Orville Hickman Browning

Orville Hickman Browning ( born February 10, 1806 Cynthiana, Kentucky; † August 10, 1881 in Quincy, Illinois) was an American politician who held the post of Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of U.S. President Andrew Johnson.

Life

After visiting the Augusta College Browning studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1831. In the same year he settled as a lawyer in Quincy. In 1832 he joined a volunteer regiment from Illinois who fought in the Black Hawk War. As a lawyer, he made himself a name in 1844 when he successfully defended five men, where the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was accused.

Policy

Politically, Orville Browning operated for the first time from 1836 to 1843 as a member of the Senate from Illinois. 1850 and 1852 he competed as a Whig to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, but failed in each case. As in Bloomington a meeting against the Kansas - Nebraska Act was held in May 1856, Browning was a delegate to it in part; In this Convention the foundation for the establishment of the Republican Party was laid.

Browning then joined with the Republicans and was a member of this party on June 26, 1861 U.S. Senator for Illinois; He succeeds the late Stephen A. Douglas. The re-election was denied him, so he retired again from the Senate on January 12, 1963. President Abraham Lincoln, whose personal friends counted Browning is said to have planned, this will be appointed as successor of Caleb Blood Smith Secretary of the Interior; to it but did not.

It was not until Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson took Browning on September 1, 1866 in his cabinet after the previous Home Secretary James Harlan had resigned because of political differences with the president. Browning belonged to the cabinet until the end of Johnson's term of office on March 4, 1869, led this for a short time as acting the Ministry of Justice. He returned to Illinois, where he was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1869 and has subsequently been working as a lawyer again.