Morgan County Profiles

Alexander B. Condiutt

     Alexander B. Condiutt, an early and influential politician whose service in the state legislature won him regional and statewide respect, while not born in Morgan County, nevertheless was a key figure in its early development.
     Alexander was born in Bedford, Kentucky on October 6, 1818 and attended the common schools of the day, his family moving to Morgan County in 1826. Upon arriving, he became errand boy-clerk for Samuel Moore, the enterprising merchant and founder, in 1824, of Mooresville.
     During his career as a local entrepreneur, Alexander was in the pork packing, flatboating, stock trading, and farming venues. He became ultimately an influential Indianapolis philanthropist and wholesale merchant, his firm was the founding enterprise that was later known as Hibben Hollweg and Company.
     Conduitt, upon his death in 1903, was the last surviving delegate to the Indiana State Constitutional Convention of 1851. He had been elected as a majority Democrat to that convention representing Morgan County in 1850.
     First elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1844, he was then elected to the Senate, serving there in the sessions of 1847-48, 1848-49, and 1849-50. He returned to the House for a final single term after the 1856 election. During the prelude to the Civil War and during it, in the period 1860-64, he was prominently engaged as a Democratic politician. In 1860 he was a Democratic elector for the defeated ticket of Stephen Douglas. In 1862, he was the nominee of his party for Congress, and again lost. In 1864 he was a Delegate to the Democratic National Convention that nominated General George McClellan to face the sitting Union President, Abraham Lincoln.
     Dying at 84, as a highly respected Capital City merchant, Condiutt could look back well on an active public life that had begun 59 years earlier, in his first election to the legislature.

By Ken Griffin

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