William Bigler: Pennsylvania's Forgotten Double Governor
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
About a mile west of here, in the early eighteen hundreds, two brothers were born who would each become governor of a different American state, a coincidence few families can claim. William Bigler governed Pennsylvania from eighteen fifty-two to eighteen fifty-five, where he pushed back against speculative wildcat banking and the kind of omnibus legislation that buried unrelated measures in sprawling bills. He then served in the United States Senate through eighteen sixty-one, a Democrat navigating the crumbling pre-Civil War political order.
His brother John, born at the same Pennsylvania homestead, headed west and won the California governorship in eighteen fifty-two, the same year William took office in Harrisburg. Two brothers, two governors, two different coasts, in the same year. Neither man is widely remembered today, but their parallel careers mark this quiet stretch of Pennsylvania as an unlikely point of origin for American political history.
