Walter Q. Gresham

Walter Q. Gresham

Walter Quintin Gresham (born March 17, 1832 in Lanesville , Harrison County , Indiana , † May 28, 1895 in Washington, DC ) was an American lawyer and politician . He has served as Secretary of State , Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of State of the United States .

Life

Gresham spent two years at an academy in Corydon and one year at Indiana University in Bloomington . He then studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1854. In the presidential election in 1856 he was active as a spokesman for the Republican campaign. In 1860 he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives as a Republican candidate from an actually Democratic constituency . Here, as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, he was instrumental in preparing the Indiana troops for service in the federal army.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he became the commander of the 53rd Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He took part in the Tennessee campaign of Ulysses S. Grant and the first Battle of Corinth and the Battle of Vicksburg in which he led a brigade in 1862 . In August 1863 he was promoted to brigadier general and was assigned command of the federal troops at Natchez, Mississippi . In 1864 he commanded a division of the 17th Army Corps in William T. Sherman's Atlanta campaign , but was so wounded on July 20 before the Battle of Atlanta that he had to retire from active service and limped for the rest of his life. In 1865 he received the rank of major general .

After the war he practiced as a lawyer in New Albany , Indiana. In 1869 he was appointed a judge at the federal district court for Indiana by US President Ulysses S. Grant . In April 1883 he replaced Timothy Otis Howe as Postmaster General in the cabinet of Chester A. Arthur . He took an active part in the smashing of the Louisiana Lottery . In September 1884 he succeeded Charles J. Folger as Treasury Secretary . However, he resigned from this post just a month later in order to take up the appeal as judge at the newly established Federal Court of Appeal for the 7th court district.

Gresham ran for the Republican nomination in the respective presidential elections in 1884 and 1888, in the last year he was ahead in the vote. However, over time, he could no longer make friends with the leaders and politics of the Republicans. Therefore, in 1892 he advocated the election of the Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland . After his election Gresham belonged from March 7, 1893 to his death on May 28, 1895 in Washington as Foreign Secretary of the Cleveland II cabinet .

literature

• Charles W. Calhoun: Gilded Age Cato: The Life of Walter Q. Gresham. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2015, ISBN 978-0-8131-6179-2 .
• Charles Calhoun: Walter Q. Gresham. In: Edward S. Mihalkanin (Ed.): American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell . Greenwood Publishing 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-30828-4 , pp. 226-233.

Web links

Commons : Walter Q. Gresham  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Walter Q. Gresham in the Notable Names Database (English)
• Walter Q. Gresham at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia (English)