Alexander Botkin
American politician (1801-1857)
Alexander Botkin (March 4, 1801 – March 5, 1857) was an American lawyer, politician, and pioneer settler of Dane County, Wisconsin. He served one term each as a member of the Wisconsin Senate and Wisconsin State Assembly.
Biography
Born in Kentucky, at an early age he moved to Hamilton County, Ohio, and then to Alton, Illinois, in 1832, where he practiced law. He was serving as a justice of the peace at the time of the riots that resulted in the murder of abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, and was active in attempting to preserve order in the city.
He moved north into the Wisconsin Territory in 1841, to work as the assistant secretary of the territory under Alexander Pope Field, in Madison. While living there, he also worked as a law partner to Field, and became active in politics. He was a candidate for delegate to Wisconsin's first constitutional convention in 1846, but was defeated by John Y. Smith. After the first constitution was rejected by voters, however, he was elected to serve in the 5th Wisconsin Territorial Assembly as a representative of Dane, Green, and Sauk counties. This was the last session of the territorial government before the adoption of Wisconsin's second constitution and their admission as a U.S. state.
In the 1848 fall general election, Botkin was elected to a two-year term in the Wisconsin Senate running on the Whig Party ticket.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexander Botkin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.