Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Bent, James" to "Bibirine" by Various

John Nichols, to whom Richard Bentley, on leaving St Paul's school, was apprenticed to learn the printing trade. With his brother SAMUEL (1785-1868), an antiquarian of some repute, he set up a printing establishment, but in 1829 he began business as a publisher in partnership with Henry Colburn in New Burlington Street. Colburn retired in 1832 and Bentley continued business on his own account. In 1837 he began _Bentley's Miscellany_, edited for the first three years of its existence by Charles Dickens, whose _Oliver Twist_, with Cruikshank's illustrations, appeared in its pages. Bentley and his son GEORGE (1828-1895), as Richard Bentley & Son, published works by R.H. Barham, Theodore Hook, Isaac D'Israeli, Judge Haliburton and others; also the "Library of Standard Novels" and the "Favourite Novel Library." In the latter series Mrs Henry Wood's _East Lynne_ appeared. In 1866 the firm took over the publication of _Temple Bar_, with which _Bentley's Miscellany_ was afterwards incorporated. Richard Bentley died on the 10th of September 1871. His son, George Bentley, and his grandson, Richard Bentley, junior, continued the business until it was absorbed (1898) by Macmillan & Co. See also _R. Bentley & Son_ (Edinburgh, 1886), a history of the firm reprinted from _Le Livre_ (October, 1885). BENTON, THOMAS HART (1782-1858), American statesman, was born at Hillsborough, Orange county, North Carolina, on the 14th of March 1782. His father, an Englishman of refinement and scholarship, died in 1790, leaving the boy under the influence of a very superior mother, from whom he received lessons in book learning, piety and temperance quite unusual in the frontier country. His home studies, facilitated by his father's fine library, were supplemented by a brief stay at the university of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) in 1799. The family removed, probably in this year, to a large tract of land which had been acquired by the father on the outskirts of the Indian country (at Benton Town, now Leipers Fork) near Franklin, Tennessee. The following years, during which Benton was at various times school teacher, farmer, lawyer and politician, were the distinctively formative period of his life. His intense democracy and many features of his boldly cast personality were perfectly representative of the border people among whom he lived; although his education, social standing and force of character placed him above his fellows. In 1809 he served a term as state senator. Between 1815 and 1817 he transferred his interests to St Louis, Missouri, and in 1820 was elected United States senator from the new state. His senatorial career of thirty years (1821-1851) was one of extreme prominence. A friendship early formed in Tennessee for Andrew Jackson was broken in 1813 by an armed fracas between the principals and their friends, but after the presidential election of 1824 Benton became a Jacksonian Democrat and Jackson's close friend, and as such was long the Democratic leader in the Senate, his power being greatest during Jackson's second term. He continued to be the administration's right-hand man under Van Buren, but gradually lost influence under Polk, with whom he finally broke both personally and politically. The events of Benton's political life are associated primarily with three things: the second United States Bank, westward expansion and slavery. In the long struggles over the bank, the deposits and the "expunging resolution" (i.e. the resolution to expunge from the records of the Senate the vote of censure of President Jackson for his removal of the government deposits from the bank), Benton led the Jackson Democrats. His opposition to a national bank and insistence on the peculiar virtues of "hard money," whence his sobriquet of "Old Bullion," went back to his Tennessee days. In all that concerned the expansion of the country and the fortunes of the West no public man was more consistent or more influential than Benton, and none so clear of vision. Reared on the border, and representing a state long the farthermost outpost across the Mississippi in the Indian country, he held the ultra-American views of his section as regarded foreign relations generally, and the "manifest destiny" of expansion westward especially. It was quite natural that he should advocate the removal westward of the Indian tribes, should urge the encouragement of trade with Sante Fe (New Mexico), and should oppose the abandonment in the Spanish treaty of 1819 of American claims to Texas. He once thought the Rocky Mountains the proper western limit of the United States (1824), but this view he soon outgrew. He was the originator of the policy of homestead laws by which the public lands were used to promote the settlement of the west by home-seekers. No other man was so early and so long active for transcontinental railways. But Benton was not a land-grabber, whether in the interest of slavery or of mere jingoism. In the case of Oregon, for instance, he was firmly against joint occupation with Great Britain, but he was always for the boundary of 49 deg. and never joined in the campaign-jingo cry of "Fifty-four Forty or Fight." It was he who chiefly aided Polk in withdrawing from that untenable position. He despised pretexts and intrigues. Both in the case of Oregon and in that of Texas, though one of the earliest and most insistent of those who favoured their acquisition, yet in the face of southern and western sentiment he denounced the sordid and devious intrigues and politics connected with their acquisition, and kept clear of these. For the same reason he opposed the Mexican War, though not its prosecution once begun. In the Texas question slavery was prominent. Toward slavery Benton held a peculiarly creditable attitude. A southerner, he was a slaveholder; but he seems to have gradually learned that slavery was a curse to the South, for in 1844 he declared that he would not introduce it into Texas lands "where it was never known," and in 1849 proclaimed that his personal sentiments were "against the institution of slavery." In the long struggle over slavery in the territories, following 1845, he was for the extreme demands of neither section; not because he was timorous or a compromiser,--no man was less of either,--but because he stood unwaveringly for justice to both sections, never adopting exaggerated views that must or even could be compromised. The truth is that he was always a westerner before he was a southerner and a union man before all things else; he was no whit less national than Webster. Hence his distrust and finally hatred of Calhoun, dating from the nullification