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Oliver Hampton Smith was an American lawyer, representative, and senator.
Background
Oliver was born on October 23, 1794 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States. His ancestors accompanied William Penn to America; his grandparents occupied Smith's Island in the Delaware River about twelve miles above Trenton. He was the son of Thomas and Letitia Smith. He had six brothers and two sisters.
Education
He obtained an elementary education at a neighboring country school of Pennsylvania. Later he studied law in Lawrenceburg.
Career
When Smith was in his nineteenth year his father died, and Oliver soon lost the small fortune which he had inherited. In 1816 he set out for the West, and at Pittsburgh engaged to take two coal boats to Louisville. He struck a snag and lost one of them, but succeeded, in the spring of 1817, in reaching Rising Sun, where he engaged in a small business with seventy-five dollars as his capital.
In 1818 he was in Lawrenceburg, studying law, and in March 1820 he was admitted to the bar. He commenced practice at Versailles, but soon removed to Connersville, where he rapidly rose to prominence. In August 1822 he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives. He was made chairman of the judiciary committee and served until 1824, when the governor appointed him prosecuting attorney for the third judicial district. During two years of service in this capacity he successfully prosecuted four notorious frontiersmen charged with the murder of Indians.
Finally, he was elected to Congress as a Jackson Democrat in 1826. He rode to Washington on horseback and took his seat at the opening of the Twentieth Congress, December 3, 1827. He was a member of the committee on Indian affairs. In another address, January 28, 1829, he presented cogent arguments in favor of appropriations for the construction of the Cumberland road.
Defeated for reelection to Congress, he was engaged in the practice of law and in farming when, in December 1836, the General Assembly elected him as a Whig to a seat in the United States Senate. He was a member of the committee on the militia in 1837, and of the committee on the judiciary in 1839, and was made chairman of the important committee on public lands in 1841.
Failing of reelection to the Senate, Smith retired to private life in Indianapolis, projected the Indianapolis & Bellefontaine Railroad, became its first president. In July 1857 he commenced writing for the Indianapolis Daily Journal a series of sketches and reminiscences of frontier life in Indiana which in the following year was published in book form under the title, Early Indiana Trials and Sketches (1858). Although crude in style, the volume is a vivid presentation of various phases of early Indiana history.
He died in Indianapolis and was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery.
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Politics
Initially he was Jackson Democrat, later he was a Whig. He supported evolving of a federal land policy in the interest of the actual settlers, and the Whig plan for the federal assumption of state debts to the extent of the proceeds of the sales of the public lands within the states.
Personality
Smith was a rough-hewn frontiersman, five feet ten inches in height, with standing black hair, shaggy eyebrows and a strong voice; he was diffuse but convincing in speech.
Connections
He married Mary Bramfield, a Quaker, in 1821, and they had three children.