Background
Henry Sheffie Geyer was born on December 9, 1790, in Frederick, Maryland. He was the son of John Geyer, a native Prussian, and Elizabeth (Sheffie) Geyer.
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Henry Sheffie Geyer was born on December 9, 1790, in Frederick, Maryland. He was the son of John Geyer, a native Prussian, and Elizabeth (Sheffie) Geyer.
Geyer received a common-school education, and after having studied under his uncle, Daniel Sheffie, began the practise of law at the age of twenty-one.
Geyer took part in the War of 1812, during which he was promoted to a first lieutenancy and became regimental paymaster of the 38th Infantry.
Immediately following the war he moved to the frontier village of St. Louis, where he quickly won distinction at the bar. In 1818, he was elected to the territorial legislature.
He held his fourth and last seat in the Missouri House in 1834-35.
In the important land case of Strother vs. Lucas, his brilliant argument caused Chief Justice Marshall surprise at finding “so much learning come from west of the Mississippi River”, while his overpowering logic in the famous Dames murder trial (1840) won the highest praise from Rufus Choate.
When the Anti-Benton Democrats in the legislature saw that their favorite, Col. Stringfellow, could not muster sufficient votes to defeat “Old Bullion, ” they switched their support to Geyer, a Whig, who held principles nearer to their proslavery views than those held by Benton, and elected him on the fortieth ballot (1851).
Despite his long political career, his chief eminence was as a lawyer.
Although, Geyer was not a member of the famous constitutional convention, nevertheless, by virtue of being the principal author of Missouri’s “Solemn Public Act, ” he played a prominent part in her struggle for statehood. He effected the major share of the revision of Missouri’s statute law in the sessions of 1825 and 1835. During his forty-three years of practise, he achieved notable success in untangling the intricacies of land-title litigation, and in the handling of jury trials and chancery cases. He was the leading attorney for the defendant slave-owner in the Dred Scott case, and practically all the arguments, principal points, and citations elaborated in Taney’s decision were made by Geyer.
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Geyer cleverly pointed out that the ostensible obligation imposed upon Missouri by Congress through this act did not, in reality, constitute a surrender of proslavery principles.
At Washington, Geyer, in common with most Western senators, devoted much of his time to the urging of petitions from groups of his constituents requesting federal land grants, to be used chiefly for the purpose of building railroads.
Atlantic seaboard senators consequently attacked the Westerners as “land pirates. ” Geyer replied that the old states also had a taste for spoils, but his chief retort was to introduce more land-grant petitions from Missouri.
When the proposed Pacific railroad was designated to go by way of Chicago and miss Missouri, he charged that the whole scheme was a Wall Street conspiracy. The extreme proslavery leaders in Missouri bitterly assailed him for his silence during most of the debate on the Fugitive-Slave Bill, but he partially retrieved himself by condemning Seward’s “higher law” doctrine, and by making the greatest speech of his senatorial career in defense of the so-called “Border Ruffians. ”
In this he contended that the Missourians had a far better right to shape the affairs of Kansas than those week-old Kansan Yankees subsidized by that child of the devil, the Emigrant Aid Society.
Although, like many strict constructionists, he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as subversive of the constitutional rights of the South, Geyer was not in theory a secessionist.
Geyer was thrice a member and twice speaker of the Missouri House in the twenties.
Geyer was married three times: on January 1, 1818, to Clarissa B. Starr; on April 26, 1831, to Joanna (Easton) Quarles; and on February 12, 1850, to Jane (Stoddard) Charless.
1808 - 1 October 1885
1801 - 15 October 1837
1801 - 29 October 1829
1822 - 13 April 1870
1825 - 1883
1835 - 14 December 1858
