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American politician and diplomat

Caleb Cushing (January 17, 1800 – January 2, 1879) was an American Democratic politician and diplomat who served as a Member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts and the 23rd United States Attorney General under President Franklin Pierce. From 1874 until 1877, he was the United States Minister to Spain. Cushing was an eager proponent of territorial and commercial expansion, especially regarding the acquisition of Texas, Oregon and Cuba. He believed that enlarging the American sphere would fulfill "the great destiny reserved for this exemplar American Republic." Cushing secured the first American treaty with China, the Treaty of Wangxia of 1844; it gave American merchants trading rights in five Chinese ports. After the Civil War, Cushing negotiated a treaty with Colombia to give the United States a right of way for a trans oceanic Canal. He helped obtain a favorable settlement of the Alabama Claims, and as the ambassador to Spain in 1870s defused the troublesome Virginius Affair.

Cushing was born in Salisbury, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1800; he was the son of John Newmarch Cushing, a wealthy shipbuilder and merchant, and Lydia Dow, a delicate and sensitive woman from Seabrook, New Hampshire, who died when he was ten. The family moved across the Merrimack River to the prosperous shipping town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1802. He entered Harvard University at the age of 13 and graduated in 1817. He was a teacher of mathematics there from 1820 to 1821, and was admitted to practice in the Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas in December 1821; he began practicing law in Newburyport in 1824. There he attended the First Presbyterian Church. On November 23, 1824, Cushing married Caroline Elizabeth Wilde, daughter of Judge Samuel Sumner Wilde, of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. His wife died about a decade later, leaving him childless and alone. He never married again.

Cushing served as a Democratic Republican member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1825, then entered the Massachusetts Senate in 1826, and returned to the House in 1828. Afterwards, he spent two years in Europe from 1829 to 1831. Upon his return, he again served in the lower house of the state legislature in 1833 and 1834. Then, in late 1834, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. John Canfield Spencer was chosen instead.

In 1843, Cushing was appointed by President Tyler to be commissioner and United States Ambassador to China, holding this position until March 4, 1845. In addition to most favored nation status, Cushing made sure that Americans received extraterritoriality. In the following years American trade with China grew rapidly, thanks to the high speed clipper ships which carried relatively small amounts of high value cargo, such as ginseng and silk. American Protestant missionaries also began to arrive. The popular Chinese reaction was mostly hostile, but there was a favorable element that provided a base of support for American missionaries and businessmen. By 1850–64, China was enmeshed in the Taiping rebellion, a civil war which caused millions of deaths; foreign trade stagnated. While serving as commissioner to China he was also empowered to negotiate a treaty of navigation and commerce with Japan.

In 1847, while again a representative in the Massachusetts state legislature, he introduced a bill appropriating money for the equipment of a regiment to serve in the Mexican–American War; although the bill was defeated, he raised the necessary funds privately. In 1858, 1859, 1862, and 1863 he again served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Also during this time, he founded the Cushing Land Agency in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. The building it was housed in, now known as the Cushing Land Agency Building, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1860 he presided over the Democratic National Convention, which met first at Charleston and later at Baltimore, until he joined those who seceded from the regular convention. He then presided also over the convention of the seceding delegates, who nominated John C. Breckinridge for the Presidency. The selection caught many off guard, including Cushing himself. Radical Republicans in the U. S. Senate immediately challenged Cushing's loyalties on account of his earlier close personal rapport with Andrew Johnson and his alleged pre Civil War Copperhead sympathies. Their feelings of distrust turned into all out opposition to his confirmation when a (non political) letter that Cushing had written in 1861 to President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis was found and made public. As a result of rising furor, the nomination was withdrawn on January 13, 1874.

Cushing died in Newburyport on January 2, 1879, where he was laid to rest in the town's Highland Cemetery. The United States Revenue Cutter Caleb Cushing was named after Cushing. The Caleb Cushing served during the American Civil War and was destroyed by Confederate raiders during the Battle of Portland Harbor on June 27, 1863.