A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

James D. (“Blue Jeans Bill”) Williams (1877 – 1880)

Governor Williams was a Democrat who succeeded Governor Hendricks. Williams was a farmer from Monroe City, Indiana and cultivated a “man of the people” persona. His affinity for denim earned him the nickname “Blue Jeans Bill.” Howard Burnett, writing in 1926, said of Williams, “Of the sixteen governors who served Indiana before 1877, fourteen were lawyers, one a gunsmith, and one a newspaper man. James D. Williams, who was inaugurated January 8, 1877, was the first farmer and last pioneer governor of the state.”

He served in the legislature from 1843 to 1872, so his wife Nancy carried a good bit of the load running the farm. At the first State Fair at Indianapolis in 1852, Williams took first prize for the best wheat grown in the state, and in 1855, he produced the best timothy and the best clover in the state. For a time, Williams apparently had an interest in a pork packing plant, facilitated by the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. But, what the railroad gives, it also takes away. The railroads contributed to the consolidation of pork packing in Cincinnati and Chicago, and Williams’ local pork packing business dried up in the early 70s.

During his long service in the legislature, Williams developed a reputation for frugality. His first vote in the legislature was against a measure that would have had the State pay for each member of the General Assembly to have two copies each of the Indianapolis Sentinel and the Indianapolis Journal. He was opposed to Governor Morton and accused of being a Copperhead. In 1865, he introduced the legislation taking advantage of the Congressional land grant legislation which lead to the founding of Purdue. In 1874, Williams was elected to Congress and gained notoriety by continuing to wear his Kentucky homespun, earning him the nickname of “Blue Jeans Williams”. The story goes that this epithet was used more in mockery but soon became a nickname that Williams used to great benefit.

In 1876, Williams won a close race for governor against Benjamin Harrison, future President and grandson of William Henry Harrison. Upon his nomination, the Democrats had hailed Williams as the “Great Lincoln Democrat of the Centennial Year.” During the campaign, the race was often framed as being Williams’, the man of the people versus Harrison, the remote patrician. Harrison was, however, assisted by reminders of Old Tippecanoe (Benjamin was “Young Tip”) and the “bloody shirt” of Republican supporters of the Union which shamed Democratic supporters of the Confederacy.  The bloody shirt was losing its power however. Williams won with a difference in the vote of 5,000 out of 430,000 cast.

The Great Railroad Strikes of 1877 tied up freight and passenger traffic in July of 1877. Williams at first announced that he would interfere in no way with the strike or the strikers, but after some destruction of property by the strikers had led to bitter criticism of his inaction, he called out the militia.

In March 1877, a law providing for the construction of a new state house was passed and $2 million appropriated for the purpose. Williams received credit for the construction coming in under budget.

In February of 1880, Williams’ wife of 49 years took a fall from which she never recovered. She died on June 27 of that year. Reportedly some weeks after her death, his daughter found him hidden in a hay mow “while great sobs of grief shook his frame and tears coursed down his cheeks.” He returned to Indianapolis, but his own health rapidly declined and he died on November 20, 1880.

Benjamin Harrison, Williams former political opponent said of him:

If there were nothing to be said of Governor Williams’s relation to the public affairs of Indiana at all, his life would be an honorable and successful one. I have always felt that the successful pioneer, one of those who pressed forward toward the edge of civilization in the early days, and made a successful fight with the wilderness, and cleared the primitive forest and made of it a meadow, and of the marsh a dry field, and who built up around him and for himself and for the family that God gave him, a competence, elevated them, that that life was an honorable life and worthy of mention in any assembly. This work Governor Williams has done conspicuously.

Williams’ lieutenant governor, Isaac Gray became governor and served the remainder of Williams term. However, this was only about three months and Gray would become governor in his own right in 1884, so we’ll cover him next time.

Thomas Hendricks (1873-1877)

In the 1870s, Indiana was coming into its own. The educational system was developing, transportation facilities were increasing, its population had risen to 1.6 million in 1870 and would hit 1.9 million by 1880, and as a political swing state, it was becoming a force in national politics. It was during this period that Thomas Hendricks would finally win the governor’s job.

Thomas Hendricks was the nephew of Indiana’s second governor, William Hendricks, and was apparently very keen to become governor in his own right; running for governor three times — in 1860, 1868, and finally, successfully, in 1872. Hendricks practiced law for a period of time, but his family’s political background seems to have set him on that path. He was a state legislator, a delegate to the Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1851, a United States Congressman, a land office commissioner, a United States Senator (filling Jesse Bright’s spot, earning him a place on Bright’s lengthy enemies list), governor, an unsuccessful Vice-Presidential candidate in 1876, and a successful Vice-Presidential candidate in 1884.

Hendricks had opposed passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and was generally an opponent of the Republicans’ reconstruction efforts in Congress. He had opposed repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act until slavery was made unconstitutional. Of blacks and the right to vote, he said “I say we are not of the same race,” Hendricks declared; “we are so different that we ought not to compose one political community.”

Hendricks faced challenges during his term as governor. He was a Democratic governor in  a state that had, for about twenty years, been dominated by Republicans. Additionally, when he started his term, Europe and North America were hit by the Panic of 1873. The post-civil war era had seen a boom in railroad construction fueled by government land grants and railroad subsidies. This led to a bubble and then a bust. German economic policy trickled into the U.S. and resulted in the U.S. not backing its currency in silver, moving to a de facto “gold standard,” and depressing the silver market. The Grant administration contracted the money supply at a time when there were some major disruptions in the banking industry. The fires in Chicago (1871) and Boston (1872) apparently didn’t help anything either.

Labor Disturbances

The period after the Civil War saw more Hoosiers leaving the farm and moving to the city to work in industry. Some saw a material improvement in their living conditions. But others found such labor brutal and barely conducive to survival. Hours were frequently on the order of 10 hours per day, 6 days per week; but 12 hours per day, 7 days per week was not unheard of. Nor was frequent unemployment. During the depression of the 1870s, many people struggled to survive. Leaders in Indiana subscribed to “a blend of individualism, laissez-faire economics, and social Darwinism” — none of which lent itself to improving the lot of workers in the face of the overwhelming bargaining position of the owners of capital (whose property rights were very much the subject of government favor.)

During Hendricks’ tenure, he called the militia out to break two strikes. One was a railroad strike in Logansport and the other was a mining strike in Clay County. The Logansport strike was part of a wave of labor problems the railroads faced in the wake of the Panic. They adapted to falling freight and profits by mass layoffs, reduced wages, and, in some cases, simply withholding wages entirely. The companies did not do themselves any favors in their manner of relating to the workers; for example, telling workers of sharp wage cuts the day before they were implemented. In Logansport, 200 railroad workers halted traffic on the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis railroad. They uncoupled cars, pulled non-strikers from their cabs, and tampered with engines and boilers. They fixed one engine so it could only run backward. The Cass County Sheriff and the mayor of Logansport were unsuccessful in dealing with the strikers, and the company was helpless to run the railroad. Indianapolis engineers appealed to public sympathy during the strike, explaining that they were not willing to sell their labor at a rate that would render them unable to send their children to school; compelling them to live a life of drudgery. Hendricks sent out the militia and restored order, but it appears that the public was largely on the side of the laboring men and the militia members heart really wasn’t in the job. Even so, the two companies of militia put down the strike by means such as arresting strikers, swearing in special deputies, sending a detachment of Indianapolis police officers, and having Logansport issue a riot proclamation ordering citizens to their homes or places of business.

The mining disturbance took place in Knightsville and Brazil. Operators of the Brazil field reduced compensation to $1 per ton and, when the miners quit, the operators imported black labor. On April 15, 1873, drunk miners attacked the black men in Knightsville and the trouble spread to Brazil. Gov. Hendricks ordered out the militia (apparently a slap-dash affair due to the disorganization of the militia at that time) and some Indianapolis police, and order was restored in fairly short order.

Baxter Bill

In the 1850s, Indiana had briefly experimented with state-wide prohibition law from 1855-1858 when it was declared unconstitutional and repealed. (Temperance advocates received a boost from the nativist Know Nothings who perceived a connection between alcohol and foreigners). Temperance concerns were set aside during the Civil War but did not go away. In 1873, Gov. Hendricks signed into law a temperance law known as the Baxter Bill:

[The bill] made it unlawful to sell, or give away for the purpose of gain any intoxicating liquors to be drunk about the premises without first obtaining a permit from the county commissioners. The applicant for such a license had to file with the auditor, not less than twenty days before the meeting of the board, a petition in writing giving the exact location, also certifying that the said applicant was a voter in the county, and that he was a proper person to have such a permit. This application had to be signed by a majority of the legal voters resident in the ward, town or township. If the petition was according to law and in regular form then the applicant had to pay the expense of filing such petition and give a bond of three thousand dollars with freehold security to insure payment of all fines and costs and all damages which might result from the selling of liquors by him. These licenses were all for one year; and the man was required to keep a certificate in a conspicuous place showing when his permit expired. If this permit was violated in any manner the holder must forfeit it and no new license might be granted him for a period of five years. In addition to this he was not allowed to sell liquors to minors or intoxicated persons, or persons in the habit of becoming intoxicated. Moreover, no liquors might be sold on Christmas, Thanksgiving Day or any public holiday between the hours of nine p. m. and six a. m.

State senator William Baxter was a Quaker from Wayne County. Gov. Hendricks was apparently urged to veto the bill and did not particularly favor it himself, but he acquiesced to it as the public will. However, he seems to have misjudged the public will (though that misjudgment was good for his party). In 1874, the Democrats had a good election in no small part because of Republican support for temperance. According to the October 14, 1874, edition of the New York Times, “opposition to the “Baxter Law,” passed by the Legislature, last Winter, undoubtedly had a good deal to do with the Democratic success. … the Democrats repudiated it at their last State Convention while the Republican platform endorses it. The Germans have been particularly hostile to the law, and the rum interest has been thoroughly organized for the benefit of the Democrats, who, in consequence, have carried the State.”

Hendricks also urged the construction of a new Indiana Statehouse. Its cornerstone was laid in 1880 after he left office. (Probably not coincidentally, he enjoys a large statue on the southeast corner of the Indiana Statehouse lawn). In 1876, while he was governor,  he ran as vice-presidential running mate to Samuel Tilden. Tilden probably won that election, but, due to the “corrupt bargain” of 1876, Republicans got the disputed electors for Rutherford B. Hayes and the South got an end to any serious reconstruction, and the ability to disenfranchise black people. In 1880, Hendricks was nominated again but declined for health reasons. In 1884, he successfully ran as the vice-presidential running mate to Grover Cleveland. The Democrats electoral strategy worked that year — they were able to win Cleveland’s home state of New York, Hendricks home state of Indiana, and the “solid south.” However, Hendricks was not vice-president for long.  In November 1885, he died unexpectedly in Indianapolis at the age of 66.  

Conrad Baker (1866 – 1873)

Conrad Baker was Indiana’s first post-war governor. Baker had studied law under prominent Radical Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens. In 1841, Baker moved his law practice from Pennsylvania to Evansville and became involved in Vanderburgh County politics, serving as a Whig state representative. He was outspoken against slavery and, when the Whig Party broke up, joined the Republicans. He ran as Oliver Morton’s lieutenant governor in their unsuccessful 1854 campaign. When Morton ran in 1864 (Morton had been Henry Lane’s lieutenant in 1860), Baker was again Morton’s running mate. Baker was acting governor for a period of time as Oliver Morton was recovering from a stroke and took over the governor’s position when Oliver Morton was elected to the Senate. He was elected in his own right in 1868 in a closely contested race against Thomas Hendricks.

In 1862, Congress had passed and President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act. That legislation had been passed to allow use of public lands for colleges focused on agriculture and the mechanical arts “in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” Each state received 30,000 acres of public land for each member of Congress the state had. The land, or proceeds from its sale, was to be used to fund a land-grant college. In 1865, Indiana elected to accept the terms of the Act and, in 1869, Governor Baker signed legislation under the land-grant system to found Purdue.  Tippecanoe County’s proposal had included $150,000 (equivalent to $2.7 million) from Lafayette business leader and philanthropist John Purdue, $50,000 from the county, and 100 acres of land from local residents. Purdue was a merchant and former teacher with a variety of civic interests in the Tippecanoe County area. One area where he seems to have profited a great deal was from supplying pork to the Union during the Civil War.

Post-War Constitutional Amendments

It was at the end of the Morton administration and beginning of the Baker administration during which the post-war Constitutional Amendments were passed.

Thirteenth Amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery, had passed fairly rapidly under Governor Morton in February 1865. It was passed by both chambers within a week, although some Democratic dead enders contemplated an unsuccessful effort to bolt the legislature in order to stall or prevent its passage.

In 1866, an Indiana Supreme Court with four Republican justices elected on the same ticket as Morton and Conrad (and Lincoln) declared Article XIII of the Indiana Constitution invalid. Article XIII was the provision added to the 1851 Constitution that prohibited black people from moving into the state and declared void all contracts with blacks who were in the state in violation of the constitutional provision. The case was Smith v. Moody. Smith was a black man, and Moody owed him money on a promissory note. When Smith sued to collect, Moody said he didn’t have to pay because Smith was here illegally under Article XIII and, therefore, the contract was void. The Indiana Supreme Court made passing reference to the recently adopted Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but it primarily relied on the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the U.S. Constitution to say that Article XIII illegally deprived people like Moody of the government’s protection and the enjoyment of life and liberty. While upholding some rights for black people, like freedom of movement and the right to contract; the court stopped short of full equality. Black people did not, for example, have the right to vote or hold office; and the Court said this was o.k.

Fourteenth Amendment

Ellsworth Shade, in a 1960 masters thesis examines the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in Indiana in 1866 and 1867. The Fourteenth Amendment does a number of things — it overturned the Dred Scott decision and guaranteed citizenship to blacks. It sought to guarantee equal protection and impose due process protections against state infringement. It dealt with Congressional representation in light of the three-fifths clause being nullifed. It attempted to disqualify rebels from holding office. And, it prohibited payment of Southern debts related to the rebellion. During the summer of 1866, Oliver Morton championed its ratification in Indiana. The parts that inflicted pain on the Southerners were easy enough to sell, but Hoosiers were not necessarily comfortable with the parts about civil rights for black people. Oliver Morton argued that nobody who wasn’t a monarchist or a believer in slavery could take issue with it. Appealing to regionalism, he said that, finally, Southern whites would be  prohibited from enjoying representation on the basis of a black population that had been deprived of civil rights. Indiana Democrats campaigned hard against the Fourteenth Amendment, but the elections that year strongly favored the Republicans. The Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislature and won 8 of the 11 Congressional Districts.  In advocating for ratification of the Amendment, Governor Morton unloaded on the South:

Morton then launched a verbal attack upon the South. He accused the Southerners of instituting a reign of terror by persecuting the freedmen and forcing other loyal Union men to flee for their lives. The Governor asserted that the South had, by these actions, stirred the anger of the nation and produced a cry for vengeance throughout the country. Warning Southerners to flee from the wrath to come, Morton called upon the people of the South to put away their perjured traitors, to make haste to abandon their sins, and to accept the proffered terms of restoration presented 2 to them in the proposed amendment.”

Republicans having the upper hand in the legislature and the Democrats being largely powerless to stop the amendment, the debate was relatively brief. Republicans mostly ignored Democratic arguments, quickly rehashed some of their own, and voted to ratify the Amendment about a week after the legislature convened, 29 to 16 in the Senate, and 55 to 36 in the House.

Fifteenth Amendment

The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States had a tougher ratification fight. It states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In 1913, William Gerhichs wrote a comprehensive account of its ratification in Indiana. In 1865, Oliver Morton did not particularly favor immediate enfranchisement, preferring to give freed slaves political power gradually. Among other rationales, he believed that giving blacks immediate rights would be a “pro-slavery” argument — saying that freed slaves were ready for political power would be an indication that slavery had been beneficial enough to them to prepare them for civic responsibility. In any event, given Indiana’s treatment of blacks in its recently adopted 1851 Constitution, it’s fair to say that the population wasn’t fervently progressive when it came to the rights of black people. That said, Morton came around on the issue. Probably because he was a loyal Republican as much as anything else. He felt that passage of the 15th Amendment was necessary to create loyal Republican government in the South.  As a Senator, Morton battled with Indiana’s other Senator, Thomas Hendricks. Hendricks disfavored the amendment, believing that loyal states should be able to choose their own course in terms of permitting or denying black suffrage.

In February of 1869, the Fifteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress, and on March 1, 1869, Governor Baker submitted the proposed amendment to the legislature. At first, Democrats urged that consideration of the Amendment be postponed until more routine, more pressing matters were taken care of. They also urged that because no party had campaigned on black suffrage in the most recent elections, consideration of the Amendment should be put off until the next election. When the Republicans did not go along with that, the Democrats bolted. On March 3, the Democrats caucused until midnight. On March 4, 1869, seventeen Senators and thirty-seven Representatives — all Democrats — resigned. Three Democratic Senators and six Representatives did not resign. (Republicans claimed that these were legislators who didn’t figure to get re-elected if they had resigned.) Governor Baker issued a writ for a special election to fill the resigned positions on March 23. (This was only 12 days before a regular election scheduled in April. Failing to wait the 12 days to hold the election was seen as an effort to impose punitive expenses on the districts who had elected the bolting legislators.) The Democrats were chastised for taking their per diem and their allotment of stamps and stationary. One was accused of trading his stamps for a plow:

“One of the conscientious bolters yesterday ‘turned an honest penny ’ by exchanging $18 worth of postage stamps, paid for by the money of the State, for a couple of plows. Here is a fine example of a retired statesman imitating the high Roman fashion of Cincinnatus.”

The constituents of the Democratic bolters were hardly outraged, however. All of the bolters were re-elected in the special election. A special session convened on April 12, and consideration of the Amendment was postponed until May. In that respect, the Democratic bolt seems to have accomplished one of its goals. When the proposal was drawing near to consideration, Democrats proposed to bolt again. Republicans resolved to use some strong arm tactics. Several senators claimed to have resigned but they had not left the building. The door keeper was told to bring them into the chamber, the doors were locked (apparently locked by a Republican senator by the name of Isaac Gray — who would later become a Democratic governor), and they were counted for purposes of a quorum despite claiming to have resigned. The vote was 27 to 1 with 10 marked as present but not voting. After some failed attempts in the House to get a quorum, the Speaker finally decided that the rules for a quorum on a Constitutional Amendment were different — that the necessary percentage should be calculated based on the number of representatives who had not resigned. The House then proceeded with a vote where the Amendment passed 54-0 with 3 not voting. Gehrichs concludes his evaluation of this episode with the opinion that, while the Republicans were on morally defensible ground, viewed through the letter of the law, the Fifteenth Amendment was probably never legally passed in Indiana.

Some other accomplishments during Baker’s term were “appropriations for a soldier’s home, a house of refuge for juvenile offenders, uncontrollable boys and children with unfit parents, and a woman’s prison.” After his term, Baker went into private practice, joining with incoming governor, Thomas Hendricks’ firm,” the law firm of Hendricks, Hord & Hendricks which became Baker, Hord & Hendricks when Thomas Hendricks became governor.” The firm would eventually become the prominent Indianapolis firm, Baker & Daniels (now Faegre Baker Daniels).

And, on a personal note, it appears that it was during Gov. Baker’s term that the first Massons were born in Indiana. James Masson, son of Mansfield B. Masson, had moved from Cincinnati to Indianapolis at some point in the 1850s or 1860s. In 1867, my  great-grandfather, Mansfield Ross Masson (founder of the M. Ross Masson company) was born. He had a brother (Woodburn) who would become an Indianapolis lawyer of some prominence another brother, James, who became a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and a sister, Jennie who became a stenographer and, apparently headed up the shorthand department at the Indianapolis Business University for some time.

Continuing on with installment number 5 of this bicentennial series. We’ll pick up just after the Civil War. In some ways, it felt like the country and the state had been in a stall for a long time. In Indiana, the State had gone all-in with the Mammoth Internal Improvement Act. This was immediately followed by a grinding recession precipitated by the Panic of 1837. Then the nation seemed perpetually distracted by the slavery question throughout the 1850s. That tension was finally released in the all-consuming Civil War. Coming out the other side of that stretch combined the impact of the Industrial Revolution, Americans were ready to get busy. (In reality, a lot of the action was probably underway — but history tends to focus on top level stuff, and the landscape was dominated by recession, slavery, and war.)

First, as per usual, the National Scene:

Presidents:

Andrew Johnson (1865 – 1869)

Andrew Johnson became President in 1865 after John Wilkes Booth murdered President Lincoln. Johnson had been a Democratic Senator from Tennessee. He was firmly pro-Union and did not resign his seat when members of the Tennessee government declared secession. In fact, back in Tennessee, Johnson campaigned against secession in the face of threats of physical harm. Lincoln picked Johnson as a running mate to signify the continued viability of Union. However, as a Democrat succeeding Lincoln, Johnson did not have a friendly Congress — many of whom were Radical Republicans, not at all in the mood to be conciliatory after sacrificing American lives to suppress the rebellion.

Johnson, therefore, found himself at odds with Congress over the shape of Reconstruction with its questions about whether the newly free blacks would be entitled to vote, what would be required of Southern States before they were entitled to participate in the federal government, and whether and how to punish those who had taken up arms against the United States. Georgia attempted to send Confederate Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, to Congress in December 1865. Johnson appeared to accept such a move in the name of quick conciliation. But most Northerners wanted Southerners to acknowledge their defeat. Some Northerners saw southern whites as proud and insolent. Allowing an unrepentant Southern leader like Stephens to participate in federal government would be intolerable. Congress refused to seat Stephens and established a committee to recommend appropriate reconstruction legislation.

As a Democrat, Johnson appeared to be counting on Southern support for his election prospects and, therefore, wasn’t as quick to condemn the actions of the Southern elite which were designed to, as much as possible, maintain the status quo ante despite their defeat. This alienated the Radical Republicans. Johnson vetoed a bill that would have extended the existence of the Freedman’s Bureau and another that granted citizenship to the freedmen. The veto of the second bill was overridden and Johnson had alienated the moderate Republicans. The Freedman’s Bureau bill was passed again, vetoed again, and this time that veto was overridden as well. The Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act over Johnson’s veto. Among other things, it required ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as a condition of the end of military occupation and the return of civil government in the rebel states (except for Tennessee which had already passed the Fourteenth Amendment and been readmitted.)

Eventually, the Congressional Republicans impeached Johnson mostly because they were spoiling for a fight with him. They had passed a dubious “Tenure of Office” Act which purported to limit a President’s authority to terminate executive cabinet members once appointed. When Johnson dismissed Secretary of War Stanton without Congressional approval, impeachment hearings were initiated. The House prosecutors  fell just short of the tw0-thirds of the Senators needed to convict, with 35 guilty votes versus 19 not-guilty.

During this period, in 1867, Secretary of State Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska (a/k/a “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox”) from Russia for $7.2 million (about $122 million today). One of Johnson’s last acts in office was to grant a blanket amnesty that protected Confederates from prosecution for the treason they committed.

Ulysses S. Grant 1869 – 1877

Grant was, of course, the Union General and war hero who defeated his Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee, and won the Civil War. Given the significance of his victory and our love of generals, he was an unsurprising choice to run for President.

Notable for Indiana was his choice of Schuyler Colfax as a running mate. Colfax had been a deputy Auditor under his step-father in St. Joseph County, covered politics when he worked at and later owned newspapers in the Region and, in that capacity, became friendly with Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune for which Colfax contributed articles. Colfax had been an active Whig then became a Republican when that party was created. He was also a delegate to the convention that wrote Indiana’s 1851 Constitution. Colfax became a United States Representative in 1855 and was Speaker of the House until 1869 when he became Vice-President under Grant. As Speaker, Colfax was aligned with the Radicals and made sure that, despite the Speaker traditionally not voting on legislation, his name was recorded as voting for the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Colfax got caught up in the Credit Mobilier scandal (involving, essentially, bribes related to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad).

Reconstruction was a major issue during Grant’s Presidency – how the U.S. was going to treat the newly freed slaves and how much or how little it would do to punish the traitors. The Radicals wanted to punish the Confederates severely and/or give black people equal rights. The Democrats were more inclined to let bygones be bygones and go back to business as usual. During the Grant administration, the Department of Justice was created and used to prosecute the white Southern terrorists calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan. Congress also passed the Force Acts of 1870 and 1871 designed to allow federal enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment and protect the ability of black people to vote in the South in the face of lawless Klansmen. Grant signed into law the Amnesty Act of 1872 which allowed most former Confederates to assume public office again — despite having broken their oaths to uphold the Constitution.

The frontier was coming to a close during this period. On May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford drove the golden spike into the United States’ first transcontinental railroad, joining the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads. It was now possible to cross the country in six days. Railroads were bringing white people into more and more contact with the Native Americans in the west. Grant implemented what he called a “Peace Policy” which was essentially designed to assimilate the Indians and keep them on reservations until they were willing to be assimilated. Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn came in 1876, and Grant blamed Custer for the unnecessary loss of life. Rampant corruption in the Department of the Interior did not help anything. Expeditions to survey the upper Yellowstone led to the establishment of the Yellowstone area as the country’s first national park.

Grant’s administration was plagued by scandal. President Grant, himself, does not seem to have been personally involved, but he was unduly loyal to his friends who were not above using the government to enrich themselves. The Panic of 1873 came during his second term, caused by, among other things, speculation in the railroad industry and an overheated economy after eight years of growth following the Civil War.

Rutherford B. Hayes (1877 – 1881) 

Hayes won (or at least became President) after a hotly contested contest against Samuel Tilden. Having lost the popular vote, “Hayes won an intensely disputed electoral college vote after a Congressional commission awarded him twenty contested electoral votes. The result was the Compromise of 1877, in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes’s election and Hayes ended all U.S. military involvement in Southern politics.”

My primary experience with Hayes is that my grandparents lived in a house built on property that Hayes and his wife (“Lemonade Lucy”) used to own in Fremont, Ohio. Spiegel Grove which is on the Hayes’ estate and houses the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center is one of my favorite places. Not because I particularly learned much about Hayes there but because that’s where I rode bikes with my Grandpa.

But I digress. Hayes had been a lawyer in Ohio before the Civil War. In the war he was wounded five times and attained the rank of major general. After the war, he served a term as Congressman then went on to be the governor of Ohio. Because of what we’ll kindly call irregularities in how he obtained the necessary electoral votes to become President, Democrats nicknamed him “His Fraudulency” and “Rutherfraud.”

Hayes ended Reconstruction in the South and returned the Confederacy to “home rule” (i.e. depriving black people of their civil rights). Congress was apparently not willing to fund military occupation of the South for much longer anyway, and Republicans were apparently losing their appetite for the task.

In July of 1877, disgruntled railroad workers were unhappy with some of the actions taken by railroad companies (e.g. cutting wages and sometimes simply refusing to pay wages) and began striking. This was in the wake of an economic collapse caused by an overheated economy and, in particular, railroad speculation. President Hayes sent federal troops to suppress the strike in a number of cities (Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago) and that was instrumental in ending the strike.

In 1873, Congress had passed the Coinage Act which resulted in an end to the U.S. minting coins in silver. This contracted the money supply and contributed to the economic troubles resulting from the Panic of 1873. During Hayes’ term, Congress tried to fix this and passed a bill that resumed the use of silver coins. Hayes felt this was dishonest and inflationary and vetoed the bill. However, Congress was able to override the veto.

In 1868, the U.S. had entered into a treaty with China that allowed unrestricted immigration of Chinese people. When the economy went south in 1873, workers — particularly in the west — blamed their hardship on the Chinese. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act abrogating the treaty. However, Hayes vetoed the act, almost leading to his impeachment. Republicans were able to prevent this by refusing to vote and breaking a quorum. During the Hayes’ administration, the last of the wars with Native Americans were taking place. For example, in 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce declared, “I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

Hayes had promised not to seek re-election, and he kept that promise. In his retirement, Hayes came more to recognize the troubles with the growing wealth disparity in the country. He wrote, “ Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. . . . We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property.” The country had entered the Gilded Age.

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.