrats when the Whig party dissolved in 1856. Later, as U.S. commisisoner, Curtis was compelled to send a former slave, Thomas Sims, back to slavery in compliance with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. | |||
| Dred Scott defense attorney | Curtis was a defense attorney for former slave Dred Scott, when that case reached the Supreme Court in 1857. Scott, a runaway slave from Missouri, claimed his freedom on the basis that he had lived seven years in a free state and a free territory, but the proslavery court declared that not only was he still a slave, the law guaranteeing slavery would not enter the new midwestern territories of the United States was unconstitutional. The decision further polarized relations between the North and South. | |||
| Historian Federalist |
Curtis wrote biographies of Daniel Webster (1870) and James Buchanan (1883), and many legal treatises, but his two-volume Constitutional History of the United States … to the Close of the Civil War (1889, 1896) has been called the classic Federalist interpretation of the Constitution. | |||
| Retainer renewed |