Walter Q. Gresham

Walter Quintin Gresham (1832 to 1895) was an American attorney, jurist, statesman and politician. Born in Lanesville, Indiana, he read law with Judge William A. Porter, was admitted to the bar in 1854, served in the Indiana House of Representatives and rose to brevet major general in the Union army during the American Civil War. In 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to the United States District Court for the District of Indiana, where he sat until 1883 and organized volunteer companies during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. He then served as postmaster general under Chester A. Arthur, briefly as secretary of the treasury in 1884, and returned to the bench in 1884 on the Circuit Court for the Seventh Circuit, later the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, resigning in 1893. A candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1884 and 1888, he left the party to support Grover Cleveland and served as his secretary of state from 1893 until his death in 1895, a moderate applier of the Monroe Doctrine who acted as an international arbitrator.