Richard W. Thompson

Richard Wigginton Thompson (1809-1900) was born in Culpeper County, Virginia, in June of 1809.  Thompson descended from a line of patriots. Both his grandfather’s fought in the War of Independence, and his stepmother was a great niece of George Washington. In 1831, Thompson moved to Indiana, where he became a schoolteacher, worked as a clerk in a dry goods store, and studied law in his spare time. He would be admitted to the bar in 1834. In the period that followed, Thompson would become active in the Whig Party, and would be elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1834, before serving in the State Senate from 1836 to 1838. In 1841, he would then be elected to Congress. He chose not to recontest the following term but decided to run again in 1847 and was subsequently re-elected. When the Whig party began to collapse in the 1850s, Thompson would switch his allegiance to the Know Nothing Party, before joining the conservative Whig offshoot, known as the Constitutional Union Party. He would eventually switch over to the Republican Party and would support Abraham Lincoln. In return, President Lincoln would appoint Thompson as Judge of the Court of Claims in Washington.