Entered College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, Virginia in 1780
after serving as Ensign in the Botetourt Militia, searching out and
capturing Tories. Late in 1780 when he was 19 the people of Botetourt
Co., VA surprised him by electing him to represent them in House of
Burgesses. For the next five years he did though still working toward his
license as a lawyer.
He spoke out for separation of church and state, for guarantees of the
civil and property rights of citizens, and for a strong central
government under the Articles of Confederation. At the same time,
however, he made clear his belief that the will of the majority in a
democracy should not be allowed to infringe upon the chartered rights of
the minority. it was a principle that would haunt his descendants for
decads to come.
During these years Breckenridge, for some unknown reason, changed the
spelling of the family nmae to Breckinridge. On June 28, 1785, he married
Joseph Cabell's sixteen-year-old daughter Mary, who like most Mary's of
the day was called Polly. In the next few years she gave birth to four
children... Meanwhile, her husband, who was struggling to establish a law
practice in a state overcrowded with lawyers, was receiving glowing
reports from his two brothers in Kentucky, telling of that state's
promise and its flourishing bar.
In 1790 John Breckinridge traveled to Kentucky alone to purchase six
hundred acres in Fayette County on the North Elkhorn Creek, seven miles
from Lexington in the heart of the Bluegrass region. He called the estate
Cabell's Dale. Three years later, when his family joined him, the move to
the new country was saddened by the loss of two children, Robert and
Mary, in a smallpox epidemic. With his family he brought his twenty or
more slaves. Breckinridge had become an antifederalist, aligned with
Thomas Jefferson and many other Virginians, and like them he believed the
institution of slavery to be evil, but necessary to agrarian economy. He
hoped for a gradual emancipation of the Negroes because of what slavery
did to white and black alike, and his attitude eventually became family
doctrine.
In addition to his successful financial activities in his new home,
Breckinridge continued his interest in politics. He had turned down a
seat in Congress before he left Virginia, but his influential
associations in the Old Dominion marked him for prominence in Kentucky.
He officially identified with Jefferson's Republicans and moved firmly
toward a conservative stance on the rights of the minority. Governor
Isaac Shelby appointed him attorney general, and after an unsuccessful
bid for the United States Senate, he won a seat in the state legislature.
(By 1799) now speaker of the House, he introduced another measure
reaffirming the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798... Most likely, Thomas
Jefferson gave Breckinridge a draft which served as the basis for the
resolves and allowed the Kentuckian to elaborate somewhat upon this
foundation.
In 1800 he won his seat in the United States Senate; went to Washington
as one of Jefferson's most trusted friends; almost immediately became a
Republican leader in the Senate, trusted with guiding to passage much of
Jefferson's legislative program. When the president presented the treaty
for the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Breckinridge backed it to
passage and then fought to insure that the question of importation of
slaves, and other domestic matters be left to the territory's eventual
settlers. Unknowingly, he was helping found the doctrine of 'popular
sovereignty."
In August, 1805, Jefferson rewarded his able friend with an appointment
as attorney general. Breckinridge served only a few months, however,
before taking a leave to return to Cabell's Dale, and here, late in 1806,
he was suddenly bedridden, probably by tuberculosis. In october he was
unable to journey back to Washington to resume