Background
Christopher Columbus Andrews was born on October 27, 1829 in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, United States, the son of Luther, a rural farmer, and Nabby (Beard) Andrews; he was the youngest of their four children.
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Diplomat lawyer officer writer
Christopher Columbus Andrews was born on October 27, 1829 in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, United States, the son of Luther, a rural farmer, and Nabby (Beard) Andrews; he was the youngest of their four children.
Andrews attended school during the winter months until 1843, when he travelled to Boston.
He attended Francestown Academy and studied law both privately and at Harvard University.
He was admitted to the bar in 1850. Of a restless disposition, he began to practise in Newton, Massachussets, then moved to Boston, and in 1854 joined the rush of settlers to Kansas. From Fort Leavenworth he wrote letters to Northern newspapers encouraging freestate immigration; and after six months he went to Washington, D. C. His fellow-townsman, President Pierce, appointed him to a clerkship in the Treasury Department in 1855, but the next year Andrews again went West, this time to Minnesota. His letters to the Boston Post, vividly describing his journey up the Mississippi in the Lady Franklin to St. Paul and by stage-coach to the frontier town of Crow Wing, later appeared in book form.
This excursion led to the resignation of his clerkship, and in 1857 he went to Minnesota to practise law in St. Cloud. In the same year he brought out his Digest of the Opinions of the Attorney Generals of the United States and in 1858 A Practical Treatise on the Revenue Laws of the United States. Law led to politics, and in 1859 he was elected to the state Senate; and the next year, as a Douglas Democrat, he held more than thirty joint political debates with Stephen Miller, later governor.
In 1861 he helped to found and for a short time was joint editor of the St. Cloud Union, but resigned because of the pro-slavery views of his associate, S. B. Lowry. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted as a private, but his energy and ability soon won his promotion.
At Murfreesboro in 1862 the colonel of his regiment, the 3rd Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, surrendered to Gen. Forrest over Andrews's vigorous protest. Three months in Southern prisons gave Andrews, now a captain, leisure to read Plutarch and Shakespeare and to write a book of Hints to Company Officers on Their Military Duties (1863). His exchange gave him an opportunity to apply his theories in action. He was with the reorganized 3rd Minnesota at Vicksburg; he commanded the regiment in the Arkansas campaign of 1863; as brigadier-general he led a decisive charge at Fitzhugh Woods in 1864; and in the Mobile campaign, now brevetted major-general, he participated in the storming of Fort Blakely.
After the collapse of the Confederacy he was in command of several southern districts, the last of which was that of Houston. He returned to Minnesota in August 1865 and was mustered out on January 15, 1866. A year later he published a comprehensive History of the Campaign of Mobile; and he contributed a full account of his own regiment to the two-volume history, Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, brought out by the state under his editorship (1890-1892).
After his return to St. Cloud, he soon became prominent in state politics. He was a delegate to the Republican convention that nominated Grant in 1868, and in that year was the regular Republican candidate for Congress in the second Minnesota district, but because of a party split lost the election.
In 1869 President Grant appointed him minister to Sweden and Norway. He took up his duties at Stockholm in July 1869 and served eight and one-half years. A noteworthy feature of this service was the preparation of a series of more than thirty remarkable reports on conditions in Norway and Sweden that were published in government documents and in many cases reprinted. Among the more important were those on industrial classes, pauperism and poor laws, emigration, public instruction, agriculture, Swedish forest culture, commerce, iron production, and manufactures. A discriminating study of Life and Manners in Sweden and Norway was privately published.
After his retirement in 1877 he returned to Minnesota; in 1880 he supervised the census in the third Minnesota district; and in the same year he served as editor of the St. Paul Dispatch.
He was appointed consul-general to Brazil by President Arthur and held this office at Rio de Janeiro from 1882 to 1885, when he was recalled by Cleveland. His book Brazil, Its Condition and Prospects (1887) includes a charming narrative of his own experiences. Two other publications of the eighties were a study of Spring Wheat Culture in the Northwest (1882), and a political brochure on Administrative Reform (1888) in which he advocated the extension of the civil service.
In 1890 he edited a cooperative History of St. Paul, Minnesota, of the commercial type. He was chief warden and forest commissioner of Minnesota from 1895 to 1911 and secretary of the state forestry board from 1911 until his death in 1922.
He died at his home in St. Paul, after an illness of a few months.
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In 1859, he won election to the state Senate as a Democrat; later, however, he changed his party affiliation and became a Republican.
Andrews married Mary Frances Baxter of Central City, Colorado, in December 1868. His only child, Alice Ebba Andrews, was born in Sweden in 1869.