Alvin Hovey (1889 – 1891) was the Republican nominee for governor in 1888. In a number of ways, his life was a thread that runs through a number of the issues we’ve already discussed in prior installments. He was born in Mt. Vernon, Indiana in 1821, shortly after Indiana became a state. He eventually worked his way through his legal studies and became a lawyer, gaining some prominence very early on through his work on the estate of William Maclure, a wealthy industrialist who collaborated with Robert Owen on his failed utopian New Harmony initiative. Maclure’s will provided that his estate be used to build libraries. However, his siblings had misappropriated much of it and, as lawyer for the estate, Hovey had to pursue more than sixty lawsuits to recover the money. The money was eventually used to build 160 libraries in Indiana and Illinois.
In 1851, Hovey was named one of the delegates to the Indiana Constitutional Convention. He was the sponsor of what became Article XIII of the Constitution of 1851 which prohibited “negroes or mulattoes” from settling in the state. In 1854, Hovey was appointed to the Indiana Supreme Court, at age 34, the youngest Justice to have been appointed. In that capacity, he was able to interpret the Constitution he helped author, including the decision in Greencastle Township v. Black, 5 Ind. 557 (1855) which helped bring the progress of the School Law of 1852 to a halt by invalidating a statute that would allow township taxes to fund schools.
Hovey was part of the faction of Democrats who got on the wrong side of Jesse Bright and was expelled from the party, eventually becoming a Republican. Toward the end of the Civil War, Gov. Morton placed Hovey in command of the Indiana Legions in the state. In this capacity, he helped break up an alleged plot by southern sympathizers and had them tried by military tribunal. This led to the ex parte Milligan decision where the court decided that because the civil courts were in operation, conviction of a civilian by a military tribunal was unconstitutional.
After the Civil War, Hovey spent some time as minister to Peru and then spent the years from 1870 to 1886 in private practice as an attorney. In 1886, he was elected to Congress for a term and then, in 1888, Hovey became the Republican nominee for governor. Running on a ticket with the locally very popular Benjamin Harrison as President, Hovey still barely eked out a victory over the Democratic nominee, Courtland Matson, by 1,600 votes out of about 570,000 cast (93.3% of eligible voters).
The General Assembly remained Democratic and, apparently, remained hostile to the governor. He unsuccessfully challenged the laws Democrats had passed limiting the power of the former governor with respect to making appointments. However, one successful initiative he had was with respect to election reform in response to the Harrison “Blocks of Five” election scandal.
Under Hovey, Indiana was among the earliest states to end party printing of election ballots that were cast in public (to make sure bought voters selected the right ballot), and instead began using state-printed ballots marked in secret for its elections. Indiana also began regulating who could enter polling places and limited campaigning at sites where voters cast their ballots.
The General Assembly did, however, assist in expanding the state’s judicial system. In 1891, the Indiana Appellate Court was created. It was initially intended as a temporary measure to handle overflow cases from the Indiana Supreme Court and was scheduled to last for six years. The state was growing and, as one of my favorite quips goes: “one lawyer starves where two lawyers prosper.” In other words, lawyers have a way of making work for one another. In any event, when the six years passed, the caseload remained heavy, so the Appellate Court was continued for another four years. After that, the legislature made the court permanent and it began its function as an intermediate appellate court.
White Capping
Hovey and the General Assembly took action to crack down on the practice of “white capping” that became a problem in Southern Indiana in the late 19th century. White capping was a sort of vigilante justice where individuals in the community committed violence against other members of the community who supposedly weren’t living up to the obligations and standards of a good Christian. That sort of justice is prone to being unevenly enforced and enforced as pretext. Unsurprisingly, in the South, it ended up taking on a racial characteristic. Early on, at least, the secret societies that administered the justice targeted “men who neglected or abused their family, people who showed excessive laziness and women who had children out of wedlock.” They also targeted “women who were not believed to be adequately caring for their home and children, children who were truant from school, and people who shirked from civic duty like working on road projects.” As the movement matured and moved south, it was just as likely to be used by poor white farmers to force more prosperous black farmers off their land.
In 1889, two men suspected of murder were in the jail in Corydon. James Devin and Charles Tennyson were thought to have murdered two women of the Lemay family in a botched robbery. As they were awaiting trial, on June 12, 1889, between 150 and 200 men in hoods, the Harrison County Regulators, dragged them from their cells in the middle of the night and hung them from the West Bridge. Initial efforts to combat these groups had limited success, in no small part because a number of the sheriffs charged with enforcing those efforts were, themselves, members of the white cap groups. Hovey had campaigned on the issue to some extent and threatened to have uncooperative local officials removed and place their towns under martial law. The White Cap activity subsided somewhat with only two lynchings during Hovey’s term.
Gov. Hovey did not complete his four year term. He fell ill and died on November 23, 1891, and was succeeded by the lieutenant governor, Ira Chase.
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