Caleb Blood Smith

Caleb Blood Smith ( born April 16, 1808 in Boston, Massachusetts, † January 7, 1864 in Indianapolis, Indiana) was an American politician who belonged to the cabinet of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln as Minister of the Interior.

Career

A native of New England, 1814 Smith moved with his parents to Ohio. He received his education at the Cincinnati College and Miami University before he studied law in Cincinnati and Connersville (Indiana) and was admitted to the bar in 1828. In Connersville, he was first employed as a lawyer; later he moved to the newspaper industry. He called the Indiana Sentinel to life, as its editor, he also acted.

Public offices

From 1833 he was also politically active and was for four years the House of Representatives from Indiana, where he served in 1836 as its Speaker. Another session closed from 1840 to 1841. His attempt to be selected for the Whigs in the U.S. House of Representatives proposed in 1841 failed yet. In 1843 he had but then success: By 1849 Smith was after multiple re-election to Parliament, and was inter alia chairman of the Territorial Committee. After retiring from Congress, the new U.S. President Zachary Taylor appointed him to an authority which examined claims of U.S. citizens against the neighboring country of Mexico. In 1850 he returned to the legal profession and worked again in Cincinnati.

As in 1861 threatened the outbreak of the civil war, which now impersonated to the Republicans Caleb Smith worked in a Washington DC Convention held peace with; This does not, however, reached its destination. The new President Abraham Lincoln took Smith then as interior minister in his cabinet, which represented a reward for his commitment during Lincoln's election campaign. He was the first citizen of Indiana, who belonged to the U.S. Cabinet.

However, the interest held by the Minister to his new office in borders; moreover, he had health problems, so he delegated many of his responsibilities to his deputy John Palmer Usher. In 1862, Smith signaled interest in the then vacant judge positions in the U.S. Supreme Court; President Lincoln, however, nominated David Davis.

In December of the same year Smith resigned from his post after all, including his stance regarding the recently adopted in the Cabinet Emancipation Proclamation helped. He returned to Indiana, where he was a judge at the Federal District Court for the District government was early 1863. However, Caleb Smith already died on 7 January 1864. President Lincoln ordered a black mourning flagging of government buildings for a period of two weeks.

Confusion about the final resting place

For a long time it was said that Smith was buried in the cemetery of Connersville. In 1977, a local historian dortiger received permission to leave exhume the corpse, it turned out that it was not about the former minister, but his son in law William Watton Smith at the person in Smith's grave. Some years later appeared a letter on that clarifying this fact: After Caleb Smith's wife Elizabeth had let her husband's remains be buried by the public in Indianapolis unnoticed. This was done at the actual place of burial for fear of vandalism by frustrated Southerners.

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