(continued from Vanderburgh County, Indiana, in the Mexican War, page 5)
busied himself with private affairs until the Civil war came on. By his last marriage he secured large property interests in the South, and with Southern people he took sides in the war of the rebellion. He joined the Knights of Golden Circle, that anti-war organization and dark blot on the pages of history, and according to abundant evidence, it is said, he was associated with other disloyalists in an attempt to liberate Confederate prisoners of war at Indianapolis, to seize arsenal and military stores in that city, and revolutionize the state. In September, 1864, Bowles was arrested along with Harrison H. Dodd, L. P. Milligan, Andrew Humphrey, John C. Walker and others, and tried by a military commission at Indianapolis on the charge of treason. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but President Lincoln commuted his sentence to imprisonment for life. He was confined in a military prison in Ohio, but later the case was carried up to the Supreme Court which set aside the finding of the military commission and ordered that Bowles be discharged from custody. He returned to his home at French Lick, and lived a quiet and obscure life till his death in 1873.
General Joseph Lane brought the Indiana brigade back to New Orleans where it was disbanded in June, 1847, but he himself was to continue in the service. He was reappoint[ed] brigadier-general and given command of a new brigade at Vera Cruz. He started out at once for the Mexican capital, and moved with such rapidity and brilliancy against the enemy as to win the name of being the “Marion of the Mexican war,” a name that ever afterward clung to him. His services brought to him a brevet major-general’s commission, an honor justly won. The war over, General Lane returned to his Indiana home, but he was not to remain long in the state. In August, 1848, President Polk appointed him territorial governor of Oregon and in March he reached its capital where he organized the territorial government and remained at its head until August, 1850, when President Taylor removed him, Taylor being a Whig and he a Democrat. The very next year Lane was elected a delegate to Congress from the territory, an office he held until Oregon became a state, whereupon he was chosen United States Senator from the new state. While in the Senate he was nominated in 1860 a candidate for the Vice-President on the ticket with John C. Breckenridge. He left the Senate March 4, 1861, and retired from public life. He died at Rosenberg, Oregon, April 20, 1881.
Joseph Lane was born December 14, 1801, in Buncomb County, North Carolina, whence he removed with parents in 1814 to Kentucky. At the age of sixteen he went to Darlington, Indiana, then the county seat of Warrick, where he was variously employed until 1821 in which year he married and settled on a farm in Vanderburgh County just across the Warrick line. In 1822 he was elected to the Indiana legislature as representative from Vanderburgh and Warrick Counties. Almost continuously thereafter he served either in the lower or upper branch of the legislature until the outbreak of the Mexican war when he resigned his seat in the senate to enter the army service, enlisting in Captain Walker’s company in which he received his first military training. He had been prominent in politics, but to say that his appointment to a brigadier-generalship was due to political influence would not be fair to him, as will be disclosed by the following extract from Cist’s Advertiser:
When it became the duty of the President to make the appointment of a brigadier-general, it was felt to be a prize by every western member of Congress for his constituents. Probably some fifty names had been handed in to the President, accordingly. Robert Dale Owen, in whose district Lane resides, entertaining no (continued next page)