Background
Joseph Lane was born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, second son of John and Elizabeth Street Lane who soon bore him away to the frontier in Henderson County, Kentucky.
(Excerpt from Speech of Hon. Joseph Lane, of Oregon, on th...)
Excerpt from Speech of Hon. Joseph Lane, of Oregon, on the Report of the Peace Conference: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 2, 1861 That the existing condition of the Territories does not require the intervention of Congress for the protection of property in slaves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Joseph Lane was born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, second son of John and Elizabeth Street Lane who soon bore him away to the frontier in Henderson County, Kentucky.
He attended the common school in Kentucky.
At fifteen Lane crossed the Ohio and worked as a clerk in a store in Warrick County, Indiana. He then settled in Vanderburg County on a riverbank farm which he managed, also buying produce and conducting a flatboat commerce with New Orleans. Here he prospered for twenty-four years, becoming almost at once a prominent community and state leader.
He was elected to the lower house of the Indiana legislature as early as 1822 and was reëlected frequently. From 1844 to 1846 he was a member of the Senate. In the Mexican War he led his brigade at Huamantla and in other engagements with such bravery and genius as to emerge one of the outstanding heroes of the war, brevetted major-general.
Returning home in August 1848, he was commissioned in the following December by President Polk to be governor of the Territory of Oregon. He made a winter journey, by the Santa Fé route, to California and on March 2, 1849, arrived at Oregon City, where on the following day he proclaimed the new government. As superintendent of Indian affairs he forced the Cayuse to deliver up the Whitman murderers and began the negotiations with the truculent Rogue River tribe which finally ended with the peace at Table Rock in September 1853.
Resigning the governorship June 18, 1850, he was at once chosen delegate in Congress from the territory, was reëlected three times, and when Oregon became a state, February. 14, 1859, entered the upper house as United States senator where he remained till March 3, 1861. His public career was now ended. As candidate for vice-president on the Breckinridge ticket, as an open and avowed partisan of the secession movement, he lost his hold upon Oregon, which had become a Republican state in 1860.
He retired to his farm near Roseburg and lived in semiseclusion for twenty years. Nevertheless, his character for honest and fair dealing, his charm of manner and high-mindedness, won for him the personal good will and even the friendship of many Oregonians who had become his relentless political enemies. One much-touted episode of his later career belongs to legend rather than history; namely, his relation to the "Pacific Republic" in aid of the Confederacy. Because he brought home a box containing four rifles, made for him and for three neighbors by a Cincinnati gunmaker, rumor reported that he had brought military equipment to arm co-conspirators in southern Oregon. His accidental wounding by the premature discharge of a horse-pistol carried in the wagon in which a neighbor drove him south from Portland gave rise to all sorts of dramatic embellishments; and the ransacking of his effects while he lay ill at a neighbor's house may have revealed correspondence with men engaged in rebellion. But Lane, while ardently sympathizing with the South, was too much the political realist to undertake the dismemberment of southern Oregon and northern California-especially from Portland as a base! Lane died at his home on April 19, 1881. His body was interred in the Roseburg Memorial Gardens.
(Excerpt from Speech of Hon. Joseph Lane, of Oregon, on th...)
In 1820 Lane was married to Polly Pierre.