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Biography of Hamilton Fish
Name: Hamilton Fish
Birth Date: August, 1808
Death Date: September 6, 1893
Place of Birth: New York, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: secretary of state, politician, governor
Hamilton Fish
As secretary of state under President Ulysses S. Grant, Hamilton Fish (1808-1893) settled the Alabama Claims and avoided war with Spain over the Cuban insurrection.Hamilton Fish was born on Aug. 3, 1808, in New York City. His father was a socially prominent lawyer and Federalist; his mother was from the old Stuyvesant family. Fish graduated with highest honors from Columbia College in 1827 and was admitted to the bar in 1830. He entered politics as a Whig; he was elected to Congress in 1842 and to the governorship in 1848. His administration expanded the New York canal system and established a statewide framework for public education. In 1851 he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Conservative in background and patrician in taste, he joined the upstart Republican party only after it was clear that the Whig party was dead beyond revival.Fish was not known nationally when President U.S. Grant appointed him secretary of state …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…captured by the Spanish, and 53 crewmen and passengers, including several Americans, were executed as pirates. The incident could have led to war, but again Fish cool-headedly negotiated a settlement, which included indemnities for the families of dead Americans and a Spanish promise (never fulfilled) to punish the officer responsible for the executions.Fish retired from public life in 1877 and busied himself in civic and social affairs. He died in New York on Sept. 6, 1893. Further Reading Amos E. Corning's Hamilton Fish (1918) has been largely superseded by Allan Nevins's rich and massive Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration (1936; rev. ed. 1957), based on Fish's letters and diary. Also valuable is the essay on Fish by Joseph Fuller in volume 7 of Samuel Flagg Bemis, ed., American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy (1929).Fish, Hamilton, Memoir of an American patriot, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway; Lanham, MD: Distributed by National Book Network, 1991.
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