When I first heard Indiana was being run by a super majority, I was overjoyed.
I could recall few times in our state’s history when a majority of Hoosier voters had been super enough to elect a majority of super-wise governmental leaders. But there we were.
Many years we elected legislatures that were not super at all.
In 1852 we elected a not-so-super majority (then Whigs and Democrats). They rewrote the state constitution to prohibit “negroes” and “mulattoes” from settling here.
Then in 1860, in the midst of all our racism, we miraculously chose a strong Republican abolitionist for governor.
Well … sort of.
Oliver P. Morton — who would become one of President Abraham Lincoln’s cadre of anti-slavery governors — had been thrown out of the Democratic party in 1854 because he was against human beings owning other human beings.
Democrats dominated the Indiana General Assembly at the time, and the voters who had put them there were by no means crusaders against human bondage, as long as they were not the ones being enslaved.
Although Hoosier law didn’t allow people legally to own other people, the majority Democratic Party thought that “peculiar institution” was no problem if some other states wanted to try it out. (You know, the “states’ rights trumps morality” thing.)
In reaction, the progressive (dare I say “liberal”) anti-slavery wings of the Democratic and Whig parties got together in 1856 and launched a national “People’s Party,” which in a few months changed its name to the “Republican Party.”
Morton, a circuit court judge from Centerville, was one of the organizers of the new party and ran for governor as an anti-slavery Republican in 1856. He lost.
Then, after his friend Abraham Lincoln announced candidacy for president of the United States in 1860, Morton decided to try again.
However, Republican Party leadership doubted Morton had a chance for a victory. (In his first run for the post, he had burned a lot of bridges by his radical speeches claiming slaves were human beings.)
Up stepped fellow Republican politician Henry Lane with a compromise. Lane was against the spread of slavery, but stayed mostly “in the closet” about the issue when campaigning. He convinced party leaders to run him for governor and Morton for lieutenant governor. (After all, what do voters know about what a lieutenant governor says or does anyway?)
The icing on the cake for Morton was that Lane really didn’t want to be governor. He wanted to be a U.S. Senator. If Lane could be elected, he agreed he would immediately resign, elevating Morton to the governorship.
Since U.S. senators from Indiana in those days were appointed by the General Assembly, rather than by running in a general election, the popular Mr. Lane would be in Washington, D.C. and Morton would be in the governor’s mansion by the time voters figured out what was happening.
Lane won.
While the men Hoosiers elected to the General Assembly that year did not prove to be all that super, the man the new Republican Party had sneaked into office did.
As the nation moved toward the Civil War, the majority in the General Assembly refused to support President Lincoln’s call for the country to unite as a single nation and prepare for inevitable conflict, so Morton went rogue.
Without legislative permission, he created a state militia, established a state arsenal and solicited private and federal funds to pay for what the legislature refused to finance.
In April 1861, twelve days after the Civil War began and after 12,000 Hoosiers had already volunteered to fight for the Union, Morton called a special session of the General Assembly to seek legislative support.
Finally, the legislators agreed to supply the funds to purchase arms and supplies for the Indiana troops.
Everything turned out super, as far as Indiana doing the right thing in spite of the General Assembly.
Today, Indiana remembers Morton as a super governor. A huge statue depicting him stands at the east entrance to the Statehouse.
No such statue stands in remembrance of the 1860 General Assembly.
Watching this year’s version of the state legislature spend its time and the taxpayers’ money on efforts to ban books, dictate what teachers can teach, politicize the department of health, fund private schools to the detriment of public education, eliminate gun permits and legislate gender identity, I doubt they will earn a statue either.
Supermajorities are not always all that super, I guess.
