Author Chittenden Lucius Eugene

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Lucius Eugene Chittenden (May 24, 1824 - July 22, 1900) was a Vermont author, banker, lawyer, politician and peace advocate who served as Register of the Treasury during the Lincoln administration. Chittenden was born in Williston, Vermont, the son of Giles and Betsey (Hollenbeck) Chittenden. He was the 2nd-great-grandson of Vermont's first governor, Thomas Chittenden. He received his early education in the district schools of Williston and academies in Williston, Hinesburg and Cambridge. He studied law with a variety of attorneys, and was admitted to the bar in Franklin County in 1844. He opened a law office in Burlington the next year. He became interested in politics and public affairs early in his career, gained prominence in the anti-slavery movement and the Free Soil Party, and published from 1848 to 1851, with E. A. Stansbury, the "Free Soil Courier." After helping Democrat John S. Robinson get elected governor in 1852, he became active in the newly formed Republican Party. He w

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as elected state senator from Chittenden County, and served from 1856 to 1860, while also serving as president of the Commercial Bank in Burlington. Governor Erastus Fairbanks, in February 1861, appointed Chittenden one of five Vermont delegates to the Washington Peace Conference, a group formed to try avert the coming Civil War. The other delegates were former Governor Hiland Hall, Levi Underwood, H. Henry Baxter, and B. D. Harris. Chittenden was selected recorder of the conference, and published its records in 1864. In March 1861, President Lincoln's new Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, a former member of the defunct Free Soil Party, offered Chittenden the position of Register of the U.S. Treasury, which he accepted, serving in that office for the remainder of Lincoln's first administration, resigning in 1864 due to poor health. When he resigned from the Lincoln Administration, he returned to Vermont to regain his health, but by 1866 was living in Tarrytown, N.Y., where he practiced as an attorney until at least 1894. He returned to Burlington at some point, where he died. Chittenden was married to Mary Hatch in 1856, and fathered three children.

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