Representative Charles Hathaway Larrabee

Charles Hathaway Larrabee (November 9, 1820 – January 20, 1883) was an American lawyer, jurist, Civil War officer, and Democratic politician from Dodge County, Wisconsin. He served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Wisconsin’s 3rd congressional district in the 36th Congress (1859–1860), and, as one of Wisconsin’s first elected circuit court judges, was an ex officio member of Wisconsin’s first state Supreme Court from 1848 until the reorganization of the court in 1853. He also served as a Union Army officer during the American Civil War and later practiced law in several western states.

Larrabee was born in Rome, Oneida County, New York, on November 9, 1820, the son of Charles Larrabee of Connecticut. During his youth his family moved west to Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Springfield Academy and then Granville College (later Denison University) from 1834 to 1836, where he specialized in English studies, mathematics, and ancient languages. After leaving college, he read law in Springfield, Ohio, under Congressman Samson Mason and W. A. Rogers. Before his admission to the bar, he worked as an engineer and assisted in surveying the route of the Little Miami Railroad, gaining early experience in the internal improvements that were transforming the Midwest.

Larrabee was admitted to the bar in Pontotoc, Mississippi, in September 1841, and in the same year he ran unsuccessfully for the Mississippi Legislature. By the mid‑1840s he had moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he edited the Democratic Advocate and became active in local politics. He was elected city attorney of Chicago, reflecting his growing prominence at the bar and within the Democratic Party. On May 13, 1846, in Chicago, he married his first wife, Minerva Norton. (A separate account places their marriage in 1840, but contemporary records identify the Chicago ceremony in 1846.) They were the parents of a son, Charles, and a daughter, Minerva (“Minnie”), who later became the wife of George H. Burton.

In March 1847, Larrabee and his wife moved to the Wisconsin Territory, settling in a small community in Dodge County. There he opened the first business in the settlement, selling goods brought from Chicago via Lake Michigan to Milwaukee and then overland to Dodge County. He became one of the leading residents of the nascent town and gave it the name Horicon; he is recognized as one of the founders of the city. In October 1847, he was chosen as one of three representatives from Dodge County to the second Wisconsin Constitutional Convention. At the convention his chief preoccupation was the establishment of a homestead exemption to protect residents from becoming homeless or destitute as a result of debt or liability, a measure reflecting his concern for debtor relief and frontier economic security.

After Wisconsin adopted its new constitution in 1848, Larrabee was elected circuit judge for the 3rd judicial district. Under the original state judicial structure, circuit judges sat ex officio as members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Larrabee thus became a member of the state’s first Supreme Court. He was the youngest person to serve on that court. When a separate Wisconsin Supreme Court was created in 1852, he was chosen as the Democratic nominee for chief justice, but he was defeated in the general election by the older and more experienced Edward V. Whiton. Larrabee continued to serve as circuit judge for a full decade, gaining a reputation as an able jurist until his nomination for Congress in 1858.

In 1858, Larrabee received the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin’s 3rd congressional district. He won the election and served in the 36th Congress from March 4, 1859, to March 3, 1861. At that time, his district was the largest in the nation by population, encompassing approximately 350,000 people. As a Democratic representative during a period of mounting sectional crisis, he contributed to the legislative process and represented the interests of his Wisconsin constituents. On the House floor he spoke fervently in favor of maintaining the Union and was noted for defending the patriotism and loyalty of German American immigrants living in Wisconsin, a significant voting bloc in his district. He ran for reelection in 1860, supporting the platform of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Northern Democratic candidate for president. In the realignment elections of 1860, Douglas was defeated by Abraham Lincoln, and Larrabee lost his seat along with dozens of other Democrats.

Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Larrabee quickly aligned himself with the Union cause. After news of the attack on Fort Sumter reached Wisconsin in April 1861, he wrote to the Milwaukee News, a Democratic newspaper, urging his party to rally in defense of the Union. He also wrote to Wisconsin Governor Alexander Randall and General Rufus King to offer his services. On April 18, 1861, he enlisted as a private in the Horicon Guard militia company and was elected second lieutenant. The company marched to Milwaukee for enrollment in a volunteer regiment, and on May 28, 1861, Governor Randall commissioned him as a major in the 5th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Larrabee marched with the 5th Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., where the regiment was attached to the Army of the Potomac. In 1862, during the Peninsula Campaign, he participated in the Siege of Yorktown, helping direct an attack on a Confederate fortress along the Warwick River, and days later took part in heavy fighting at Fort Magruder during the Battle of Williamsburg. He was commended for his conduct in inspiring and directing his regiment under fire.

The arduous campaign through the Chickahominy River marshlands left many soldiers ill, and Larrabee himself fell seriously sick. He recuperated at White House, Virginia, but continued to suffer lingering symptoms. When new Wisconsin regiments were raised in the summer of 1862, Governor Edward Salomon appointed him to organize and command the 24th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Upon the regiment’s muster into service in August 1862, he was promoted to colonel. The 24th Wisconsin was ordered to Kentucky with little time for drilling and was attached to the Army of the Cumberland. The regiment arrived in time to participate in the Battle of Perryville in October 1862, which ended the Confederate incursion into Kentucky. During the battle, the 24th Wisconsin was assigned to defend an artillery battery that came under assault by a Confederate brigade commanded by Daniel Weisiger Adams. The attack was repulsed, and Larrabee was commended by his brigade commander, Colonel Nicholas Greusel, for his leadership in the defense of the battery. After Perryville, Larrabee again fell ill and recuperated in Nashville, Tennessee, while his regiment went on to fight at the Battle of Stones River. He briefly returned to the regiment in March 1863, but his chronic illnesses—described as diarrhea and erysipelas of the head—forced him to resign his commission in August 1863.

In the spring of 1864, still plagued by poor health, Larrabee sought relief in the milder climates of the Far West. He traveled first to California, then to Nevada, and ultimately to Oregon, where he resumed the practice of law. In Oregon he formed a partnership with his former congressional colleague Lansing Stout. By 1868 he was in Los Angeles, California, where he and William A. Winder, former commander of the U.S. military prison on Alcatraz Island, opened an agency for the purchase and sale of lands in the southern part of the state. In April 1868 he was elected city attorney of Los Angeles, but none of the officials chosen in that election ultimately served, and the election “seems to have been wholly ignored.” He later returned to California after his sojourn in Oregon, and his first wife, Minerva, died there in August 1873.

After his wife’s death, Larrabee moved north to Seattle in Washington Territory, where he resided with Beriah Brown, a prominent Democratic editor and politician. While in Seattle he became a member of a territorial constitutional convention and took part in efforts to organize a state university in the city, contributing to the early institutional development of what would become the University of Washington. He eventually settled in San Bernardino, California, where he resumed the practice of law and continued to be involved in local affairs. During this period he contracted a second marriage; after his death, an attempt was made in the settlement of his estate to challenge the legitimacy of his second wife’s claim, but she produced a marriage certificate and letters substantiating the marriage, and the San Bernardino County Superior Court recognized it as valid.

Charles Hathaway Larrabee was killed in a train accident at the Tehachapi Loop near Tehachapi, California, on January 20, 1883. He was survived by his son and daughter, and was interred in the Masonic Cemetery in San Francisco. In June 1884, John Anderson, executor of Larrabee’s estate, filed a court action in San Bernardino against the Central Pacific Railroad, seeking $100,000 in damages for his death. The town of Larrabee, Wisconsin, was named in his honor, reflecting the esteem in which he was held in the state where he had helped found a community, shape a constitution, sit on the first Supreme Court, and represent a vast congressional district in the years immediately preceding the Civil War.