RARE "Maine Senator" Eugene Hale Hand Written Letter For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Maine Senator" Eugene Hale Hand Written Letter. 

1836 – October 27, 1918) was a Republican United States Senator from Maine.

Born in Turner, Maine, he was

educated in local schools and at Maine's Hebron Academy. He was admitted to the bar in 1857 and served

for nine years as prosecuting attorney for Hancock County, Maine. He

was elected to the Maine Legislature 1867–68, to the U.S. House

of Representatives 1869–79, serving in the 41st and

four succeeding Congresses. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in

1878 to the 46th Congress. He

was elected to succeed Hannibal Hamlin in the U.S. Senate in 1881;

reelected in 1887, 1893, 1899 and 1905 and served from March 4, 1881, to March

3, 1911. During his time in the Senate, he served several committees, chairing,

during various Congreses, the U.S. Senate

Committee on the Census, the U.S. Senate Committee on Private Land Claims, the U.S. Senate Committee on Printing, the U.S. Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, the U.S. Senate

Committee on Appropriations and the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Expenditures. He was Republican Conference

Chairman from 1908 to 1911. Although he declined the post

of United

States Secretary of the Navy in the Rutherford B. Hayes administration

(and had previously declined S. Grant), Senator

Hale performed constructive work of the greatest importance in the area of

naval appropriations, especially during the early fights for the "new

Navy." "I hope", he said in 1884, "that I shall not live

many years before I shall see the American Navy what it ought to be, the pet of

the American people." Much later in his career, he opposed the building of

large numbers of capital ships, which he

regarded as less effective in proportion to cost and subject to rapid

obsolescence. He was served as a member of the National Monetary

Commission. Hale received an LL.D. from Bates College in 1882. During the late 1890s, Hale and

Senator George F. Hoar of

Massachusetts were the most vocal opponents of American intervention into the

ongoing insurrection in Cuba. Hale disdained expansionism and jingoism and often challenged claims made by senators on

Cuban military victories and Spanish atrocities. He so frequently engaged in

verbal jousts with Cuban sympathizers in the Senate that they unfairly accused

him of parroting Spanish propaganda and called him "The Senator from

Spain." Senator Hale retired from politics in 1911 and spent the remainder

of his life in Ellsworth, Maine, and

in Washington, D.C., where he

died. He is buried in Woodbine Cemetery, Ellsworth, Maine. Two ships were named USS Hale for him. He was the father of Frederick Hale,

also a U.S. Senator from Maine, and of diplomat Chandler Hale. Gertrude Atherton's novel Senator North (1900)

was based on Eugene Hale.