Oliver P. Morton, the War Governor

This monument honors Oliver Perry Morton, the man who ran Indiana through the Civil War. Born in eighteen twenty-three, he was the first Indiana-born governor, taking office in eighteen sixty-one when his predecessor resigned for the United States Senate.

When the war came, Morton moved fast. He pledged ten thousand Hoosiers to answer President Lincoln's first call for volunteers, and when a hostile legislature refused to fund the troops, he simply set up a state arsenal and financed the army himself, bypassing lawmakers entirely. Critics called him a dictator. Allies called him the great war governor.

He later served as a United States senator and a leading Radical Republican, pushing hard for African American voting rights until his death in eighteen seventy-seven. Few governors anywhere held a divided border state to the Union with such raw force of will.