|
Senate Years of Service: 1819-1844; 1848-1852 Party: Democratic Republican; Jacksonian; Democrat
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20090825081729im_/http://bioguide.congress.gov/bioguide/photo/K/K000217.jpg) |
Library of Congress |
KING, William Rufus de Vane, a Representative from North Carolina, a Senator from Alabama, and a
Vice President of the United States; born in Sampson County, N.C., April 7,
1786; attended private schools; graduated from the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill in 1803; studied law; admitted to the bar in 1806 and commenced
practice in Clinton, N.C.; member, State house of commons 1807-1809; city
solicitor of Wilmington, N.C., 1810; elected to the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and
Fourteenth Congresses and served from March 4, 1811, until November 4, 1816,
when he resigned; secretary of the legation at Naples and later at St.
Petersburg; returned to the United States in 1818 and located in Cahaba, Ala.;
planter; delegate to the convention which organized the State government; upon
the admission of Alabama as a State into the Union in 1819 was elected as a
Democratic Republican to the United States Senate; reelected as a Democratic
Republican and as a Jacksonian in 1822, 1828, 1834, and 1841, and served from
December 14, 1819, until April 15, 1844, when he resigned; served as President
pro tempore of the Senate during the Twenty-fourth through Twenty-seventh
Congresses; chairman, Committee on Public Lands (Twenty-second Congress),
Committee on Commerce (Twenty-second, Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth
Congresses); Minister to France 1844-1846; appointed and subsequently elected
as a Democrat to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the
resignation of Arthur P. Bagby and served from July 1, 1848, until his
resignation on December 20, 1852, due to poor health; served as President pro
tempore of the Senate during the Thirty-first and Thirty-second Congresses;
chairman, Committee on Foreign Relations (Thirty-first Congress), Committee on
Pensions (Thirty-first Congress); elected Vice President of the United States
on the Democratic ticket with Franklin Pierce in 1852 and took the oath of
office March 24, 1853, in Havana, Cuba, where he had gone for his health, which
was a privilege extended by special act of Congress; returned to his
plantation, Kings Bend, Alabama, and died there April 18, 1853; interment in
a vault on his plantation; reinterment in Live Oak Cemetery, Selma, Dallas
County, Ala.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography;
Dictionary of American Biography; Martin, John M. William
Rufus King: Southern Moderate. Ph.D. dissertation, University of North
Carolina, 1955; U.S. Congress.
Memorial Addresses. 33rd Cong., 1st sess., 1853. Washington,
D.C.: Armstrong, 1854.
|