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Senate Years of Service: 1848-1857 Party: Democrat
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DODGE, Henry, (half-brother of Lewis Fields Linn, father of Augustus Caesar Dodge),
a Delegate and a Senator from Wisconsin; born in Vincennes, Ind., October 12,
1782; received a limited schooling; moved to Missouri in 1796 and settled at Ste. Genevieve; sheriff
of Cape Girardeau County in 1808; moved to Galena, Ill., and operated a lead mine; moved to
Wisconsin in 1827, then part of Michigan Territory, and settled near the present site of Dodgeville;
served in the Black Hawk and other Indian wars; was commissioned major of United States Rangers
1832; left the Army as colonel of the First United States Dragoons 1836; appointed Governor of the
Territory of Wisconsin 1836-1841; elected as a Democratic Delegate to the Twenty-seventh and
Twenty-eighth Congresses (March 4, 1841-March 3, 1845); was not a candidate for renomination in
1844, having again accepted the appointment of Governor of the Territory of Wisconsin, and served
from 1845 until 1848; upon the admission of Wisconsin as a State into the Union in 1848 was elected
as a Democrat to the United States Senate; reelected in 1851 and served from June 8, 1848, to
March 3, 1857; chairman, Committee on Commerce (Thirty-fourth Congress); declined the
appointment of Governor of Washington Territory by President Franklin Pierce in 1857; retired to
private life; died in Burlington, Des Moines County, Iowa, June 19, 1867; interment in Aspen Grove
Cemetery.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Clark, James I. Henry Dodge, Frontiersman. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1957; Pelzer, Louis. Henry Dodge. Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1911.
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