John Adam Kasson

Kasson, John Adam (11 Jan. 1822-18 May 1910), diplomat, congressman, and postal official, was born in Charlotte, Vermont, the son of John Steele Kasson and Nancy Blackman, farmers. His father died a few years after Kasson's birth, and his mother managed the farm. He was educated in the common schools, Burlington Academy, and the University of Vermont, where he received an A.B. in 1842. Kasson tutored for a season in a slaveholding family near Charlottesville, Virginia. He then spent three months in his brother's law office in Burlington, Vermont, before moving to Worcester, Massachusetts, to read intensively under Emory Washburn, later a professor of law at Harvard. Kasson was admitted to the bar in 1844. Although he was only mildly antislavery, he attended the Free Soil Convention of 1848 in Buffalo. In 1850, after practicing law for six years in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he reestablished himself in St. Louis. That year he married Catherine Eliot; they had no children.

Handsome in appearance and impressive in bearing, Kasson was intelligent, articulate, and unusually observant. He also was witty and, by middle age, somewhat crotchety. Although he was farsighted on international matters, conflict between his idealistic and opportunistic strains often compromised his stand on domestic issues. In 1857 ambition prompted him to settle in Des Moines, Iowa, where he soon became state chairman of the Republican party. Three years later Kasson marshaled support for Abraham Lincoln at the national convention. He also exercized a moderating influence on the party platform. Appointed assistant postmaster general in 1861, he was soon recognized for his administrative skill. He played a key role at the Paris Postal Conference of 1863, the first of nine diplomatic missions on which he served.

Kasson's control of patronage in Iowa helped him win election to Congress in 1862 for the first of six terms spread over twenty-two years. He supported Lincoln's military, emancipation, and Reconstruction programs, and he remained loyal to Andrew Johnson, though he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Privately Kasson disapproved of the vengefulness of Radical Republicans and scorned conservative Democrats who wanted no Reconstruction at all. Publicly he went along with the Radicals on some issues and avoided confrontation on others by not voting. On balance, he apparently restrained the Radicals somewhat. They retaliated by using publicity over his 1866 divorce to thwart his nomination for a third term that year. Elected to the Iowa state legislature in 1867, Kasson led the movement to build a state capitol in Des Moines.

Kasson returned to Congress in 1873 to reemerge as an expedient moderate with a larger public vision than most of his colleagues. Yet he had no solution to the refusal of militant white southerners to observe federal law; even though he supported the second Civil Rights Bill in 1875, he voted against the Force Bills of 1874 and 1875. When an 1876 libel suit against his more malicious critics resulted in a hung verdict, he declined to run for a third consecutive term. He made rankly partisan speeches for Rutherford B. Hayes in the presidential campaign that fall, then involved himself indirectly in the arrangements leading to Hayes's disputed designation as president.

As Hayes's minister to Austria-Hungary in 1877, Kasson gave special attention to the newly created Balkan countries. He succeeded, for example, in drawing up commercial treaties with Serbia and Romania that were signed after he left Vienna. On the other hand, he failed to interest Secretary of State William M. Evarts in proposing that the Berlin Congress of 1879 provide religious and political freedom to Jews in Romania. Yet his repeated calls for commercial expansion and its concomitants--marine and naval expansion and an American-controlled isthmian canal--helped build the intellectual foundations for the expansionist nineties.

Elected again to Congress in 1880 for the first of two final terms, Kasson lost a bid for the Speakership but emerged as the leader of the House on foreign affairs. He piloted through committee a measure to foster a flexible tariff system, which eventuated instead in the "Mongrel Tariff" of 1883. He resisted a bill to exclude Chinese immigration for twenty years but was forced to accept a ten-year exclusion. He convinced the Foreign Affairs Committee, though not the entire House, to align behind federal incorporation of a private company to construct a canal across Nicaragua. He supported funding the Civil Service Commission under the Pendleton Act, even as he continued to support aspects of the patronage system. He voted enthusiastically for the Naval Appropriation Bill of 1884.

Kasson left Congress in the summer of 1884 to become minister to Germany. As head of the American delegation to an international conference on Central Africa presided over by Otto von Bismarck, he championed a host of enlightened policies ranging from neutralization of the Congo to free trade within it. His proposals to extend the "rights" of natives were rejected, as was his resolution to prohibit the liquor trade. He won approval of a strong resolution outlawing the slave trade, but the United States failed to ratify the Congo Treaty.

Kasson continued to serve the American government into his eightieth year. He performed notably as president of the Centennial Commission of 1887 and less successfully as commissioner to the Berlin Conference on Samoa in 1889, partly because of the obstructionism of President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine. He was one of six American members of the British-American Joint High Commission that made an inconclusive effort in 1898-1899 to settle a Canadian-American boundary dispute in Alaska. From 1897 to 1901 Kasson served as President William McKinley's minister plenipotentiary to negotiate tariff reciprocity treaties. He negotiated numerous treaties, some on very favorable terms for the United States, that languished in the Senate unratified.

Kasson was a secondary figure of substantially more than average merit. By defining terms, crystallizing problems, fostering international arbitration, and pushing tariff reciprocity, he advanced many important programs incrementally. As his biographer appropriately concluded, Kasson's reputation "rests firmly upon his cumulative record as a constructive conservative" (Younger, p. 383). Kasson died in Washington, D.C.

Bibliography

The most important collection of Kasson's papers is in the Iowa State Department of History and Archives, Des Moines. The Grenville M. Dodge and Samuel J. Kirkwood Collections are housed there, as is part of the James S. Clarkson Collection. Another part of the Clarkson collection is in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. Kasson's letters as a tutor in Virginia are in the Alderman Library, University of Virginia. The Department of State Archives contain Kasson's diplomatic dispatches. Other useful Department of State series include the John A. Kasson Samoan Conference Papers, 1889; the John A. Kasson Reciprocity Papers, 1897-1901; and the Post Office Department: Journal and Letterbooks of the Postmaster General (n.d.). Two autobiographical statements by Kasson are in the Annals of Iowa 4 (Jan. 1910) and 12 (July 1920). Edward Younger, John A. Kasson: Politics and Diplmacy from Lincoln to McKinley (1955), is a full, authoritative, and well-written biography. Obituaries are in the New York Times and the Washington Post, both 19 May 1910.

William H. Harbaugh

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