Thomas Lawson Price was an American railroad builder and congressman.
Background
He was born on January 19, 1809 near Danville, Virginia, United States, the son of Major Price and a Miss Lawson, both descendants of English families which had early settled in the state. His father was a prosperous and influential tobacco-planter and land-owner.
Education
Price received only a meager common-school education.
Career
After inheriting in 1829 an ample fortune, he moved to Missouri, where economic conditions seemed favorable. Deterred by a cholera epidemic from settling in St. Louis, he pushed westward in 1831 to the new capital, Jefferson City, then a mere village. His inheritance gave him a favored status in a community of little wealth. He organized a mercantile and trading business which achieved immediate success, and became a speculator in lands in central Missouri.
He established in 1838 the first stage line between St. Louis and Jefferson City, operated a building and loan association, the Jefferson Land Company; he leased convict labor. Early recognizing the vast significance of railroads, he was a leader in their development, employing his financial and political influence in securing state projects. To all these enterprises, he made liberal donations of time and of money, and his construction company built a substantial portion of the railroads in the state prior to the Civil War.
During the early forties he entered politics, but retained full control of his numerous business interests. When Austin A. King was elected governor in 1848, Price was elected lieutenant-governor, both representing the Thomas H. Benton element of the Democratic party.
In 1852 he was the choice of the Benton group for governor, but Colonel Benton forbade his followers to participate in the deliberations of the state convention. Unsuccessful in his quest for a congressional nomination in 1854, he nevertheless continued a prominent leader of the Benton wing during a period in the middle fifties. In 1860 he was elected to the legislature. Frémont designated him a general in charge of state troops; he was subsequently recommissioned by Lincoln.
Following the expulsion of John W. Reid, he was elected as a War Democrat to the Thirty-seventh Congress and took his seat in January 1862. He was defeated for reelection in 1862; the interference with the election by the militia and the conduct of certain polling officials caused him unsuccessfully to contest the result. In 1864, under demoralized conditions of intimidation, disfranchisement, and violence, he was defeated as the Democratic nominee for governor.
He died, after a lingering illness in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Achievements
Politics
On politics, he had moderate, border-state opinion. Devoted personally and politically to Benton, he opposed the proslavery Jackson Resolutions of 1849. He opposed certain administration measures, including the confiscation bill and all emancipation proposals.
A relentless opponent of the triumphant Radical party, he became a Conservative Unionist, but later was prominent in the reorganization of the Democratic party and its unsuccessful candidate for Congress.
Personality
Standing well over six feet, he was a man of demonstrated physical courage, impetuous and imprudent on occasion, but generous, friendly, and loyal. He was essentially the business man in politics.
Connections
His first wife, Lydia Bolton, of North Carolina, whom he married in 1828, died in 1849; on April 20, 1854, he married Caroline V. Long, of Virginia. A son and daughter by his first wife survived him.