Anthony Ellmaker Roberts

Anthony Ellmaker Roberts (October 29, 1803 – January 23, 1885) was an American politician, abolitionist, and member of the United States House of Representatives from 1855 to 1859, who became a prominent early leader of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania and a close associate of Thaddeus Stevens. He represented Pennsylvania’s Ninth Congressional District during a pivotal period in the nation’s history, and was the first Republican to represent Lancaster County in Congress.

Roberts was born on October 29, 1803, in Pennsylvania, into a family connected with the Ellmaker and Hiester families, both of which were influential in the region’s political and social life. Little is recorded in the surviving accounts about his early childhood or formal education, but his later career and reputation suggest that he was well read and intellectually engaged. Contemporary observers and later biographers emphasized his “well-balanced, reading, and reasoning mind,” indicating that he cultivated a habit of independent study and reflection from a relatively young age.

By the 1830s and 1840s, Roberts had established himself in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he became increasingly involved in civic and political affairs. On October 29, 1840, he married Emma Bushong, who was about eighteen years his junior. The couple had twelve children, and their large family was rooted in Lancaster’s social and religious life. Roberts’s personal and family responsibilities ran alongside his growing public commitments, and he developed a reputation for “firmly-established principles of justice and right to his fellowmen,” which would shape his later political identity as an abolitionist and reformer.

Roberts’s political prominence rose in the early 1850s, a time of intense national conflict over slavery and sectional power. Initially active in the shifting coalition of anti-slavery and reform-minded voters in Pennsylvania, he aligned himself closely with Thaddeus Stevens, the influential Lancaster lawyer and future Radical Republican leader. His opponents derided this alliance, one critic remarking that “inconsistent in everything else, he is consistent only in his blind obedience to Thaddeus Stevens. If he is elected, we shall be represented by the shadow of Mr. Stevens without his brains.” Despite such attacks, Roberts’s association with Stevens placed him at the center of the emerging anti-slavery movement in the state.

On October 13, 1854, Roberts stood for election to the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s Ninth District. In a closely watched contest, he defeated his rival and relative, Isaac Ellmaker Hiester, by a vote of 6,561 to 5,371, while the Democratic nominee received 4,266 votes. His victory secured him a seat in the Thirty-Fourth Congress and marked a significant breakthrough for the nascent Republican movement in Lancaster County. As the Republican Party began to form in 1854 and 1855 around the central tenet of stopping the spread of slavery, Roberts emerged as one of the leaders who helped establish the party’s organization and principles in Pennsylvania.

Roberts served two consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from March 4, 1855, to March 3, 1859. During his first term, he aligned with the anti-slavery coalition that would soon coalesce fully into the Republican Party, and he strongly advocated its principles in debates over the expansion of slavery and related issues. When his first term ended, he sought re-election as a Republican and won a second term, continuing to represent Pennsylvania’s Ninth District in the Thirty-Fifth Congress. During his second term he served on the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, participating in the oversight of federal construction and infrastructure in the nation’s capital. Throughout his four years in Congress, Roberts contributed to the legislative process during a significant period in American history, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents as an avowed abolitionist and early Republican. His obituary later noted that his actions in Congress “were always true to his constituents.”

Roberts chose not to be a candidate for re-nomination in 1858 and left Congress at the close of his second term in March 1859. He did not, however, withdraw from public life. In the years that followed, he remained active as an organizer and supporter of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, helping to consolidate the party’s strength during and after the Civil War. In 1867, he ran for mayor of Lancaster, seeking to bring his experience and principles to municipal government, but he was defeated by the Democratic candidate in a city that still had strong Democratic support. Even out of office, he continued to be regarded as a figure of integrity and steadfast conviction in local and state politics.

In his later years, Roberts remained in Lancaster City, where he was remembered as a citizen whose life was “characterized by firmly-established principles of justice and right to his fellowmen, independent thought and action, and a well-balanced, reading, and reasoning mind.” Both in public and private life, he “enjoyed the confidence of those who knew him,” a testament to the consistency of his character across decades of political and social change. Anthony Ellmaker Roberts died in Lancaster City on January 23, 1885, at the age of eighty-one. He was buried in Lancaster Cemetery, leaving behind his widow, Emma, their twelve children, and a legacy as an early Republican leader, abolitionist, and faithful representative of his Pennsylvania constituents.