Samuel Kirkwood
Born in 1813 as the son of wealthy Scotch-Irish parents in Harford County, Md., Samuel Kirkwood rose to prominence in Iowa politics as a state and U.S. senator and its governor during the Civil War.
Kirkwood was educated in private school in Washington, D.C., and other East Coast schools before his family moved to Ohio, where he farmed and later became an attorney. He married Jane Clark in 1843, and at her family’s urging, moved to Iowa City in 1855 to farm and run a flour mill in Coralville that his brother-in-law had purchased.
In Iowa, Kirkwood began to make his mark. He played a role in helping form the Iowa Republican Party, saying in 1856 that he was leaving the Democratic Party because it had backed Kansas as a slave state. Kirkwood was elected state senator, helping the state government move its base from Iowa City to Des Moines in 1857. Two years later, he was nominated for governor, winning a hotly contested race against Democrat Augustus Caesar Dodge in a battle between the “unpolished miller-farmer” and his rival who had just returned from the Court of Spain.
As governor, Kirkwood helped bring Iowa from the brink of financial ruin and division as the Civil War began in 1861. Firmly anti-slavery, he pledged his own money toward equipping Iowa volunteers to fight for the Union. He also sent troops to quell an uprising by pro-slavery Copperheads who threatened to secede from Iowa, a move that gained him prominence among Northern war governors.
His political career ended with two years as a U.S. Senator as he filled the unexpired term of James Harlan, who had become secretary of the interior, as well as another term as Iowa governor in the late 1870s. He also served two years as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President James Garfield, resigning in 1882 after Garfield was assassinated. In 1885, he lost a run for Congress brought on partially by a split in the Republican Party.
Kirkwood returned to Iowa City after that, living as a farmer until his death in 1894.