FREE: William Allen FDC

The listing, William Allen FDC has ended.

He served as a Representative from Ohio from 1832 to 1834, when he lost a bid for re-election, and Senator from Ohio from 1837 to 1849, losing a bid for a third term in 1848. Allen then retired to his farm, "Fruit Hill", which had belonged to his father-in-law, and fellow Ohio Governor, Duncan McArthur, near Chillicothe, Ohio, and did not return to public service for nearly a quarter century. He served as Governor of Ohio from 1874 to 1876. He unsuccessfully sought a second two-year term in an 1875 election. At the close of his administration, he retired to private life at Fruit Hill, where he died in 1879.
While in the Senate, Allen was one of a group of Western Democrat expansionists who asserted that the U.S. had a valid claim to the entire Oregon Country, which was an issue during the 1844 U.S. presidential election. He suggested that the United States should be prepared to go to war with the United Kingdom in order to annex the entire Oregon Country up to Russian-owned Alaska at latitude 54°40'N. This position ultimately produced the famous line "54 40 or fight!", coined in 1846 by opponents of such a policy (not, as popularly believed, a slogan in the Presidential campaign).
William Allen was one of Ohio's two statues donated to the National Statuary Collection and stood in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol until, after a statewide poll run by the Ohio Historical Society, the Ohio National Statuary Committee voted August 26, 2010 to replace him with the statute of inventor Thomas A. Edison.