Representative Samuel Steel Blair

Samuel Steel Blair (December 5, 1821 – December 8, 1890) was a Republican United States Representative from Pennsylvania and a prominent Unionist voice in the U.S. House of Representatives during the American Civil War. Known for his forceful advocacy of a hard war policy and for linking the preservation of the Union to the destruction of slavery, he emerged as one of the more outspoken antislavery Republicans in Congress during the early 1860s.

Blair was born in Indiana, Indiana County, Pennsylvania, on December 5, 1821. He was educated in the public schools of his community and then attended Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, an institution that later became part of Washington & Jefferson College. He graduated from Jefferson College in 1838, demonstrating early academic promise that would support his subsequent legal and political career.

After completing his collegiate studies, Blair read law and pursued the traditional legal apprenticeship of the period. He was admitted to the bar in 1845 and, the following year, began the practice of law in Hollidaysburg, Blair County, Pennsylvania. From 1849 until 1864, he practiced in partnership with John Dean, who would later become a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Through this long-standing partnership and an active legal practice, Blair established himself as a respected attorney in central Pennsylvania and gained the professional standing that helped launch his political career.

An early adherent of the emerging Republican Party, Blair became involved in national politics as the sectional crisis deepened in the 1850s. He served as a delegate to the 1856 Republican National Convention, which nominated John C. Frémont for president, aligning himself with the party’s antislavery and Unionist platform. Building on this role, he was elected as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1858 and was reelected in 1860, serving in the Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Congresses from Pennsylvania. During the Thirty-seventh Congress, he was appointed chairman of the House Committee on Private Lands, a position that placed him in a significant role in overseeing legislation related to land claims and property issues at a time of rapid national expansion and civil conflict.

Blair’s congressional service coincided with the outbreak and escalation of the American Civil War, and he became particularly noted for his uncompromising stance toward the Confederacy and slavery. In a lengthy and widely remarked address to the House of Representatives on May 22, 1862, he argued that the rebellion could not be subdued by conciliation or compromise. Declaring that “the rebellion is to be subdued by the Army, not by concessions to treason; by the earnestness of war, not by the chicane of diplomacy,” he insisted that the federal government must not surrender “one foot” of its territorial jurisdiction and that the Union could never be at peace with a power that made slavery “the head of its corner.” In this speech, Blair identified slavery as “the great primary cause” of the war, asserting that it “prompted the war, sustains and supports it, and it is waged for the openly avowed purpose of its perpetuation.” He warned that unless the nation had the “courage and the resolution” to confront and destroy slavery, another rebellion and an even greater sacrifice of life and treasure would follow in a future generation.

Blair’s address went on to frame emancipation as both a moral imperative and a legitimate instrument of war. Drawing on the “analogous belligerent right of confiscation of enemy’s property,” he advocated for large-scale emancipation of enslaved people in the seceded states and urged the passage of a new confiscation bill to facilitate that process. He argued that the power to own human beings as property was a “tremendous” social and political force that would always distort republican government, and he endorsed what he described as the “Madisonian idea of converting chattels into men.” Far from seeing emancipation as a sign of national decline, he described it as “the surest evidence of our perpetuity as a nation.” In closing his oration, he urged his colleagues to treat the seceded southern states as if they were “a foreign Government of a thousand years’ existence” at war with the United States and pressed Congress to adopt decisive “measures to pursue and destroy the enemy” and “destroy the southern confederacy.” Summarizing his position, he declared: “This rebellion cannot be put down with soft words and lenient measures. We extended the olive branch full too long, until our flag was disgraced and war commenced by the mad conspirators. We must, by all the means at our command, strike down the power of rebels to assail us, and then the work is done.”

Despite his prominence as a wartime Republican and his leadership on issues related to the conduct of the war and emancipation, Blair’s political fortunes declined as the conflict continued. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection to the House in 1862 and left Congress at the conclusion of his term. After his defeat, he resumed the practice of law in Hollidaysburg, returning to the profession in which he had first made his reputation. He remained active in public affairs and, in 1874, attempted to regain higher office, but this effort was also unsuccessful, and he did not return to national elective office.

Blair spent his later years in Hollidaysburg, where he continued to be recognized as a figure associated with the Union cause and the Republican Party’s wartime policies. He died in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on December 8, 1890. His remains were interred in the Presbyterian Cemetery in that community, closing the life of a lawyer, legislator, and Civil War–era congressman whose speeches reflected the evolving Union war aims and the increasingly central place of emancipation in federal policy.