| Interment Location | Visited | |
|---|---|---|
| Toledo, OH | April 12, 2023 |
Ohioan James Mitchell Ashley rests near a body of water in Toledo’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Ashley was a journalist-turned-politician; a five-term congressman who represented Ohio’s 5th district from 1859 to 1863 and its 10th district from 1863 to 1869. Highlights of Ashley’s time in Washington include his efforts in successfully passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which outlaws slavery and indentured servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” On January 7, 1867, Ashley became the first member of Congress to formally call for an impeachment inquiry against President Andrew Johnson because of his Reconstruction policies. Thought even by many critics of Johnson to be premature, Ashley’s measure was sent to the Judiciary Committee. In June, the Judiciary Committee voted 5-4 against recommending impeachment. Succeeding events did lead to Johnson’s eventual impeachment, though. Johnson was acquitted in May 1868, but was rejected by the Democratic Party in his bid to remain in the White House. Ashley was defeated for re-election that November, and so both he and Johnson saw their terms end in March 1869. The next month, new president Ulysses S. Grant made the ousted congressman the territorial governor of Montana. Tensions with Montana Democrats over Ashley’s political appointments and his vocal disapproval of the exploitative Chinese coolie system of labor prompted Grant to remove Ashley in July 1870.
The congressman’s epitaph on the Ashley family obelisk eulogizes him as “a builder.” The plaque credits him as “a pioneer in the building of the city of Toledo” from 1849 until his death in 1896. It continues to note that the onetime Jacksonian Democrat was one of the organizers of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh in 1854. The marker characterizes Ashley’s decade in the House of Representatives as one in which “he rendered notable service to the nation in the mighty struggle for liberty and the preservation of the Union.” His three-year tenure as chairman of the House Committee on Territories is acknowledged, and he is credited with “organizing and naming Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Nevada and Arizona.” Furthermore, it states that he was “recognized by common consent and honored as the leader in Congress of the battle for the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment,” and concludes with his status as the man behind the development of the Ann Arbor Road rail system from 1878 into the 1880s.
The Thirteenth Amendment was passed by the Senate in April 1864, but the House failed to do so in its vote that June. Once the November elections were through, Republicans renewed their attempts to abolish chattel slavery. It was James Ashley who reintroduced the proposed amendment in the House on January 6, 1865. The Toledoan was among the chief pols who strategized how to secure the votes needed to finally pass the amendment. The House had 183 members at that time, with 122 votes necessary to meet the two-thirds threshold. After a delay to shore up more support, the day of the vote arrived on January 31, 1865. Ashley feared another failure; it was rumored that peace commissioners were en route to Washington, and the line of thought was that congressmen who were on the fence would vote against the amendment in order to preserve talks with the pro-slavery, southern negotiators. Because the commissioners were actually on their way to Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, President Abraham Lincoln was able to truthfully convey that no peace commissioners were in Washington, “or likely to be in it.” On the floor, Ashley yielded his time to Democrats who were pledged to support the amendment, which historian Doris Kearns Goodwin hails as “wise.” Eight Democrats abstained from voting, which lowered the magic number to 117. The final tally was 119-56. In December, enough states had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment that it became enshrined as part of the Constitution.
Ashley’s detractors — which included his peers, contemporary journalists, and historians — found many faults with the congressman. Author Brenda Wineapple cites some examples in her 2019 book, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation. Wineapple relays that Ashley’s scorners knew him “as an ambitious lightweight interested only in his own advancement.” Nineteenth-century newspaperman Benjamin Perley Poore reminisces in one of his publications that Ashley was “[a] man of the lightest mental calibre and most insufficient capacity.” James A. Garfield, a fellow Ohio Republican representative, dismissed Ashley and early impeachment advocates as “impracticable.” Yet, Wineapple points out, Ashley’s firm antislavery actions earned him the praise of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American League of Tennessee decades on. In a souvenir printed in Ashley’s honor in the 1890s, league president William H. Young writes, “Mr. Lincoln was the mouthpiece of Unionism; Mr. Davis of State sovereignty; Mr. Ashley of freedom. […] The followers of Mr. Ashley have seen the freedom of all men acknowledged in theory at least.”
Ashley was portrayed by actor David Costabile in director-producer Steven Spielberg’s 2012 drama film, Lincoln. The movie narrowly focuses on the efforts of those within the U.S. government to pass the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives. Contrary to his real-life abolitionist zeal and conviction of purpose, Lincoln‘s Ashley appears cowardly and easy to push around. The on-screen depiction bears little semblance of the Radical Republican who was an ardent supporter of abolition, natural rights, women’s suffrage, Black suffrage, and free labor.
Fast Facts
Born: November 14, 1824 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Spouse: Emma Smith Ashley (m. 1851-1896)
Primary Political Affiliation: Republican Party
House Tenure: 1859-1869
Gubernatorial Tenure: 1869-1870
Died: September 16, 1896 in Alma, Michigan
Cause of Death: Heart Failure
Age: 71
Interment: Woodlawn Cemetery, Toledo, Ohio
"You believe, all of us believe, that a truly democratic government will see to it that the poor and defenseless are protected against the aggressions of the rich and powerful."
- James M. Ashley
January 31, 1859 in an address delivered in Charloe, Ohio
Sources Consulted and Further Reading
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.
Library of Congress. “Image 1 of [Duplicate copy of the souvenir from the Afro-American League of Tennessee to Hon. James M. Ashley of Ohio]. Appendix.” Accessed May 15, 2024. https://www.loc.gov/resource/lcrbmrp.t0d09/?sp=1&st=image.
Poore, Benjamin Perley. Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis II. Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886. https://archive.org/details/perleysreminisce02poor/mode/1up.
Rosen, Steven. “Lincoln Movie Underplays James Ashley’s Role.” Huffpost. February 21, 2013. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/james-ashley_b_2726176.
Wineapple, Brenda. The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation. New York: Random House, 2019.
Zietlow, Rebecca E. The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Zietlow, Rebecca E. “James Ashley’s Thirteenth Amendment.” Columbia Law Review 112, no. 7 (2012): 1697-1731. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41708162.
