Gideon Welles

Gideon Welles ( born July 1, 1802 in Glastonbury, Connecticut, † February 11, 1878 in Hartford, Connecticut ) was an American politician. In the Cabinet of Abraham Lincoln and his successor, Andrew Johnson, he was involved from 1861 to 1869 Secretary of the Navy of the United States and in that time much in building a powerful navy of the northern states, which could implement the blockade of the Southern States during the Civil War.

Welles attended Cheshire Academy and the Norwich Military Academy in Vermont and became first a lawyer, and later a journalist in Hartford. In 1826 he founded the journal Hartford Times. He also sat for the Democrats in the House of Representatives from Connecticut and has held various official posts, such as the postmaster in Hartford from 1836 to 1841 and the head of the Navy Office Supply 1846-1849.

Due to its dedicated rejection of slavery he freed himself from the Democrats, first in 1848 in support of the Free Soil Party of Martin Van Buren and definitively with the founding of the Republican Party in 1854, which he established in Connecticut. For their support, he founded in 1856 the journal Hartford Evening Press. In the election for governor for the Republicans in 1856, he was behind the victorious William T. Minor of the Know-Nothing Party and the Democrat Samuel Ingham third with 10.1 percent of the vote. Welles was an active partisan of Abraham Lincoln, which made him on March 7, 1861 Secretary of the Navy ( Secretary of the Navy ). In this role, he built the navy of the northern states of strong and supported even after initial resistance, the politics of blockade of the ports of the Southern States ( Anaconda Plan), not least thanks to Welles' use could be implemented effectively and significantly to the positive for the northern states output the Civil War contributed.

Welles also served under Lincoln's successor Johnson as Secretary of the Navy, but left the Cabinet in 1869 in dispute over the Reconstruction policies of the president. He held in his impeachment loyal to Johnson. Welles moved back to the Democratic Party and returned to Hartford, where he published his journals and was active as a writer. Among other things, he published a biography of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward (New York 1873).

He left behind a diary, which is considered an important source for the Cabinet Lincoln and the Civil War. The first edition published by his son in 1911 ( she was still edited by Welles himself), an output after the original appeared in 1960.