Oliver P. Morton and the Two Years Without a Legislature

Every series has a figure who resists a clean telling. For this one, that figure is Oliver P. Morton. He kept Indiana producing soldiers for the Union at a rate that outran the state’s population. He also governed Indiana for two years without a legislature, funding the state out of a safe in his office — and pushed civilians into a military courtroom in a way the United States Supreme Court would later rule unconstitutional. Both halves of that record are documented. This post does not resolve the tension between them. It sets the record down and lets the tension stand.

From Democrat to Republican

Oliver Hazard Perry Throck Morton was born near Salisbury, Wayne County, Indiana, on August 4, 1823. He trained as a lawyer and built a practice in Centerville, in the eastern part of the state. He entered politics as a Democrat — in the 1840s and early 1850s, the Democratic Party was the ordinary political home of an ambitious young Indiana lawyer.

That changed in 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened previously free territory to the possible extension of slavery, split the Democratic Party across the North. Morton broke with the party over it. He was among the Indiana politicians who helped assemble the coalition that became the Indiana Republican Party. In 1856 he ran for governor as a Republican and lost. In 1860 he ran for lieutenant governor on a ticket with Henry S. Lane — with an understanding that if the Republicans also took the legislature, Lane would be sent to the United States Senate and Morton would succeed him as governor. The Republicans did take the legislature. In January 1861, two days after being inaugurated, Lane resigned to enter the Senate, and Oliver P. Morton became the fourteenth governor of Indiana. He had been in the office a matter of weeks when, in April, the Confederate batteries opened on Fort Sumter.

The fastest mobilization in the North

Morton had not waited for the war to start. He had been corresponding with the War Department and preparing for the possibility of a call for troops before Fort Sumter fell. When it did fall, and President Lincoln called on the states for 75,000 militia, Morton answered immediately. He telegraphed Washington that Indiana could supply 10,000 men — more than twice the state’s quota under the first call.

That pace did not slacken. Across the four years of the war, Indiana furnished well over two hundred thousand men to the Union army, and called out tens of thousands more in short-term state militia to meet Confederate raids and invasion scares along the Ohio River. By the eight-volume Report of the Adjutant General that William H. H. Terrell compiled after the war, it was a contribution large by any measure for a state of Indiana’s size — and the organizing engine behind it was the governor’s office. Morton involved himself in recruitment, in equipment, in the welfare of Indiana soldiers in the field and Indiana wounded in the hospitals, and in the establishment of the state’s Sanitary Commission work, to a degree that exhausted his staff and, eventually, his own health.

This is the half of Morton’s record that the statues commemorate. It is real. It is also not the whole story.

1863 — the year Indiana’s legislature broke

The 1862 mid-term elections went against Morton. Indiana Democrats — campaigning in part on white voters’ hostility to the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln had announced in preliminary form in September 1862 — won control of both houses of the Indiana General Assembly. When the legislature convened in January 1863, the new Democratic majority and the Republican governor were set against each other from the first day.

The Democratic majority refused even to formally receive Morton’s annual message. They moved to transfer control of the state militia from the governor to a board of state officers — most of them Democrats — which would have stripped Morton of military authority in the middle of a war. The Republican minority responded with the most extreme parliamentary tool available to them: they walked out. By bolting the session, the Republican legislators denied the General Assembly the quorum it needed to do business, including the election of a United States senator the Democratic majority intended to fill.

The walkout stopped the militia bill and the Senate election. It also had a second consequence the Republicans had to accept along with the first: a legislature without a quorum could not pass an appropriations bill either. When the session ended, Indiana had no budget. The state government had no legal authority to spend money for the next two years.

The One Man Rule

What Morton did next is the most extraordinary act of any Indiana governor, and the most contested. He did not call the legislature back into session — a special session would simply have handed the Democratic majority another chance to pass the militia bill and elect their senator. Instead, Morton chose to run the government of Indiana himself, without a legislature and without appropriations, for the duration. The period is known to Indiana historians as the “One Man Rule.”

It required money the state had no legal means to raise. Morton assembled it from wherever he could. He drew funds from the county governments that were controlled by Republican commissioners. He obtained money from the federal War Department. He took funds that had been designated for the state arsenal. And he turned to private lenders — most significantly James F. D. Lanier, a wealthy banker originally of Madison, Indiana, then based in New York, who twice advanced the state large sums — well over a million dollars in unsecured loans across the war — on essentially nothing but Morton’s word and his own judgment of the Union’s prospects.

Morton kept the money in a safe in his office. He disbursed it through an aide he placed at the head of an improvised “Bureau of Finance” that had no basis in Indiana law. With it he paid the interest on the state debt, kept Indiana’s institutions running, and continued to equip and support Indiana troops. He ran the state this way from the spring of 1863 until he finally reconvened the General Assembly in January 1865, after the 1864 elections had returned a Republican majority.

Morton did not pretend the arrangement was legal. It was not. The Indiana Constitution vests the appropriation of state money in the General Assembly, and no reading of it permits a governor to fund the state from private loans and federal transfers held in a personal office safe. Morton’s defenders, then and since, have argued that the alternative — surrendering the war-making machinery of a major Union state to an assembly some of whose members actively opposed the war — was worse than the breach. His critics, then and since, have argued that no emergency converts an unconstitutional act into a constitutional one, and that a governor who funds a state from a safe has crossed a line a republic cannot let a governor cross. The post records both arguments. It does not adjudicate between them. That argument is older than this series and will outlast it.

The Copperheads, the tribunal, and Ex parte Milligan

The same wartime division that broke the legislature also ran underground. Indiana, like the other lower-Midwest states, had an organized anti-war movement — the “Copperheads,” Peace Democrats who opposed the war and, in their most militant fringe, organized into secret societies: the Knights of the Golden Circle, and later the Sons of Liberty. How dangerous these societies actually were has been debated by historians ever since; estimates of their real operational capacity range widely. What is documented is that in the late summer of 1864, federal authorities in Indiana believed a Copperhead rising was being planned, pointed to a shipment of several hundred revolvers as evidence, and arrested the leadership of the Sons of Liberty in Indiana — among them Harrison Dodd, William Bowles, and a Huntington lawyer named Lambdin P. Milligan.

Morton pressed for the accused to be tried not in the civilian courts but before a military commission. His stated reason was direct: he feared a civilian jury in Indiana might acquit them. The military commission convened in Indianapolis. Harrison Dodd escaped custody mid-trial and fled to Canada; he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to hang. In a second trial, Lambdin Milligan, William Bowles, and Stephen Horsey were convicted of conspiracy and related charges and sentenced to death.

The sentences were not carried out, and the reason they were not is the part of the story that closes the constitutional question Morton’s One Man Rule had left open. Milligan’s lawyers appealed, and in 1866 the case reached the United States Supreme Court as Ex parte Milligan. The Court ruled unanimously that Milligan’s military trial had been unlawful. Milligan was a civilian; the civil courts of Indiana were open and functioning the entire time. A majority of the Court held further that where the civil courts are open, no authority — not even Congress — could place a civilian before a military tribunal. The convictions were void. Ex parte Milligan is now one of the foundational American decisions on the limits of military power over civilians — and it exists because of what was done to Indiana Copperheads in an Indianapolis military courtroom that Oliver P. Morton had argued for.

The unresolved verdict

The war ended in the spring of 1865. In the autumn of 1865, Morton suffered a paralytic stroke that left him without the use of his legs for the rest of his life. It did not end his career. He recovered enough to return to politics, and in 1867 the Indiana legislature — the institution he had governed two years without — sent him to the United States Senate. He served there for a decade as a leading Radical Republican of the Reconstruction era, until a second stroke in 1877. He died in Indianapolis on November 1, 1877, at fifty-four.

Indiana memorialized him heavily. A monument to Morton stands on the grounds of the Indiana Statehouse. He is one of the two Hoosiers represented in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol — the other is Lew Wallace, the subject of the previous post in this series.

The statues settle nothing. Morton kept Indiana in the war and supplied the Union army with more Hoosier soldiers than the state’s size predicted — and he did it, in the end, by running the state in a manner the Indiana Constitution did not permit and by reaching for a military courtroom the Supreme Court would not allow. A reader can hold that he was the indispensable Union governor of Indiana. A reader can hold that he set precedents a constitutional republic should be uneasy about. The honest position is that both are supported by the record, and that the Hoosier Union History series owes its readers the second half of the record as plainly as the first. The dead Indiana soldiers Morton equipped are owed an accurate accounting of the man who equipped them. That accounting includes the safe, and the tribunal, and the Supreme Court.

Sources

• Indiana Historical Bureau, “The Great War Governor: Oliver P. Morton and the War of the Rebellion in Indiana,” and “Oliver P. Morton and Civil War Politics in Indiana,” in.gov/history, accessed 2026-05-20.
• Oliver P. Morton (1823–1877), biographical entry, Wikipedia, accessed 2026-05-20; biographical and political dates corroborated against the Indiana Historical Bureau governor records and Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Indiana Historical Bureau, “Lambdin P. Milligan and Dissent in the Civil War,” in.gov/history, accessed 2026-05-20.
• Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2 (1866). United States Supreme Court decision holding that military commissions may not try civilians where the civil courts are open and operating.
• William H. H. Terrell, Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana, 8 vols. (Indianapolis: W. R. Holloway, State Printer, 1865–1869). Canonical primary record for Indiana’s Civil War troop totals.
• This series, Entries 1 through 7, available at the blog index.