Thomas A. Hendricks

American Democratic politician from Indiana who was governor of Indiana from 1873 to 1877 and Vice President of the United States in 1885 until his death. He earlier served in both houses of Congress.

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Biography

Thomas Andrews Hendricks was born in 1819 near Zanesville, Ohio, and grew up in Shelby County, Indiana, where his family settled in 1822. His uncle William Hendricks had been governor of Indiana. He attended Hanover College without graduating, read law in Shelbyville and at a law school in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and was admitted to the bar in 1843.

A Democrat, he served a term in the Indiana House in 1848 and was a delegate to the 1850-1851 state constitutional convention. He sat in the U.S. House from 1851 to 1855, where his vote for the Kansas-Nebraska Act cost him re-election, and then ran the General Land Office in Washington from 1855 until he resigned in 1859. He practised law in Indianapolis in the firm that became Baker & Daniels.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1863, he led its small Democratic minority through the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, opposing the Reconstruction amendments and the removal of President Andrew Johnson. After two failed attempts he was elected governor of Indiana in 1872, the first Democrat to win a northern governorship after the war, and served from 1873 to 1877 through the depression that followed the Panic of 1873.

He was Samuel Tilden's running mate in the disputed election of 1876, which they lost in the Electoral College despite winning the popular vote. In 1884 he was elected vice president alongside Grover Cleveland, but he died in Indianapolis on 25 November 1885, less than nine months into his term.