Thomas A. Hendricks

Thomas A. Hendricks: The Ticket-Balancer Who Died Too Soon

He held the second-highest office in the United States for eight months and did essentially nothing with it. Thomas Andrews Hendricks was inaugurated Vice President on 4 March 1885, complained of feeling unwell on 24 November, went to bed early, and was found dead the next day of a heart attack. His reported last words were "Free at last!" The office then sat empty for more than three years, an absence so alarming that Grover Cleveland pushed through a Presidential Succession Act that governed the republic until 1947. Hendricks's largest contribution to American government was the hole he left in it.

Shelby County Lawyer

He was born on 7 September 1819 in Muskingum County, Ohio, the second of eight children of John Hendricks of Pennsylvania and Jane Duke Hendricks of Virginia. The family moved to Madison, Indiana in 1820 and to Shelby County in 1822. Politics was in the household: his uncle William Hendricks had been a U.S. Representative, the third Governor of Indiana, and a Senator until 1837.

He attended the Shelby County Seminary and Greensburg Academy, graduated from Hanover College in 1841, then read law under Judge Stephen Major in Shelbyville and took an eight-month course at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, under another uncle, Judge Alexander Thomson. Admitted to the Indiana bar in 1843, he opened a practice in Shelbyville. He married Eliza Carol Morgan on 26 September 1845; their only child, Morgan, born in 1848, died at three.

The law was not a stepping stone he abandoned. He moved to Indianapolis in 1860 and built a firm — Hendricks and Hord in 1862, later Baker, Hord and Hendricks after outgoing Governor Conrad Baker joined in 1873 — that survives, through successors, as one of Indiana's leading practices.

Washington in the 1850s

A single year in the Indiana House from 1848, then a seat at the 1850–51 state constitutional convention, where he argued for a powerful judiciary and the abolition of grand juries. He entered the U.S. House in March 1851 and served two terms. He was a popular-sovereignty Democrat, an ally of Stephen Douglas, and he voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 — a position his district disliked enough to end his congressional career that November.

Franklin Pierce rescued him with the commissionership of the General Land Office in 1855. It was the least glamorous and most consequential job of his life: 180 clerks, a huge backlog, and the machinery of westward settlement running through his desk. He issued 400,000 land patents and settled 20,000 disputed cases, and most of his decisions survived legal challenge, though critics noted he had arrived with no relevant background. He resigned in 1859 over patronage, pro-slavery policy and the homestead bill, having quarrelled with James Buchanan.

The Senator Who Said No

The Indiana legislature sent him to the Senate in 1863, at the low point of Union fortunes — military reverses and the unpopularity of Lincoln's administration made a Democrat electable. Hendricks became the effective leader of a tiny minority and spent six years opposing almost everything the Republican majority did. He voted for war appropriations; he fought the draft, the greenbacks, and Radical Reconstruction, arguing that the Southern states had never legally left the Union and were entitled to representation, and that Congress had no authority over state governments. He opposed Johnson's impeachment and preferred his rapid restoration to the Radical alternative.

He voted against the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. On emancipation he was capable of the formula "He is free; now let him remain free," while insisting constitutional change was premature. On equality he was explicit and ugly. Debating Senator Oliver P. Morton, he claimed the African race "for two thousand years has shown that it cannot elevate itself," had "not produced" significant inventions, and owed whatever elevation it possessed to contact with white civilisation through slavery. No sympathetic reading survives that passage. When Republicans retook the Indiana legislature in 1868, he lost his seat.

Governor, and the Election That Was Stolen

He lost the governorship in 1860 and again in 1868, by 961 votes, before winning on the third attempt in 1872 — 189,424 to 188,276 over General Thomas M. Browne — becoming the first Democrat elected governor of Indiana after the Civil War. The Panic of 1873 defined his term: unemployment, business failures, collapsing farm prices. He twice sent the state militia against strikers, miners in Clay County and railroad workers in Logansport. A Republican legislature blocked most of his programme. He signed the Baxter Bill, a strict local-option temperance law he privately disliked; it proved unenforceable and was repealed in 1875. His durable achievement was pushing the funding of a new Indiana Statehouse, the old 1835 building having been condemned after its roof partly collapsed. He gave the keynote at the cornerstone-laying in 1880; the building opened in 1888 and still houses the state government.

Indiana was a swing state in an era when it decided elections, and Hendricks was Indiana. In 1876 the Democrats nominated him unanimously as Samuel Tilden's running mate. Tilden and Hendricks won the popular vote and lost the presidency by a single electoral vote after a partisan Electoral Commission, splitting eight to seven, awarded all twenty disputed votes from South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida and Oregon to Hayes. They accepted it. In 1884 he was nominated unanimously again, this time with Grover Cleveland — a soft-money man balancing a hard-money one, from the state Cleveland needed most.

Why Thomas Is Called a Genius

He is not one, and the honest answer starts there. Hendricks produced no idea, no statute of consequence, no book, no doctrine. His name survives on a monument, a library and a $10 silver certificate — he is the only vice president who never became president to appear on American paper currency — rather than on anything he thought.

What he did possess was two specific and unglamorous competences. The first was administrative: the General Land Office years, in which he processed 400,000 patents and adjudicated 20,000 contested claims quickly enough to clear a paralysing backlog and well enough that the courts mostly upheld him. That is real capacity, if not intellect. The second was rhetorical and social — he was a formidable public speaker, a fiscal conservative with a reputation for honesty and settled convictions, and, rare in that scalding decade, on good terms with Republicans as well as Democrats. That likeability was his political value: parties put him on national tickets twice for the votes he delivered from Indiana, not for what he would do in office.

Set against this is a record that a defender cannot rehabilitate. He was wrong, and self-consciously wrong, on the central moral question of his century, voting against all three Reconstruction Amendments and arguing from the Senate floor that Black Americans were incapable of self-elevation. He deployed troops against striking workers. As vice president he pursued patronage in a way that cut across Cleveland's civil service reform — though he himself called Cleveland "courteous and affable" and the two worked together without open rupture. Calling him a genius inflates a capable lawyer-administrator with an unusual talent for being nominated.

Legacy

He was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery after a funeral at Saint Paul's Episcopal Cathedral attended by Cleveland himself, with thousands lining the mile-and-a-quarter route. His widow Eliza funded the Thomas A. Hendricks Library at Hanover College in 1903; it and the Bates-Hendricks House in Indianapolis are both on the National Register of Historic Places, and the eleven-foot bronze raised on the Statehouse grounds in 1890 is the tallest statue there. He was one of four Hoosiers elected vice president between 1868 and 1920 — the era when carrying Indiana was the whole art of American politics.

Achievements

• Worked as politician, lawyer and governor