[Richard Wigginton]. American public man, born in Culpeper County, VA, on the 9th of June 1809. He removed to Kentucky in 1831, thence to southern Indiana, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1834. He settled at Bedford, IN; was elected to the lower house of the legislature in 1834, and to the upper house in 1836; served in Congress from 1841 until 1843, and again from 1847 until 1849. He was offered the Austrian mission by President Taylor, the recordership of the land office by President Fillmore, and a seat on the bench of the court of claims by President Lincoln, but he declined all these offices. In 1867–69 he was judge of the eighteenth circuit of Indiana. Mr. Thompson entered President Hayes’s Cabinet as Secretary of the Navy, March 12, 1877, resigning in 1881 to become chairman of the American Committee of the Panama Canal Company. He is the author of The Papacy and the Civil Power and a History of the Tariff.
