Godlove S. Orth

Godlove Stein Orth (April 22, 1817 – December 16, 1882) was a United States Congressman from Indiana and acting-Lieutenant Governor of Indiana.

Of German ancestry, he was born near Lebanon, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania on April 22, 1817. He attended Pennsylvania College at Gettysburg for about one year and then studied law with the office of James Cooper. He entered the bar in 1839.

His political career started with public speeches in 1840 supporting William Henry Harrison for president. He started as a Whig but as that party collapsed, he looked elsewhere. For a time he was the Indiana leader of the Know-Nothings (called the American Party) and later aligned himself with the Republican Party.

He served in the Indiana Senate 1843-1849, acting-Lieutenant Governor of Indiana 1845, U.S. House representative from Indiana 1863-1871 from 1873 to 1875 and 1879-1882.

"Godlove S. Orth is a fat, fluffy, pudgy-cheeked, good-humored old boy, with a volubility co-equal with the necessities of a politician, and a smile that is broad, bewitching, childlike, and bland," the Chicago Times reported in 1876. "He has a good head, well stocked with information and experience, and is no fool." He was, in fact, a politician skilled at political survival, and had to be: as was so often the case with congressmen, local jealousies kept even the most able members from serving more than one or two terms, before some other county in the district demanded the nomination in recognition. Those jealousies and factional feuds nearly prevented his re-election in 1866, and in 1868 he had to fend off a serious challenge from General Lew Wallace. Survival therefore took assiduous cultivation of his constituents. In his district, as he informed another Republican, he kept a list of the top hundred party leaders for each county, and a file on some ten thousand other constituents, "pretty much all the reading Republicans and some Democrats in the District." When he sent out public documents and books, or speeches from other House members, he would mail them to names on the first list; when he sent pamphlets and his own speeches, it went to the second. Naturally, he had a hearty appreciation of the franking system, as a way of not having to pay the postage costs.

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