When Vt. helped give birth to the GOP

CORNWALL | Imagine Vermont as a stronghold of Republican political ideals. You're kidding, right? No, there was a time in the 19th and 20th centuries when the Green Mountain State was dominated by the Grand Old Party, later of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, and Trump; a time when Vermont Republicans felt in-command of the political stage; a time when some residents didn't snub their noses at conservative leaders (and vice versa). Vermont in those days looked and felt more like modern-day Texas. Alas, today, GOP strongholds have moved to other states, far to the west and south of Vermont, to smudge their part of the political map rendered, since the election of 1988, the color red. Forgotten by most Vermonters is the true story of an enterprising attorney from the Vermont cow town of Cornwall in Addison County; a man who made an indelible mark on the political landscape of the state and the nation during the early to mid-1800s. Solomon Foot, born in Cornwall, was a loyal Whig Party member who became a pioneer of the fledgling Republican Party in mid-century. The Whigs, short for whiggamor (a nickname first applied to 17th-century Scottish rebels) was the sole party of America's revolutionaries during the 1770s and 1780s. But after the demise of the Whigs by the 1850s, the party's political philosophy, which stressed free speech (even if it offended some), the individual, free states, and free enterprise, was quickly absorbed by its replacement, the modern Republicans. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig until the party morphed into the GOP-Republican Party. Thus, Lincoln became the first Republican president in 1860, ironically running against Democrat U.S. Sen Stephen Douglas (D-Illinois), a Brandon, Vermont, native (and at a time when Democrats were few and far between in the Green Mountain State). In Vermont, Solomon Foot helped establish the state as a bastion for Republican ideals by the start of the Civil War, a far cry from the state's post-1960s role as a cradle for liberal Democrat "blue state" politics. Foot was born Nov. 19, 1802, the son of Dr. Solomon and Betsey Crossett Foot. The Foots lived across the road in Cornwall from Vermont Gov. William Slade (W). Slade also served as a Vermont congressman. The young Cornwaller developed skills as a deep thinker, witty speaker, and raconteur. He married his sweetheart, Emily Fay of Rutland, in 1830. He was an old-fashioned, yet likable conservative lawyer, state representative, and senator. Foot spent more than a quarter-century in various elected offices. After being admitted to the Vermont bar in 1831, Foot served as an Addison County state legislator starting in 1833. After a break from the government, he returned to state office from 1836 to 1838. Spending six years as a prosecuting attorney, Foot soon eyed a promising career in national politics. His successful 1843 U.S. House campaign focused on pre-Civil War conservative ideals and the call for a Whig form of "Manifest Destiny" on the American western frontier, although Foot and fellow Whigs, at the time, rejected the specific catchphrase coined by rival Jacksonian Democrats. Foot was elected a Whig congressman from Vermont in 1843. By 1850 he successfully transitioned his political fundraising machine to make a mad dash for the U.S. Senate. The mad dash paid off; he was elected to the influential post in 1850. Foot succeeded Middlebury resident U.S. Sen. Sam Phillips, a fellow Whig, and kept it all in the family, so to speak. After the demise of the Whigs in 1856 and over the growing free-state, slavery state controversy, Foote was reelected as a new Republican senator. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1856 until his death in 1866. The Cornwall native was third in line to be president during the Civil War. He was president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate (just like Democrat U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy is today) between 1861 and 1864. He died, at age 63, in the District of Columbia, on March 28, 1866. After a public funeral in the United States Senate Chamber, Foot's body was returned home to rest in eternity in Vermont. He is buried at the historic Evergreen Cemetery in Rutland.

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When Vt. helped give birth to the GOP

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