On 8 May 1861 [President Abraham] Lincoln urged that [Gustavus] Fox, "a live man, whose services we cannot well dispense with" (Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 [1953-1955], p. 363), be given the crucial task of assisting Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Initially as chief clerk and then as assistant secretary, Fox was the de facto chief of naval operations during the Civil War, eclipsing during his tenure the entrenched power and autonomy of the Navy Department bureaus.

Although [Gustavus] Fox was a Democrat with little interest in the slavery issue, he was outraged by secession. He was a patriotic nationalist who believed it was the manifest destiny of the United States to expand, not to disintegrate. After South Carolina fired on the Star of the West and prevented the reinforcement of Fort Sumter in Charleston's harbor, Fox, as a civilian, planned an expedition for that fort's relief. Through his wife's brother-in-law, Montgomery Blair, the new postmaster general, Fox met Lincoln, who adopted his plan.

In April 1844 [Wilson Shannon] resigned the [Ohio] governorship after President John Tyler nominated him as minister plenipotentiary to Mexico.

In 1849, infected with gold fever, [Wilson Shannon] organized and financed an expedition of sixty "Argonauts" to California. Sacramento yielded no riches, and he returned to Ohio in 1851. Persuaded to run for Congress in 1852, he won easily and voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854, basing his decision on adherence to party, commitment to popular sovereignty, and diffidence to slavery's expansion.

SHANNON, Wilson,  (brother of Thomas Shannon), a Representative from Ohio; born at Mount Olivet, Belmont County, Ohio, February 24, 1802; attended Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, 1820-1822 and Transylvania College, Lexington, Ky., in 1823; studied law; was admitted to the bar in 1830 and began practice in St.