Lewis Charles Levin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lewis Charles Levin(November 10, 1808-March 14, 1860) was the first Jewish person elected to the United States Congress.

Lewis Charles Levin was born in Charleston, South Carolina and graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1828. After teaching for a time he practiced law in several states for a time. He settled in Philadelphia and edited the Philadelphia Daily Sun for a time. In that capacity he was arrested for "exciting to riot and treason" in inciting locals against a Catholic Church.[1]

He was a member of the American Party, predecessor to the "Know Nothings" of the 1850s, and is sometimes credited as one of the party's founders. He entered Congress on its platform in 1844. Once in office he argued in favor of prayer in the public schools and against immigration. His role in a nativist party is sometimes deemed a paradox, in spite of the fact that he was born in the United States. More intriguing and ironic, perhaps, was Levin's ability to equate "nativism" with anti-Catholicism, and to do so in Philadelphia, where sectarian animosity was minimal, and where native-born Catholics had lived side-by-side with Anglicans, Quakers, and others since the Colonial period.

Levin was elected as a candidate of the American Party to the Twenty-ninth, Thirtieth, and Thirty-first Congresses. He served as chairman of the United States House Committee on Engraving during the Thirtieth Congress. (As a side note, it was this Thirtieth Congress that saw a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln serve his one and only term in the House.) After three terms in the House, Levin lost his seat in the 1850 election and returned to teaching.

In 1905 a veteran Pennsylvania journalist and politician, Alexander Kelly McClure, recalled Levin as one of the shrewdest and most persuasive politicians of the period[2]:

A brilliant adventurer named Lewis C. Levin, a native of Charleston, S.C., and a peripatetic law practitioner, first in South Carolina, next in Maryland, next in Louisiana, next in Kentucky and finally in Pennsylvania, was the acknowledged leader of the Native American element that had erupted during the summer of 1844 in what is remembered as the disgraceful riots of that year in which Catholic churches and institutions were burnt by the mob... He was one of the most brilliant and unscrupulous orators I have ever heard. He presented a fine appearance, graceful in every action charming in rhetoric and utterly reckless in assertion. I have heard him both as a temperance and political orator, and I doubt whether during his day any person in either party of the State surpassed him on the hustings. He was elected by a good majority and was re-elected in 1846 and '48, thus serving six consecutive years as a representative from the city. (Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania, 1905, pp. 84-85.)


[edit] External links

Preceded by
Edward J. Morris		 Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Pennsylvania's 1st congressional district
1845 - 1851		 Succeeded by
Thomas B. Florence
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../l/e/w/Lewis_Charles_Levin_1439.html"