The first governor of this period was Albert Porter. In 1880, Indiana had reached a population of almost 2 million people. It was 98% white and about 20% of the population lived in cities while 80% remained in rural locations. Despite the overwhelmingly white population, it was in 1880 that a black man, James Hinton, was first elected to the Indiana General Assembly.
At his election, the Indianapolis Leader proclaimed [of Hinton], “thirty years ago, the Indiana Legislature was engaged in concocting brutal laws to prevent the entrance of colored people into this state. Now a member of the race then proscribed, is a member of the Legislature. Time sets all things right.”
As for Governor Porter, he was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, only the second Governor to be born in Indiana. His family moved over the river to Kentucky when his mom inherited land there. He worked his father’s ferry across the Ohio for a period of time before enrolling at Hanover. He ran out of money before he finished. His uncle offered to pay for the remainder of his schooling if he went to a Methodist School. So, he finished at Asbury University (now DePauw) in 1843. (Recall the educational feud between Presbyterians and Methodists back in the days of Samuel Bigger.)
Porter became a personal secretary to Governor Whitcomb and was originally a Democrat, but he got caught up in the factional dispute of the 1850s over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was on the wrong side of Jesse Bright’s faction when the dust cleared. He left the Democrats and became a Republican shortly thereafter. Porter was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1858 and served until 1863. He declined to run for another term, going into private practice in Indianapolis with, among others, Benjamin Harrison. One of his cases was the Ex Parte Milligan case.
In 1880, he was the Republican nominee for President. The election was a close one. The Democrats had held the governor’s office since 1873, the Democrats had William English as a Vice-Presidential candidate, and some prominent observers of the day felt that the state was safely Democratic. Nevertheless, the Democrats lost both the governorship and the Presidential race by less than 8,000 votes out of 470,000 cast.
The Democrats’ failure usually has been placed on national factors: e.g., the supposed political ineptitude of the Democratic presidential candidate, General Winfield Scott Hancock; the unfortunate appearance of the phrase “a tariff for revenue only” in the party platform; the general disorganization and anarchy within the party following the loss of the disputed election of 1876; and the decline in both the health and political mastery of Samuel J. Tilden in New York. Some writers have credited other national causes such as the energy, money, and imported voters which were supposedly poured into Indiana in the closing weeks of the campaign by the Republican national committee under the direction of its secretary, Stephen W. Dorsey.
Isaac Gray campaigned for the Democrats as lieutenant governor even though he was a stronger nominee than Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Franklin Landers. Gray’s actions as a Republican, locking Democrats into the Senate to maintain a quorum to pass the Fifteenth Amendment, was not forgotten by his (now) fellow Democrats. Landers lost to Albert Porter by about 7,000 votes out of 470,000 cast. According to one commentator, during the period from 1880 – 1892, the Tariff Question was “the only serious issue in Indiana politics.” The economy was shifting from agricultural to industrial. Republicans generally favored the tariff as protecting developing and diversifying local industry from foreign competition. Democrats, meanwhile, generally favored low tariffs and free trade. This appealed to farmers — particularly in the south and the west — who were exporting products like tobacco, cotton, and wheat.
During the early part of the Porter administration, the Republicans held majorities in the General Assembly, They promptly passed a bill which would have a prohibition amendment in the Indiana Constitution. This backfired on them and the next session was heavily Democratic as there was apparently a strong showing by German voters opposing the temperance legislation. The Republicans of 1881 had also passed resolutions for amendments that would have provided for female suffrage and would have made all state and county offices four year terms. (In Indiana, a proposed constitutional amendment has to pass two General Assemblies before it is eligible for a statewide vote.)
The Democratic General Assembly also employed some heavy handed opposition to the Republicans, taking away much of the Governor’s legislatively granted appointment power to offices like prison board member, State Geologist, State Statistician, and State Oil Inspector. It was also during this period that the hospitals for the insane were created at Richmond, Logansport, and Evansville.
I’m not sure the best section to put this, but I feel like an under-appreciated aspect of state and local government is our system of drainage. There are a tremendous number of miles of regulated drain in Indiana. But they’re mostly invisible to citizens. When drains are working, you simply don’t notice them. It rains, the land is wet for a while, and then it dries up. There used to be a lot less productive acreage in Indiana. From the State’s inception, government dabbled at drainage laws, but a comprehensive system seems to have begun in earnest in the 1880s. The surge in drainage activity had to do with the closing of the frontier (making more difficult land in the settled areas more attractive), an increase in land prices, and the growing proof of how valuable a system of regular drainage could be — the cost of the drains were small in comparison to the increase in value of the drained land. Despite these benefits, there is some natural resistance to construction of drains. It does not fit very well with our atomistic view of property rights and a philosophical inclination to limit government power. There was no right under the common law for one land owner to construct drains over the property of another. But, water does not respect property lines, and so through the 1880s, the General Assembly enacted a variety of drainage laws that helped open up a good deal of territory in Indiana. (I believe Northern Indiana was particularly swampy.)
A focus on problems with water were probably also triggered by the fact that 1882, 1883, and 1884 saw significant flooding along the Ohio and Wabash rivers. The 1883 flood was the most significant of these and, in Peru anyway, rivaled the flood of 1847.
On Friday, February 2, 1883, there was a heavy fall of snow, which turned to rain late in the afternoon. The ground was frozen so that the water could not penetrate it, the temperature rose during the night and the snow melted, adding to the volume of water that was forced into the streams over the frozen ground. By eleven o’clock on Saturday morning the Wabash railroad tracks were under water and the channel of the river was filled with floating ice. Rain fell all day on Saturday and during the night it turned colder, the temperature on Sunday morning being only a few degrees above zero. When the people arose that morning they found the Strawtown pike under water from the bridge to the toll house, the Mississinewa pike was under water for a mile or more, and South Peru was inundated. Frank Henton and Lou Cole led a rescuing party to convey the people in boats to places of safety. The back water had extinguished the fires at the gas works and the people had to return to coal oil, and in some instances to candles, for their light. All along the river, on the high grounds, could be seen little herds of livestock and the intense cold added to the suffering of both man and beast.
The shift from a rural agricultural economy to an urban industrial economy likely made Hoosiers feel the impact of the floods more deeply. A flooded field is no picnic, of course, but flooded out homes, businesses, and factories in cities built up against rivers are more expensive and recovery takes longer.
Even as the General Assembly was busy weakening the office of the governor, they did give Governor Porter some money and authority to address the damage caused by the floods. The Indiana Constitution prohibited consecutive terms at that time, so Porter did not run for office in 1884. He declined an opportunity to run in 1888. He did, however, have the opportunity to nominate his former law partner, Benjamin Harrison, to be the Republican nominee for the Presidency.
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