"

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. ANDREW STEWART, now in his eighty-second year, was

born in Fayette county, Pa., and never lived out of it. His father,

Abraham Stewart, was born in York, Pa., and his mother, Mary Oliphant, in

Chester county, Pa. They emigrated while young to Fayette county, where

they were married in 1789. They raised a family of children, of whom the

eldest was Andrew, the subject of this notice, who was born June 11th,

1791, near Uniontown, where he now lives. 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. At the age of

twenty-three he was admitted to the bar, 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, going in and going out with the Hon. Thos. H. Benton; and he is

now the only surviving member of the seventeenth Congress, as stated by

President Buchanan, in a speech in Philadelphia, shortly before his death,

that he and "Mr. Stewart, of Fayette, were the only survivors of the

seventeenth Congress," to which they were elected in 1820. 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 3

Page 4

A B13IOGRAPHICAL SKETCIH. 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. "

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The American System

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