Charles Magill Conrad was an American lawyer and statesman from Louisiana. He served as a member of the United States Senate, United States House of Representatives, and was a Secretary of War.
Background
Charles Magill Conrad was born on December 24, 1804, in Winchester, Virginia, United States. On the side of his father, Frederick Conrad, he was descended from German stock that had come into the Shenandoah Valley in the early eighteenth century. On the side of his mother, Frances Thruston Conrad, who was the daughter of Charles Mynn Thruston, an Episcopal minister in Virginia and a colonel in the Revolutionary army, he was descended from English stock that had settled in Virginia in the seventeenth century. While he was a boy his father's family moved to Mississippi and later to Louisiana, settling near New Iberia.
Education
Charles was educated in a school in New Orleans maintained by a Dr. Huld, said to have been the founder of the first English school in that city. He studied law in the office of Abner L. Duncan in New Orleans and began the practice of his profession in 1828.
Career
Charles Magill Conrad was a member of the Louisiana state legislature for several terms and was serving in that capacity when he was appointed to the United States Senate in April 1842, in place of Alexander Mouton who had resigned. He was defeated by the legislature for reelection in January 1843, and hence retired in the following March.
In 1844 he was sent as a delegate to the Louisiana state constitutional convention, and in 1848 he was elected to Congress from the Louisiana 2nd District. He took his seat on December 3, 1849, and served until August 13, 1850, when he resigned to accept an appointment by President Fillmore to the office of Secretary of War. He retired from that position at the close of Fillmore’s administration in March 1853. In the memorable political campaign of 1860, he was active as a member of the Constitutional Union Party and was appointed one of the delegates from New Orleans to a state convention in June, to ratify the Bell and Everett national ticket and nominate candidates for state offices.
During the Civil War, he served first as a delegate from the 1st district of Louisiana to the Provisional Confederate Congress that met at Montgomery in February 1861 and later as a representative from Louisiana to the first and second Confederate Congresses, 1862-1864. His large estate was confiscated but after the close of the war, he resumed the practice of law in New Orleans and soon amassed a competency.
Achievements
Charles Magill Conrad had a distinguished career and played a prominent political role in the States of Lousiana legislature, United States Congress, and the Confederate Congress. He attended the Confederate constitutional convention in 1861, helped write parts of the Confederate constitution.
Politics
Conrad entered politics as a supporter of Andrew Jackson but shortly withdrew from the Democratic party and became a Whig over the Bank issue. During his brief term in Congress, the chief issue before that body was the admission of California as a free state. Conrad opposed the measure except as one of the conditions of a general compromise on the subject of slavery. He had resigned his seat in Congress, however, before the compromise measures of 1850 were agreed upon.
Personality
Conrad was very intense in his convictions and tenaciously persistent in support of whatever cause he espoused. In his earlier years, he was somewhat belligerent in disposition and fought a duel with a Dr. Hunt of New Orleans, brother of Randall Hunt, a noted lawyer of the time, in which he killed his antagonist. He had, nevertheless, a profound reverence for the majesty of the law and the sanctity of the courts. He was a man of small stature but of abounding energy.
Connections
Conrad married to Mary Eliza Angela Lewis. The pair had two children: Lawrence Lewis Conrad and Angela Lewis Conrad.
