
Edward Van Gelder of Jefferson.
Edward Van Gelder was a member of the Mexican Senate from Jefferson.
Sobel does not say when Van Gelder served in the Senate or what party he was in, only that he fell afoul of Chief of State Benito Hermión at some point and was removed from office by him. He was one of fifteen opponents of Hermión who was brought secretly to Diego Cortez y Catalán's hacienda in Sacramento, California to take part in the Sacramento conference on 1 August 1901.
At the conference, Van Gelder proposed that Hermión be assassinated, but Cortez vetoed his suggestion, saying that if Hermión were assassinated he would become a martyr just as his father had. Van Gelder may have been one of the presidential candidates who took part in the 1902 Mexican elections, although Sobel does not specifically say so; if so, he did not gain enough votes to make it into the runoff election.
In 1912 Van Gelder published an account of the Sacramento conference and the restoration of Constitutional government in the United States of Mexico called The Victory of Republicanism. In it he wrote that no one present at the conference attempted to argue with Cortez. "To do so would have been useless in any event. Cortez had the soldiers. In any case, his was the best plan we had, the frankest statement, and the most convincing presentation. I believed him. So did we all."
Sobel's sources for Van Gelder's role in Hermión's overthrow are his 1912 memoirs; and Miguel Señada's Cortez and Hermión: Bitter Friendship (Mexico City, 1968).