De Alva Stanwood ALEXANDER, Congress, NY (1846-1925)

ALEXANDER, De Alva Stanwood, a Representative from New York; born in Richmond, Sagadahoc County, Maine, July 17, 1846; attended the common schools; moved with his mother to Ohio in 1859; at the age of fifteen enlisted in the Union Army as a private in the One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and served from 1862 until the close of the Civil War, when he entered the Edward Little Institute, Auburn, Maine, to prepare for college; was graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in 1870 and served many years as a member and president of its board of overseers; moved to Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1870; one of the editors and proprietors of the Daily Gazette 1871-1874; delegate to the Republican National Convention at Philadelphia in 1872; moved to Indianapolis, Ind., in 1874 and became a staff correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette; secretary of the Indiana Republican State committee 1874-1878; studied law; was admitted to the bar in 1877 and commenced practice in Indianapolis, Ind.; appointed Fifth Auditor of the Treasury Department in 1881 and served until 1885; commander of the Department of the Potomac, Grand Army of the Republic, for one term; moved to Buffalo, N.Y., in 1885; appointed United States attorney for the northern district of New York in May 1889 and served until his resignation in December 1893; elected as a Republican to the Fifty-fifth and to the six succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1897-March 3, 1911); chairman, Committee on Rivers and Harbors (Sixty-first Congress); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1910 to the Sixty-second Congress; resumed the practice of law; died in Buffalo, N.Y., January 30, 1925; interment in Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Bibliography

Alexander, De Alva Stanwood. History and Procedure of the House of Representatives. 1916. Reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970.

Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present