McGaughey, Edward W.

Born: 1817-01-16 Putnam County, Indiana

Died: 1852-08-06 San Francisco, California

McGaughey attended public schools in Putnam County. He became deputy clerk to his father, who was county clerk of Putnam County. He read law, earned admission to the Indiana bar, and opened a law practice in Greencastle, Indiana. In 1838, he married Margaret Matlock, with whom he had five children. From 1839 to 1840, he served in the Indiana House of Representatives. He served in the Indiana Senate from December 1842 to February 1843, resigning before the end of his term. He was an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Twenty-Eighth Congress. In 1844, he won election as a Whig to the U.S. House of Representatives, the only Whig in Indiana’s ten-person congressional delegation. He failed to win re-election in 1846, and moved to Rockville, Indiana, where he resumed his law practice. In 1848, he won election again as a Whig to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving from 1849 to 1851. During this tenure, he voted for the Fugitive Slave Act, only one of three Whigs who did so. In 1849, President Zachary Taylor nominated him as governor of the Minnesota Territory, but the U.S. Senate refused to confirm his nomination. He failed to win re-election in 1850 because of his vote on the Fugitive Slave Act, and in 1852, he moved to California, but died of fever contracted on the voyage.

Jesse W. Weik, Weik’s History of Putnam County Indiana (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen, 1910), 708-12; Charles M. Money, “The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 in Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 17 (June 1921), 167, 168; The Fugitive Slave Law and its Victims, revised and enlarged edition (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), 6; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-2005 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), 1544.