John Bingham

After graduation, Bingham returned to Mercer, Pennsylvania to read law with John James Pearson and William Stewart, and he was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar on March 25, 1840 and the Ohio bar by year's end. Bingham then returned to Cadiz, Ohio, to begin his legal and political career. An active Whig, Bingham campaigned for President William Henry Harrison. His uncle, Thomas, a prominent Presbyterian in the area, had served as associate judge in the Harrison County Court of Common Pleas from 1825 to 1839. The young lawyer's practice extended to Tuscarawas County, Ohio, and its seat, New Philadelphia. In 1846, Bingham won his first election, as district attorney for Tuscarawas County, serving from 1846 to 1849.[6]

Bingham's political activity continued despite the Whig Party's decline. Campaigning as candidate of the Opposition Party, he was elected to the Thirty-fourth Congress, representing the 21st Congressional District. In Washington, DC, he roomed at the same boarding house as fellow Ohio Representative Joshua Giddings, a prominent abolitionist Bingham admired.[7] Voters re-elected Bingham to the Thirty-fifth, Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Congresses as a Republican. However, the district was one of two Ohio districts eliminated in the redistricting following the census of 1860. Bingham thus ran for re-elected from what became the 16th District. Known for his abolitionist views, he lost to Democratic peace candidate Joseph W. White, and thus failed to return for the Thirty-eighth Congress, in part because Union soldiers (mostly-Republican leaning), who were away from home fighting in the war, were not allowed to vote by mail in Ohio at the time. Nonetheless, the House of Representatives appointed him as one of the managers of impeachment proceedings against West H. Humphreys.

During the Civil War, Bingham strongly supported the Union and became known as a Radical Republican. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him Judge Advocate of the Union Army with the rank of major during his hiatus from Congress, and Bingham briefly became solicitor of the United States Court of Claims in 1865. Bingham’s judge advocate service was exceptional in the sense that he was a prosecutor or appellate reviewer in three significant military trials. He oversaw critical aspects of the trials of General Fitz-John Porter in 1863, Surgeon General William Hammond in 1864, and the military commission trial of the Lincoln Assassination conspirators in 1864.[8]

Bingham defeated White in the next congressional election (Ohio had changed its law and now allowed soldiers away from home to vote by mail) and thus returned to serve in the Thirty-ninth Congress, which first met on March 4, 1865.

John Bingham (left) along with Joseph Holt (center) and Henry Burnett (right) were the three prosecutors in charge of the Lincoln assassination trial.

The following month, the capital fell into chaos as John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, and Booth's co-conspirator Lewis Powell severely injured Secretary of State William H. Seward on the night of April 14, 1865. Booth died on April 26, 1865 from a gunshot wound. When the trials for the conspirators involved in the Lincoln assassination were ready to start, Bingham's old friend from Cadiz, Edwin Stanton, appointed him to serve as Assistant Judge Advocate General along with General Henry Burnett, another Assistant Judge Advocate General, and Joseph Holt, the Judge Advocate General.

The accused conspirators were George Atzerodt, David Herold, Lewis Powell (Paine), Samuel Arnold, Michael O'Laughlen, Edman Spangler, Samuel Mudd, and Mary Surratt. The trial began on May 10, 1865. The three prosecutors spent nearly two months in court, awaiting the jury's verdict. Bingham and Holt attempted to obscure the fact that there were two plots. The first plot was to kidnap the president and hold him hostage in exchange for the Confederate prisoners held by the Union. The second was to assassinate the president, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward and thereby throw the government into electoral chaos. The prosecution did not reveal the existence of a diary taken from Booth's body, which made clear that the assassination plan dated from 14 April. The defense surprisingly did not call for Booth's diary to be produced in court.

On June 29, 1865, the eight were found guilty for their involvement in the conspiracy to kill the President. Spangler was sentenced to six years in prison; Arnold, O'Laughlen and Mudd were sentenced to life in prison, and Atzerodt, Herold, Paine and Surratt were sentenced to hang. They were executed July 7, 1865. Surratt was the first woman in American history to be executed. O'Laughlen died in prison in 1867. Arnold, Spangler and Mudd were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in early 1869.

In 1866, during the Thirty-ninth Congress, Bingham was appointed to a subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction tasked with considering suffrage proposals. As a member of the subcommittee, Bingham submitted several versions of an amendment to the Constitution to apply the Bill of Rights to the States. His final submission, which was accepted by the Committee on April 28, 1866, read, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Committee recommended for the language to become Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It was introduced in the spring of 1866, passing both houses by June 1866.[9]

In the closing debate in the House, Bingham stated:

[M]any instances of State injustice and oppression have already occurred in the State legislation of this Union, of flagrant violations of the guarantied privileges of citizens of the United States, for which the national Government furnished and could furnish by law no remedy whatever. Contrary to the express letter of your Constitution, 'cruel and unusual punishments' have been inflicted under State laws within this Union upon citizens, not only for crimes committed, but for sacred duty done, for which and against which the Government of the United States had provided no remedy and could provide none. It was an opprobrium to the Republic that for fidelity to the United States they could not by national law be protected against the degrading punishment inflicted on slaves and felons by State law. That great want of the citizen and stranger, protection by national law from unconstitutional State enactments, is supplied by the first section of this amendment.[10]

Except for the addition of the first sentence of Section 1, which defined citizenship, the amendment weathered the Senate debate without substantial change. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

Despite Bingham's likely intention for the 14th Amendment to apply the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights to the States, the US Supreme Court declined to interpret it that way in the Slaughter-House Cases and in United States v. Cruikshank. In the 1947 case of Adamson v. California, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black argued in his dissent that the framers' intent should control the Court's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and he attached a lengthy appendix that quoted extensively from Bingham's congressional testimony.[11] Though the Adamson Court declined to adopt Black's interpretation, the Court for the next 25 years, used a doctrine of selective incorporation that eventually extended the protections in the Bill of Rights as well as other, unenumerated rights.

Ohio ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on January 4, 1867, but Bingham continued to explain its extension of citizenship during the fall election season.[12] The Fourteenth Amendment has vastly expanded civil rights protections and has come to be cited in more litigation than any other amendment to the Constitution.[13]

John A. Bingham and Thaddeus Stevens before the Senate addressing the vote on President Andrew Johnson's impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Bingham continued his career as a representative and was re-elected to the Fortieth, Forty-first, and Forty-second Congresses. He served as Chairman of the Committee on Claims from 1867 to 1869 and a member of the Committee on the Judiciary from 1869 to 1873.

In 1868, Bingham was one of the House managers in the impeachment trial of U.S. President Andrew Johnson. Bingham was also implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal and in 1872, he lost the election. Three local Republican political bosses made a deal to cut out Bingham, instead selecting Lorenzo Danford as the party's candidate. Thus, Danford came to represent the 16th district in the Forty-third Congress and was re-elected several times but with a hiatus.

President Ulysses Grant then appointed his ally Bingham as United States Minister to Japan, which involved a salary increase but also economic responsibilities with respect to the small legation. (The Legation was upgraded to Embassy and the title of Minister upgraded to Ambassador in the early 20th century)Initially, Bingham tried to switch appointments with John Watson Foster of Indiana, whom Grant had appointed minister to Mexico, but Foster declined. Bingham thus sailed with his wife and two of his three daughters to Japan.[14] Bingham ultimately served longer than any other US Chief of Mission to that nation, for more than twelve years and under four Republican presidents, from May 31, 1873 to July 2, 1885, when his successor, appointed by newly-elected Democratic President Grover Cleveland, arrived. (The next-longest serving American ambassador to Japan would prove to be former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Michael Joseph Mansfield, who served for ten years a century later).

Bingham initially moved the embassy from an unsuitable location and replaced a problematic interpreter with a Presbyterian missionary from Ohio and then mastered the art of consulting with his superiors in the State Department and trimmed the imperialistic ambitions of fellow Union veteran Charles Le Gendre.[15] Bingham came to greatly respect Japanese culture, but he also presciently expressed his fear that Japan's military culture would hurt the country's development.[16][17]

Bingham most distinguished himself from other Western diplomats by fighting against the unequal treaties imposed upon Japan by Britain, particularly provisions for extraterritoriality and tariff control by Westerners.[18] Initially, Bingham supported Japan's right to restrict hunting by foreigners to certain times and places and later its right to regulate incoming ships via quarantines to restrict the spread of cholera. Bingham later negotiated return of the Shimonoseki indemnity in 1877 as well as a revision of Japan's treaty with the United States in 1879, which restored some tariff autonomy to Japan, conditioned upon other treaties with Westerners.[19]