page_title: George N. Briggs
section_title: Governor of Massachusetts
hierarchical_section_title: George N. Briggs / Governor of Massachusetts
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of George Sewall Boutwell
context_page_description: George Nixon Briggs was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts. A Whig, Briggs served for twelve years in the United States House of Representatives, and served seven one-year terms as the 19th Governor of Massachusetts, from 1844 to 1851.
  Raised in rural Upstate New York, Briggs studied law in western Massachusetts, where his civic involvement and successful legal practice preceded statewide political activity. He was elected to Congress in 1830, where he supported the conservative Whig agenda, serving on the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads. He was also a regular advocate of temperance, abstaining from all alcohol consumption.
  He was nominated by the Whigs in 1843 to run against Democratic Governor Marcus Morton as part of a Whig bid for more rural votes, and easily won election until 1849. Although he sought to avoid the contentious issue of slavery, he protested South Carolina policy allowing the imprisonment of free African Americans. He supported capital punishment, notably refusing to commute the death sentence of John White Webster for the murder of George Parkman. Briggs died of an accidental gunshot wound at his home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
context_section_description: Briggs was nominated to run for the governorship on the Whig ticket against the incumbent Democrat Marcus Morton in 1843. Former Governor John Davis had been nominated first, but refused the nomination, possibly because Daniel Webster promised him party support for a future vice presidential bid. Briggs was apparently recommended as a compromise candidate acceptable to different factions within the party (one controlled by Webster, the other by Abbott Lawrence). He was also probably chosen to appeal more directly to the state's rural voters, a constituency that normally supported Morton. The abolitionist Liberty Party also fielded a candidate, with the result that none of the candidates won the needed majority. The legislature decided the election in those cases; with a Whig majority there, Briggs' election was assured. Briggs was reelected annually until 1850 against a succession of Democratic opponents. He won popular majorities until the 1849 election, even though third parties (including the Liberty Party and its successor, the Free Soil Party) were often involved. Although Whigs had a reputation for aristocratic bearing, Briggs was much more a man of the people than the preceding Whig governors, John Davis and Edward Everett.
  In 1844 Briggs, alarmed at a recently enacted policy by South Carolina authorizing the imprisonment of free blacks arriving there from Massachusetts and other northern states, sent representatives to protest the policy. Samuel Hoar and his daughter Elizabeth were unsuccessful in changing South Carolina policy, and after protests against what was perceived as Yankee interference in Southern affairs, were advised to leave the state for their own safety.
  Capital punishment was a major issue that was debated in the state during Brigg's tenure, with social reformers calling for its abolition. Briggs personally favored capital punishment, but for political reasons called for moderation in its use, seeking, for example, to limit its application in murder cases to those involving first degree murder. After an acquittal in an 1846 murder case where anti-death penalty sentiment was thought to have a role, Briggs, seeking to undercut the anti-death penalty lobby, proposed eliminating the penalty for all crimes except murder, but expressed concern that more such acquittals by sympathetic juries would undermine the connection between crime and punishment.
  Briggs' argument was used in the 1849 trial of Washington Goode, a black mariner accused of killing a rival for the affections of a lady. The case against Goode was essentially circumstantial, but the jury heeded the district attorney's call for assertive punishment of "crimes of violence" and convicted him. There were calls for Briggs to commute Goode's capital sentence, but he refused, writing "A pardon here would tend toward the utter subversion of the law."
  Not long after the Goode case came the sensational trial of Professor John White Webster in the murder of George Parkman, a crime that took place at the Harvard Medical School in November 1849.  The trial received nationwide coverage, and the prosecution case was based on evidence that was either circumstantial (complicated by the fact that a complete corpse was not found), or founded on new types of evidence (forensic dentistry was used for the first time in this trial). Furthermore, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw was widely criticized for bias in the instructions he gave to the jury. Briggs was petitioned to commute Webster's sentence by death penalty opponents, and even threatened with physical harm if he did not. He refused however, stating that the evidence in the case was clear (especially after Webster gave a confession), and that there was no reason to doubt that the court had acted with due and proper diligence.
  During Briggs' time as governor, abolitionist activists continued to make inroads against both the Whigs and Democrats, primarily making common cause with the Democrats against the dominant Whigs. Briggs' stance as a Cotton Whig put him in opposition 
caption: George S. Boutwell, c. 1851 portrait by Southworth & Hawes
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