Abram Hammond (1860-1861)
Hammond had been Lieutenant Governor under Governor Willard and served the short remainder of Willard’s term. Hammond, a former lawyer and judge, had been a pro-slavery Whig before the party imploded and became a Democrat thereafter. Part of his selection as Willard’s running mate had to do with hopes that he would draw support of other former Whigs. Hammond served for three months, and his main achievement seems to have been giving an annual address to the General Assembly. Among other things, he was in favor of accommodating Southern demands in order to avoid disunion. On his recommendation, Indiana sent delegates to an unsuccessful peace conference with the goal of preventing war with the South.
Henry Lane (1861)
Lane served as Governor for only two days, from January 14, 1861 – January 16, 1861. He was a prominent early Republican and, when he ran for Governor, his plan was — if the Republicans controlled the General Assembly — to have it appoint him to the U.S. Senate, replacing Graham Fitch (the unprincipled physician from Logansport).
Even though Lane served only two days as governor, his story probably deserves some elaboration. Lane was an anti-slavery Whig and Henry Clay supporter, originally from Kentucky. He became a lawyer and a banker, moving to Crawfordsville in 1832 and worked at the Bank of Indiana. He served in the Indiana Senate and in the state House of Representatives in the late 1830s. He became a U.S. Representative in 1840, and then served with Indiana’s First Regiment and then its Fifth Regiment in the Mexican-American War.
As the Whigs imploded in the 1850s, Lane was part of the Fusion/People’s Party conglomeration that won the House in 1854 which resulted in gridlock when the Democrats refused to caucus and Indiana went without a Senator for a period of time. In 1856, the People’s Party in Indiana, with the cooperation of the American Party, sent a delegation of Hoosiers to the second national Republican convention in Philadelphia. Lane was elected President of the convention where he declared:
“Freedom is national. Freedom is the general rule. Slavery is the exception. It exists by sufferance. Where it does exist under the sanction of the law, we make no war upon it. Does that constitute us Abolitionists, simply because we are opposed to the extension of slavery? If that makes an Abolitionist, write ‘Abolitionist’ all over me.”
In 1858, still angry about the procedurally suspect election of Bright and Fitch to the Senate, state Republicans who had taken control of the legislature, elected Lane and William McCarty to the U.S. Senate while Bright and Fitch were still serving terms. The U.S. Senate refused to seat Lane and McCarty. So Bright and Fitch kept their Senate seats.
In 1860, Lane campaigned with Oliver Morton as his running mate. The two had agreed that, should the Republicans control the General Assembly after the election, Lane would go to the Senate, taking Fitch’s seat, and Morton would become Governor. Lane was initially rejected (again) by the Democratically controlled U.S. Senate, but, as the Southern states began to secede, the balance of party power in the Senate shifted to the Republicans, and Lane took his seat in the U.S. Senate with his fellow Senator, Jesse Bright. (With the Southern Democrats leaving and having alienated Stephen Douglas and the Northern Democrats, things must have been fairly lonely for Bright just about then.)
Lane served just the one term in the Senate. After that, he spent a short time during the Grant administration as an Indian commissioner and then as a commissioner for the improvement of the Mississippi River. He then returned to Crawfordsville where he passed away in 1881.
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