Voting Station

William W. Belknap

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Politician

The Resume

    (September 22, 1829-October 12, 1890)
    Born in Newburgh, New York
    During the Civil War, joined the Union Army as a major
    Promoted to brigadier general by the end of the war
    Secretary of War in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-76)
    Resigned from office (March 2, 1876)
    Unanimously impeached by the House of Representatives two hours later on corruption charges
    Senate voted 35-25 in favor of conviction, five votes short of the two-thirds majority needed (August 1, 1876)

Why he might be annoying:

    He violated the official US policy of neutrality during the Franco-Prussian War by selling arms and ammunition to France (1871).
    After gold was discovered in the Black Hills, he and Grant secretly agreed to withdraw the US soldiers that had been protecting the area, resulting in an influx of miners and triggering the Sioux War (1876).
    He provided the Army with inferior single-shot breech-loading rifles, which may have contributed to George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
    He accepted bribes for the contract to run the Army trading post at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. (John Evans, who ran the post, paid $12,000 a year to contractor Caleb Marsh, who sent half of that money to Belknap.)
    When the scandal broke, he initially claimed to be unaware of the payments and blamed his wife.
    That alibi unraveled when Marsh testified that he had made some of his payments to Belknap in person.
    One of the impeachment articles accused him of ‘prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain.’
    The Senators who voted to acquit him did so not because they thought he was innocent but because they felt the Senate did not have the right to try someone who no longer held office.
    After a century and a half of obscurity, his name resurfaced during the impeachment of Donald Trump, when he was cited as precedent for the Senate holding a trial of someone who no longer held office.

Why he might not be annoying:

    Irony Department (Small World Division): His Princeton roommate, Hiester Clymer, would lead the House investigation into the charges against him.
    During his first major battle, at Shiloh, his commander noted, ‘[He] was always in the right place at the right time, directing and encouraging officers and men as coolly as a veteran.’
    After the Great Chicago Fire, he dispatched two companies of troops to maintain order and sent tents and food from Army supplies to aid the survivors (1871).
    He arranged for the War Department to buy and preserve over 6,000 of Matthew Brady’s Civil War photos (1874).
    Part of the reason the Democratic majority in the House was eager to impeach him was his willingness to use Army troops to suppress the KKK and enforce black voting rights in the Reconstruction-Era South.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 15 Votes: 66.67% Annoying