Background
Gouverneur Kemble was the eldest son of Peter and Gertrude (Gouverneur) Kemble and came from a family of business men. He was born on January 25, 1786 in New York City, New York, United States.
Gouverneur Kemble was the eldest son of Peter and Gertrude (Gouverneur) Kemble and came from a family of business men. He was born on January 25, 1786 in New York City, New York, United States.
Kemble attended Columbia College, from which he graduated in 1803.
In the years before the War of 1812 Kemble followed inclinations of his family toward a mercantile life and in the same period he became a member of the brilliant coterie of young men who surrounded Washington Irving in the New York of that day and who often assembled at a mansion of the Kembles on the Passaic in New Jersey, celebrated in Salmagundi as Cockloft Hall. "Who would have thought, " Irving remarked to Kemble years later, referring to the pranks and revels of those times, "that we should ever have lived to be two such respectable old gentlemen!". In Monroe's administration Kemble went as consul to Cadiz, and here he took the trouble to study the Spanish methods of casting cannon. In 1817 he visited the Mediterranean ports to procure supplies for the United States navy during the Tripolitan War.
When he returned to the United States he "turned Vulcan, " as Irving expressed it, and began "forging thunderbolts" at Cold Spring, New York opposite West Point on the Hudson River. His factory, chartered in 1818, was known as the West Point Foundry Association. It produced the first fairly perfect cannon ever cast in the United States and became so successful in the manufacture of ordnance as to receive the special patronage of the government. For many years it was the leading industry of Cold Spring. "It feeds all, clothes all, and supports all, " wrote W. J. Blake in 1849. Kemble now set up his home, as Irving writes, "in the very heart of the Highlands, with magnificent scenery all around him; mountains clothed with forests to their very summit, and the noble Hudson moving along quietly and majestically at their feet".
He served two terms as Democratic representative in Congress during Van Buren's administration, from 1837 to 1841. In 1840 he published a pamphlet, "Letter from Gouverneur Kemble. In Answer to Certain Inquiries", justifying his conduct while in office which had been impugned by several residents of his congressional district, but he refused to let himself be nominated for another term. Four years later he was a delegate to the Democratic national convention which nominated Polk, and in 1846 he was delegate to the state constitutional convention of that year. Again, he was a delegate to the futile schismatic Democratic national convention of 1860, just before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Kemble was an active member of the Democratic Party.
In 1854 Kemble was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician.
Kemble was a convivial man, and at his home in Cold Spring he was very hospitable. Every Saturday night to the end of his life he gave a dinner to which all the professors and principal officers of the West Point Military Academy across the river had a standing invitation, together with such other notables as happened to be in the vicinity at the time.
Quotes from others about the person
"That is my friend of early life--always unchanged, always like a brother; one of the noblest beings that ever was created. " - Washington Irving
Kemble was never married.