MCCULLOCH, HUGH: 1808-1895.
Hugh McCulloch was born at Kennebunk, Me., on Dec. 7, 1808, the son of Hugh and Abigail Perkins McCulloch. Hugh, senior, was a ship-owner in the West Indies trade.
Young McCulloch attended Bowdoin College for two years, with the class of 1829, but left school to study law. He was admitted to the bar in Boston, Mass., in 1832. The next year he came to Fort Wayne, Ind., where he opened a law office but devoted most of his attention to the Fort Wayne branch of the State Bank of Indiana, which he served as cashier and manager from 1835 to 1856. In the latter year he became president of the bank and next year saw it through a panic in which only one or two other state banks of any size survived in the entire country.
The old state banking system being abandoned in 1863 in favor of the national system, McCulloch was, properly, put in charge of the organization of the new system as U.S. Comptroller of the Currency. At the end of the Civil War he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Lincoln. He served through the first of the difficult reconstruction years but retired in 1869 to enter private banking. Once more, during the last months of President Arthur's administration, he served as Secretary of the Treasury, filling out the term of Walter Q. Gresham.
Hugh McCulloch spent his last years in Prince George's County, Md. He had married Susan Mann at Fort Wayne in 1838, and their four children survived him. He died on May 24, 1895.
Information from the Dictionary of American Biography and Who Was Who in America.
- Our National and Financial Future. Address of …
Secretary of the Treasury, at Fort Wayne, Indiana, October 11, 1865.
Fort Wayne, Ind., 1865.
- Bi-Metallism: a Lecture Delivered at Harvard University, May
8, 1879. New York, 1879.
- Men and Measures of Half a Century: Sketches and
Comments. New York, 1888.
- Addresses, Speeches, Lectures and Letters Upon Various
Subjects. Washington, D. C., 1891.
