Profile: Hugh McCulloch

Hugh McCulloch was born in Kennebunk, Maine, on December 7, 1808. He enrolled at Bowdoin College, but left in his sophomore year. He taught school, then read law in Kennebunk and Boston.

McCulloch left New England for Indiana, where he opened a law practice in Fort Wayne in 1833. When the State Bank of Indiana established a branch in Fort Wayne in 1835, McCulloch became branch cashier and manager. He later became a director of the bank until its charter expired in 1857, at which point the directors of the new Bank of the State of Indiana chose him as president.

A Whig who joined the new Republican Party in the 1850s, McCulloch, as head of the Indiana

banking system, argued against national banks. He later resolved his differences with the national banking system and accepted an offer from Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to become the first Comptroller of the Currency in 1863.

McCulloch worked successfully with Chase and, after 1864, with Chase’s successor, William P. Fessenden. He accepted Lincoln’s offer to become Treasury Secretary after Fessenden resigned in March 1865. He continued as Treasury Secretary under Andrew Johnson.

As Treasury Secretary, McCulloch worked to contract the paper money supply in the post-Civil War era. He supported President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies and opposed suffrage for freed blacks; as a result, he earned a great measure of criticism. McCulloch left the Treasury in March 1869 following the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant, with whom he disagreed politically.

Following his Treasury service, McCulloch joined the financier Jay Cooke in establishing the firm of Jay Cooke, McCulloch and Company as the London branch of Cooke’s company. He returned as Secretary of the Treasury from 1884–1885 in the administration of Chester A. Arthur. He then retired to his Maryland farm where he died on May 24, 1895.

In 1838, McCulloch married Susan Man, a teacher in Fort Wayne. Their marriage lasted 57 years.

Source: American National Biography