Background

Henry C. Warmoth was descended from a family of Dutch extraction which had wandered from Virginia through Kentucky and Tennessee to Illinois. Son of Isaac Sanders and Eleanor (Lane) Warmoth, he first saw the light in a log cabin in MacLeansboro, Ill.

Education

His formal education was limited to that received in the village schools and to the training which he was able to pick up as a typesetter in a local printing office.

Career

After his father became justice of the peace at Fairfield, the reading of his law books and association with members of the bar inspired the youth with ambition to become a lawyer, and at the age of eighteen he was admitted to the bar at Lebanon, Mo. The outbreak of the Civil War the following year found him established as district attorney of the eighteenth judicial district, which post he relinquished in 1862 to join the Union forces as lieutenant-colonel of the 32nd Missouri Volunteers. After the capture of Arkansas Post he was assigned to the staff of Maj. -Gen. John A. McClernand and participated in the battles around Vicksburg, where he was wounded and furloughed. Charged with circulating exaggerations of Union losses, he was dishonorably discharged but was restored through personal appeal to President Lincoln. After the victory of Lookout Mountain and Banks's Texas campaign, he was assigned, in June 1864, as judge of the provost court for the Department of the Gulf, and when this service was ended he found himself, because of consolidations, without a command. He thereupon opened a law office in New Orleans early in 1865 and soon won a lucrative practice before military commissions and government departments. In November of that year he was elected as "territorial delegate" to Congress by Louisiana Unionists but was denied a seat. In September 1866 he was a delegate to a special convention of Southern loyalists in Philadelphia called to demand protection for the Union men of the South. With a group including former Gov. Andrew J. Hamilton of Texas he made a canvas' of the Northern states in behalf of the congressional program of reconstruction. In the Republican state convention of 1868 the sentiment in favor of his nomination for the governorship was so strong that the constitutional limitation on age was removed to permit him to become a candidate. The nomination was not without opposition, for he defeated his Negro rival by only two votes, and a black faction withdrew its support in the subsequent election. Warmoth was successful, however, and was reëlected in 1870. His gubernatorial term (1868 - 72) was characterized by discontent, turbulence, a wild orgy of speculation in state-aided railroads, a depleted treasury, and bitter strife over the question of Negro suffrage. Although he signed the bill which opened the restaurants, schools, and railroad coaches to Negroes without discrimination, he later vetoed a more radical measure and declared his purpose to harmonize the interests of races and to secure justice for both. Probably, as he claimed late in life, corruption and extravagance would have been worse except for his opposition. Nevertheless, toward the close of his administration he was under attack from three quarters: from white conservatives, from radical Republican Negroes - who denounced him as a traitor - and from the so-called Custom-House faction of the Republican party. By 1872 he had become utterly unavailable for renomination, and in consequence he actively supported the Democratic ticket. In the violent disturbances resulting from an election which culminated in two governors and two legislatures, he became, naturally, deeply involved. He was impeached by the hostile legislature in December 1872 and the trial dragged on until it was dropped some weeks after his term had expired. Many years later he published his own account of this stormy period, War, Politics, and Reconstrnction (1930). Although after 1872 he retired from active party politics, he participated at intervals in political affairs. In 1876-77 he was a member of the Louisiana legislature; in 1879 he served in the state constitutional convention; in 1888 he again headed the Republican state ticket, but, though he made the strongest campaign of his career, was defeated; in 1896 he went to St. Louis to help nominate McKinley for president. He was appointed collector of customs for New Orleans in 1890 by President Harrison and served until 1893, when Cleveland replaced him by a Democrat. In 1873 Warmoth engaged in sugar planting at "Magnolia Plantation, " just below New Orleans. He helped to organize a sugar refining company, and to build a railroad which greatly advanced the development of the west bank of the lower Mississippi. He contributed significantly to the advancement of sugar-refining until it was no longer possible to compete with the foreign product, whereupon he sold his plantation and retired to live quietly in New Orleans. In 1884 he had made a trip to France and Germany to study the sugar industry and upon his return secured the establishment of an experiment station on his plantation. When the Sugar Planters Organization determined to fight for a higher duty and for a bounty, he was selected to conduct what proved a successful struggle. During his long life after the bitter era of Reconstruction he overcame much of the antagonism against him, and hundreds who had earlier opposed him gathered to do him honor at his funeral.

Achievements

• Warmoth was the first elected Reconstruction Governor of Louisiana. He was later elected as a Louisiana State Representative, serving one term from 1876 to 1878 while Reconstruction ended and the federal government withdrew its troops from the state.

Works

More photos

• book

  • War, Politics, And Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana (Southern Classics)

    (A memoir of the ambitious life and controversial politica...)

  • Public debt: speech of delegate H.C. Warmoth, of Plaquemine, in the Constitutional convention of the state of Louisiana, delivered on the 12th of June, 1879.

    ( The Making of the Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-192...)

  • War, Politics and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana

    (This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.)

Connections

He married Sallie Durand of Newark, N. J. , on May 30, 1877. They had two sons and a daughter.

Father:

Isaac Sanders Warmoth

Mother:

Eleanor (Lane) Warmoth

Spouse:

Sallie Durand