Simon Cameron was born in 1799 in Maytown, Pennsylvania, son of a tailor and tavern keeper who died when Simon was a boy. Boarded with a doctor in Sunbury, he read through the doctor’s library and befriended Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who then ran a grocery there. Apprenticed as a printer, he became an assistant editor of a state newspaper in his early 20s and set type for the Congressional Globe in Washington. State printing contracts funded his canals, railroads and the Bank of Middletown. In 1838 he served as a commissioner settling Winnebago claims in Wisconsin Territory, and never proven fraud allegations earned him the nickname the Great Winnebago Chief.

In 1845 he took a Senate seat from his own Democratic Party’s nominee with a coalition of dissident Democrats, Whigs and Know Nothings. As a Republican in 1857 he won again after three Democratic legislators defected, and they were thrown out of their Harrisburg hotels that night. At the 1860 convention he traded Pennsylvania’s delegates for a cabinet post, publicized Lincoln’s offer while ignoring a second letter rescinding it, and became secretary of war. His brother James was killed at Bull Run. When his annual report urged arming freed slaves and he leaked it to the press, Lincoln removed him and sent him to Russia. He returned to the Senate in 1867, supported seating Hiram Revels, and in 1877 had the legislature elect his son Don Cameron to his seat.

• The War Department had just 90 employees when the Civil War began.
• He kept records of military contracts on scraps of paper stuffed in his coat pockets.
• He championed Tom Chester, an escaped slave he helped educate who became a diplomat.
• He abandoned the Russian post after a few months and rebuilt his Pennsylvania machine.
• He died in 1889 at 90, and his machine dominated Pennsylvania politics into the 1920s.