Charles Jared Ingersoll

Charles Jared Ingersoll (October 3, 1782 – May 14, 1862) was an American lawyer and Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.

Biography

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he was the son of Jared Ingersoll who served in the Continental Congress, and brother of Joseph Reed Ingersoll.

Charles Ingersoll dropped out of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1799.^[1] He then studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1802 and commenced practice in Philadelphia. He traveled in Europe for a time, and was attached to the U. S. embassy in France. He was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the Thirteenth Congress, where he served as chairman of the United States House Committee on the Judiciary. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1814, having been appointed United States district attorney for Pennsylvania. He served in that office from 1815 to 1829, and was a member of the Pennsylvania canal and internal improvement convention in 1825. In 1829, he was removed from the office of district attorney by Andrew Jackson.

He was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1830, and a member of the State constitutional convention in 1837. He was appointed secretary of the legation to Prussia on March 8, 1837. He was an unsuccessful candidate in 1837 for election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Francis J. Harper in the Twenty-fifth Congress. He was again an unsuccessful candidate for election in 1838.

Ingersoll was elected as a Democrat to the Twenty-seventh and to the three succeeding Congresses. He served as chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs during the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Congresses). He was not a candidate for renomination in 1848. He was appointed Minister to France in 1847 but was not confirmed by the Senate. He died in 1862 in Philadelphia. Interment in The Woodlands Cemetery. His son Edward Ingersoll wrote on legal topics.

Works

• “Chiomara,” a poem published in the The Port Folio (1800)
• Edwy and Elgira, a tragedy (Philadelphia, 1801)
• Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters on American Literature and Politics (New York, 1810)
• “Julian,” a dramatic poem (1831)
• Historical Sketch of the Second War between the United States and Great Britain (4 vols., Philadelphia, 1845-'52).

He also published numerous anonymous contributions to the Democratic Press of Philadelphia, and to the National Intelligencer of Washington, on the controversies with England before the War of 1812 (1811–15). He published several “Speeches” concerning that war (1813–15), a discourse before the American Philosophical Society on the “Influence of America on the Mind,” which was republished in England and France (1823), a translation of a French work on the freedom of navigation, in the American Law Journal of 1829, and many other literary and political discourses. At the time of his death, he was preparing a History of the Territorial Acquisitions of the United States.

Bibliography

• Ingersoll, Charles Jared. Recollections, Historical, Political, Biographical, and Social, of Charles J. Ingersoll. Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., 1861
• Meigs, William Montgomery. The Life of Charles Jared Ingersoll. 1897. Reprint, New York: DaCapo Press, 1970.

References

Sources

• Charles Jared Ingersoll at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• The Political Graveyard

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wilson, James Grant; Fiske, John, eds. (1892). "Ingersoll, Jared". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton. 

External links

• The Charles Jared Ingersoll papers, including correspondence and writings, are available for research use at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
• Charles Jared Ingersoll at Find a Grave

Chairmen of the United States House Committee on the Judiciary C. Ingersoll Nelson Sergeant Nelson Webster Barbour Buchanan Davis Foster Beardsley Thomas Sergeant Barnard Wilkins Saunders Rathbun J. Ingersoll Thompson McLanahan Stanton Simmons Houston Hickman Wilson Bingham Butler Knott T. Reed Tucker Culberson Taylor Culberson Henderson Ray Jenkins Parker Clayton Webb Volstead Graham Sumners Michener Celler C. Reed Celler Rodino Brooks Hyde Sensenbrenner Conyers Smith Goodlatte