Charles Kuehn (c.1818 – November 2, 1865) was a German American immigrant, banker, and Democratic politician. He was the 3rd state treasurer of Wisconsin and served two terms in the Wisconsin State Assembly, representing Manitowoc County during the 1849 and 1850 legislative sessions.

Biography

Charles Kuehn was born about 1818 in the Kingdom of Saxony.^[1]

He emigrated to the United States sometime before 1848. He settled in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in Manitowoc County, where he operated a grocery and dry goods store for several years. He was elected without opposition to the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1848, running on the Democratic Party ticket. His district at the time comprised all of Manitowoc County. He ran for re-election in 1849, and won a second term, defeating Whig candidate James L. Kyle.^[2]

In 1854, he was the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin Senate in the 1st State Senate district, but was defeated in the general election by David Taylor of Sheboygan.

The following year, Kuehn received the Democratic nomination for State Treasurer of Wisconsin. He was the only candidate on the statewide Democratic slate that year who was not tainted by the corruption scandals of the Barstow administration, and was narrowly elected over Republican nominee Charles Roeser.^[2][3] He served two years and was not a candidate for re-election in 1857.

Kuehn's term as treasurer was controversial. He started his own bank in Manitowoc during his term as treasurer, and was accused of transferring all the gold currency from the treasury to his own bank, in exchange for his own wildcat currency.^[4]

In the pivotal 1860 United States presidential election, Kuehn was one of a small portion of Wisconsin Democrats who supported the Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge.^[2]

Kuehn's banks prospered for a short time, but in the midst of the American Civil War, Kuehn made the fateful decision to invest his own money as well as the banks' in Confederate bonds. The defeat of the Confederacy was a financial disaster for him and his banks, eventually resulting in their failure, able to pay out only 45 cents on the dollar to their depositors.^[1] Kuehn died just a few months after the war's end, in November 1865, but before his bank's imminent failure became known to the public. At the time, his death was reported as a stroke,^[5] but later reports describe that he committed suicide by taking a fatal dose of morphine.^[6]

Personal life and family

He married Henrietta K. L. Ebel in Milwaukee, in April 1845, but had no known children. After Kuehn's death in 1865, his bank's creditors hounded his widow trying to recoup their losses. She was forced to sell their mansion and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. Eventually, she would remarry with her sister's widower, Union Army general Frederick Salomon.

Electoral history

References