Biography
Born in Rockingham County, Virginia, Cravens moved near Hardinsburg, Indiana with his father in 1820 where he attended public schools as a child. He engaged in agricultural pursuits and livestock raising, served in the Mexican-American War as Major (United States) of the 2nd Indiana Volunteer Regiment from 1846 to 1847 and was a member of the Indiana House of Representatives in 1848 and 1849. Cravens served in the Indiana Senate from 1850 to 1853, was commissioned a brigadier general in the Indiana Militia in 1854 and was elected a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives in 1860, serving from 1861 to 1865, not being a candidate for renomination in 1864. During the lame-duck session of the 38th Congress, he voted against the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. He was a delegate to the National Union Convention in 1866 and to the Democratic National Convention in 1868. He resumed agricultural pursuits until his death in Hardinsburg, Indiana on June 20, 1893. He was interred in Hardin Cemetery in Hardinsburg.
Read more about this topic: James A. Cravens
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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