John Palmer Usher

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John Palmer Usher

John Palmer Usher (born January 16, 1816 in Brookfield , Madison County , New York , † April 13, 1889 in Philadelphia ) was an American politician who belonged to the cabinet of US President Abraham Lincoln as Home Secretary .

Life

Born in New York State, Usher set out west as a young man in 1839. He settled in Terre Haute in western Indiana , where he and a business partner opened the law firm Griswold & Usher . As an outstanding trial attorney, he soon worked in numerous courts in Indiana and Illinois , where he also made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, who was a lawyer in Springfield . Usher also became a mentor to Joseph Gurney Cannon , who later served as Speaker of the US House of Representatives .

politics

Usher first became politically active in 1850, when he was elected to the Indiana state legislature for the Whigs , to which he belonged until 1851. He left the falling Whig Party and joined the Republicans , for whom he ran unsuccessfully in the 1856 election to the US House of Representatives. In 1861 he was elected Attorney General of Indiana, but resigned after a few months to take over the post of Assistant Secretary of the Interior in the Lincoln government.

The then Minister Caleb Blood Smith showed little interest in his office and also had to contend with health problems, which is why he relinquished most of his duties to his deputy. After Smith resigned in December 1862, Usher officially took over the ministry on January 1, 1863.

After the murder of Abraham Lincoln Usher remained under his successor Andrew Johnson only for a month in office; but he had already announced his resignation on March 9, 1865, which then took effect on May 15. His power base in his home state suffered from the fact that Lincoln had brought Hugh McCulloch, another Indiana politician, into his cabinet as Treasury Secretary at the beginning of his second term . In addition, there was growing public pressure on the president to fill a ministerial office with a Methodist ; Usher had turned the members of this denomination against him through political decisions. On the day of his resignation, a Methodist was named as his successor, James Harlan , but he did not take office until Andrew Johnson.

Another résumé

After the end of his political career, John Palmer Usher worked as a lawyer for the Union Pacific Railroad , whose interests he had previously represented as a cabinet member. He died of cancer at the age of 73.

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