Charles R. Buckalew

Charles Rollin Buckalew (December 28, 1821 – May 19, 1899) was an American lawyer, diplomat, and Democratic Party politician from Pennsylvania. He represented the state for one term in the United States Senate, where he was an advocate of proportional representation and cumulative voting, from 1863 to 1869.

Buckalew also served three nonconsecutive terms in the Pennsylvania Senate (1851–1854, 1859–1860, and 1869–1870) and two consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1887 to 1891. He served as Minister Resident for Ecuador under President James Buchanan from 1858 to 1861.

Early life and education Buckalew was born in Fishing Creek Township, Pennsylvania on December 28, 1821, to John McKinney Sr. and Martha Funston Buckalew. He was a graduate of Harford Academy, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, where he studied law. He was admitted to the bar in 1843.

Buckalew's bill in the Senate would have allowed all the electors of a state to have the number of votes equal to the number of house of representatives members to be elected from that state. The voter could give all his votes to one candidate, or distribute them in any fashion, equally or unequally, among candidates. The candidates with the highest number of votes would be elected.

As a senator, Buckalew voted in 1866 against the District of Columbia Suffrage Act, a bill, intended by Republicans as a model for the postwar South generally, to extend voting rights to Black men in Washington, D.C.

In addition to serving in Congress and the Pennsylvania state legislature, Buckalew was commissioner to exchange ratifications of a treaty with Paraguay in 1854; chairman of the Democratic State committee in 1857; appointed one of the commissioners to revise the penal code of Pennsylvania in 1857; Minister Resident to the Republic of Ecuador 1858–1861; unsuccessful candidate for governor of Pennsylvania in 1872; and a delegate to the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1873.

He resumed the practice of law when he left Congress in 1891, age 69, in Bloomsburg, Columbia County, where he died on May 19, 1899. He is interred in Rosemont Cemetery in Bloomsburg.

Buckalew's writings and speeches on cumulative voting were collected in an 1872 book titled Proportional Representation. 1872, Philadelphia, J. Campbell & Son.

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