Levin, Lewis C.

Lewis Charles Levin

(1808-1860)
South Carolina & Pennsylvania

Lewis C. Levin was born in Charleston, South Carolina on November 10, 1808. He graduated from South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) at Columbia and moved to Woodville, Mississippi in about 1828 and taught school. He studied law and was admitted to the bar and practiced in several states (Maryland, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania) before eventually settling in Philadelphia in 1838. In Philadelphia he served as editor of the Philadelphia Daily Sun and was elected to Congress as a member of the American Party which he helped found. Unsuccessful in his candidacy for reelection in 1850, he resumed the practice of law. Levin died in Philadelphia on March 14, 1860; interment in Laurel Hill Cemetery.

According to one commentator:

He had an immense following. Blending religious with political passions, he dominated in our conventions, electing himself and others to Congress, carrying most of the local officers in Philadelphia, and erecting in the First Pennsylvania district, now the stronghold of the very Catholics he opposed, a power that was, while it endured, really invincible. Perhaps the very ferocity of the onset of Mr. Levin and his cohorts gave the sympathy of others to the Catholics. A fervid speaker and nervous writer, he was conspicious on the open platform, the Congressional forum, and in the public press. Some of his speeches in the House were models of popular oratory. [John W. Forney, 1 Ancedotes of Public Men 131 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873)] [online text]

Lewis C. Levin
Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889)(James Grant Wilson & John Fiske eds.)(6 vols.)

Lewis Charles Levin
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

Writings

Lewis C. Levin, A Lecture on Irish Repeal, in elucidation of the fallacy of its principles, and in proof of its pernicious tendency, in its moral, religious, and political aspects (Philadelphia, 1844)

____________, Intemperance the Prelude to Gambling and Suicide, as illustrated in the Life of Rev. C. C. Colton, Author of "Lacon," (Philadelphia: Printed by William F. Geddes, 1845)