Husband Hon. Andrew "Tariff Andy" Stewart 1 2
Born: 11 Jun 1791 - German Twp, Fayette Co, PA 1
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Died: 16 Jul 1872 - Uniontown, Fayette Co, PA 3
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Father: Abraham Stewart ( - ) 2 4
Mother: Mary Oliphant ( - ) 1 2
Marriage: Abt 1825
Wife [Unk] Shriver
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Father: David Shriver ( - ) 3
Mother:
Children
1 M Lt.-Com. William F. Stewart, U.S.N. 3
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Died: 24 Jan 1870 3
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2 M Col. Andrew Stewart 3
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3 M D. Shriver Stewart 3
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General Notes: Husband - Hon. Andrew "Tariff Andy" Stewart
Andrew Stewart, one of the most distinguished public men of Fayette County, Pennsylvania (which was always his home from birth to death). At an early age he became self-dependent; till eighteen he worked on a farm and taught a country school, afterwards, to pay his way while going to school and reading law, he acted as a scrivener and as clerk at a furnace. In his twenty-fourth year he was admitted to the bar (January, 1815), and in the same year was elected to the Legislature; was re-elected for three years, and when a candidate for the Senate, without opposition, President Monroe tendered him the appointment of district attorney for the United States, which, preferring to a seat in the Senate, he accepted, but resigned it after his election to Congress in 1820, where he served eighteen years out of a period of thirty. He served in the 17th, 20th, 22d, 23d, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th Congresses, going in and going out with the Hon. Thomas H. Benton.
In 1848, when Mr. Stewart was a candidate for the Vice-Presidency, he declined a nomination for Congress, and in the convention in Philadelphia, after the nomination of President Taylor, it was left to the Pennsylvania delegation to nominate a candidate for Vice-President, who, after having retired to agree upon a nominee, upon the first ballot Mr. Stewart had fourteen out of twenty-six, the remaining twelve voting for Mr. McKennan and several others, when, without taking a second ballot to make it unanimous, the chairman of the delegation hurried back into the convention and reported that they had failed to agree, whereupon Mr. Fillmore was nominated and confirmed, as was stated and published at the time without contradiction.
On the accession of Gen. Taylor to the Presidency, the Pennsylvania delegation in Congress recommended Mr. Stewart for Secretary of the Treasury; but being at the time confined to a sick-bed, he declined the appointment; and it may be stated as a remarkable fact, true of no other man living or dead, that Mr. Stewart served in Congress with every President before Gen. Grant, except the first five, and Taylor, who was never in Congress.
While in Congress Mr. Stewart served on several of the most important committees, among them as chairman of the Committee on the Tariff and the Committee of Internal Improvements, constituting together, what was well called by Mr. Clay, "The American System," in the advocacy of which Mr. Stewart commenced and ended his political life. This system, he always contended, lay at the foundation of the national prosperity, the one protecting the national industry, and the other developing the national resources. He called it the "political thermometer," which always had and always would indicate the rise and fall of the national prosperity.
Mr. Stewart belonged to the Democratic party up to 1828, when the party, at the dictation of the South, under the lead of Van Buren, Buchanan, and others, gave up the tariff and internal improvements for office; here Mr. Stewart took an independent stand. He said he would stand by his measures, going with those who went for and against those who went against them. He came home in the midst of the excited contest between Jackson and Adams for the Presidency in 1828, when his constituents were known to be more than two to one for Jackson, and in a public speech declared his intention "to vote for Adams, whose friends supported his measures, while the Democratic party, as such, opposed them. If for this they chose to turn him out, so be it, he would never surrender his principles for office. If he did he would be a political hypocrite; unworthy the support of any honest man; he would rather go out endeavoring to support what, in his conscience, he believed to be the true interests of his constituents and his country than to go in by meanly betraying them."
The Democrats took up Mr. Hawkins, of Greene County, then Speaker of the Senate, and used every means to exasperate the Jackson men against Mr. Stewart; yet, with all their efforts, although Jackson had a majority of two thousand eight hundred-more than two votes to one-in his district, Mr. Stewart was elected over the Jackson candidate by a majority of two hundred and thirty-five,-a result unprecedented, showing a degree of personal popularity on the one side, and of magnanimity and forbearance on the other, without a parallel in the history of elections. Mr. Stewart was afterwards re-elected for four terms, when he peremptorily declined a renomination.
Mr. Stewart carried into private life the same devotion to those measures that distinguished him while in the public service, and until the time of his death he was found among the foremost in advocating railroad improvements which promised to make his native county one of the richest and most prosperous in the state. To show his constant zeal and restless activity in the cause of domestic industry and home manufactures, it may be stated that he erected a blast-furnace, rebuilt a glass-works, built eleven saw-mills, four flouring-mills, planing-mills, etc., besides more than two hundred tenant and other houses; he bought and sold over eighty thousand acres of land, and had between thirty thousand and forty thousand acres still left at his death, much of it in the West; and yet twenty-one years of the prime of his life were devoted to the services of his country in her state and national Legislatures.
He and his wife raised a family of six children, who were all living except one, in 1882.