From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Nixon Briggs was a member of the Whig Party and seven-term Governor of the U.S. state of Massachusetts, serving from 1844 to 1851.

He was born in Adams, Massachusetts on April 12, 1796. His parents were Allen Briggs (b. Cranston, Rhode Island, 1756) and Nancy Brown, of Huguenot descent. When seven years of age moved with his parents to Manchester, Vermont, and, two years later, to White Creek, New York. He attended the public schools there. He moved to Lanesboro, Massachusetts in 1814; there he was apprenticed to the hatter’s trade. He studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1818, and commenced practice in Lanesboro. He married Harriet Hall of Lanesboro in 1818; their children were Harriet, George, and Henry. He was the register of deeds for Berkshire County, Massachusetts from 1824 to 1831. He was elected town clerk in 1824, was appointed chairman of the board of commissioners of highways in 1826.

At the age of 14, during the Second Great Awakening, which was especially strong in Upstate New York, he experienced a conversion experience and joined the Baptist faith. He remained committed to religious ideals, for instance objecting to Congressional sessions that stretched into Sunday and abjuring alcohol.

Briggs was elected as an Anti-Jacksonian to the twenty-second through the twenty-fourth-Congresses and as a Whig to the twenty-fifth through twenty-seventh Congresses, serving from March 4, 1831 to March 3, 1843. In the Twenty-sixth Congress, he was the chairman of the Committee on Public Expenditures, and of the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads during the Twenty-seventh Congress. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1842. He moved to Pittsfield in 1843 and served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1844 to 1851. He resumed the practice of law in Pittsfield, being a member of the State constitutional convention in 1853. He was a judge of the court of common pleas from 1853 to 1858. He was appointed in 1861 as a member of a commission to adjust differences between the United States and New Granada. Briggs was accidentally killed in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on September 11, 1861 when a gun discharged, and was buried in the Pittsfield Cemetery.

• Giddings, Edward Jonathan. American Christian Rulers, pp. 61-9. New York: Bromfield & Company, 1890.
• Richards, William Carey. Great in goodness: A memoir of George N. Briggs, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from 1844-1851. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1866. Reprint, New York, Sheldon and Company (1867).
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Official Commonwealth of Massachusetts Governor Biography

This article about a Massachusetts politician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.