HENRY STUART FOOTE
In 1848 a pro-slavery mob in Washington DC Gamaliel Bailey's anti-slavery publication, The National Era, which soon thereafter was the publisher of the serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin. Senator John P. Hale introduced a bill in the Senate outlawing rioting in the District of Columbia. The Southern Senators objected violently and this served as a catalyst for one the for the most extensive and bitter public debate that had ever been held on the slavery issue.
Henry Stuart Foote was a United States Senator from Mississippi and the chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1847 to 1852. He was a Unionist Governor of Mississippi from 1852 to 1854, and an American Party supporter in California. During the American Civil War, he served in the First and Second Confederate Congresses. A practicing attorney, he published two memoirs related to the Civil War years, as well as a book on Texas prior to its annexation, and a postwar book on the legal profession and courts in the South.
