Businessman clergyman politician
John Hogan was born on January 2, 1805 in Mallow, Ireland. He was the son of Thomas and Mary (Field) Hogan. His mother died in Ireland when he was ten years old. He and his father came to Baltimore in 1816, where the latter died a year later.
As a youth, Hogan was apprenticed to James Hance, manufacturer of boots and shoes, and from him and another apprentice he learned to read.
At the age of sixteen Hogan became a Methodist convert and within five years was granted a license to preach. For several years he served as an itinerant preacher, part of the time as companion to Bishop Soule, with whom he left Baltimore for the West and traveled more than eight hundred miles on horseback; the rest of the time he was engaged on the St. Louis Circuit, which comprised the territory along the south bank of the Missouri River from St. Louis to Boonville.
In August 1830, his health impaired by the exposures incident to his work, he gave up the ministry. He then became a dealer in general merchandise at Edwardsville, Illinois, as partner to his brother-in-law, Edward M. West. They afterwards moved to Alton, establishing there a wholesale grocery. In 1835 Hogan became the president of the Alton branch of the State Bank of Illinois. The following year he was elected to the Illinois legislature from Madison County on the Whig ticket and in 1838 was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress from the southern district of Illinois. Subsequently President Harrison appointed him land commissioner for that state, in which office he served from 1841 to 1844. The year following he removed to St. Louis, entering the grocery house of Edward J. Gay as a partner.
In 1853 he was made vice president of the Missouri State Mutual Fire and Marine Insurance Company and in 1854 organized the Dollar Savings Institution. Hogan became conspicuous in 1853 by reason of a series of articles published in the Missouri Republican, in which he set forth the natural advantages of St. Louis. These articles became so popular that they were subsequently published in book form under the title, Thoughts About the City of St. Louis (1854), and circulated in Germany and Ireland. The result was a great and continuous German and Irish immigration to that city. Hogan was also the author of "History of Methodism in the West, " published in the Christian Advocate (St. Louis) in 1860.
He again entered politics in 1854, when he was defeated for mayor in a close vote. In 1857 he was appointed postmaster of St. Louis by President Buchanan. During his term of office the building at Third and Olive Streets was erected, and the Civil War began. When Hogan was notified that the government was short of funds and that no appropriation would be made for paying the salaries of his men, he paid them from his own private funds. Ever afterwards he was known as "Honest John Hogan. "
In 1860 he was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention at Charleston, South Carolina. He was the first to bring to President Lincoln's attention, in a letter of remonstrance, Secretary Stanton's order of November 30, 1863, instructing the generals commanding the departments of Missouri, Tennessee, and the Gulf to turn over to Bishop E. R. Ames, of the Methodist Church, North, all churches in their departments belonging to the Methodist Church, South, in which loyal ministers appointed by a loyal bishop did not officiate.
On February 13, 1864, Lincoln wrote Hogan, informing him that the War Department had modified the order and that it would not include Missouri. Hogan was elected to Congress in 1864, where he was known as a friend of the waterways.
Hogan was a Methodist.
Hogan was a member of the Democratic Party.
Hogan married in 1830 Mary Mitchell West. They had five children, of whom two survived infancy. After her death in 1845, he married, May 18, 1847, Harriet Garnier, the granddaughter of Auguste Condé, a French army surgeon stationed at St. Louis. Four children were born of this marriage.
