“Samson and the Temple of Slavery”

Perhaps no one epitomized an age the way Thomas Hart Benton captured the prevailing spirit and contradictions of the period 1820 to 1850. He became the first senator to serve for thirty consecutive years, representing the border state of Missouri, whose controversial admission to the Union in 1821 triggered the first debate over slavery. Theodore Roosevelt, in his biography of Benton, remarked: “No other American Statesman, except John Quincy Adams—certainly neither of his great contemporaries, Webster and Clay—kept doing continually better work throughout his term of public service, or showed himself able to rise to a higher level at the very end than at the beginning.”