Lewis Cass: Cass Lake, Indian Removal, and Popular Sovereignty in 1848

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Lewis Cass was born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1782, the son of Bunker Hill veteran Jonathan Cass, and moved with his family to Marietta, Ohio in 1800. He practiced law in Zanesville, helped found the Grand Lodge of Ohio, entered the Ohio House in 1806 and became a U.S. Marshal under Thomas Jefferson. In the War of 1812 he led the 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment near Fort Malden, where General William Hull refused to press an opening, and he was at the Battle of the Thames. President James Madison made him governor of the Michigan Territory in 1813, a post he held for 18 years while negotiating land cessions such as the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs.

In 1830 he wrote in the North American Review that Native Americans should be removed from the East, and as Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War from 1831 he ran the logistics of removal. He later served as Minister to France and U.S. senator, and as the 1848 Democratic nominee promoted popular sovereignty, which helped spark the Free Soil split behind Martin Van Buren and his loss to Zachary Taylor. At 75 he became James Buchanan's Secretary of State and resigned on December 14, 1860 over Buchanan's refusal to act against secession. He died in 1866, and in 2020 Michigan renamed its Lewis Cass Building.

• His 1820 expedition named Cass Lake as the source of the Mississippi, until Henry Rowe Schoolcraft identified Lake Itasca 12 years later.
• Correspondence from 1818 shows he held at least one enslaved person in a territory where the Northwest Ordinance banned slavery.
• He was the first non incumbent Democratic presidential nominee to lose.
• Cass County, Georgia was renamed Bartow County in 1861 because Cass was considered too pro Union.
• Michigan's Lewis Cass Building became the Elliott-Larsen Building, named for the sponsors of the state's civil rights act.