1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/McLane, Louis

McLANE, LOUIS (1786–1857), American political leader, was born in Smyrna, Delaware, on the 28th of May 1786, son of Allan McLane (1746–1829), a well-known Revolutionary soldier. He was admitted to the bar in 1807. He entered politics as a Democrat, and served in the Federal House of Representatives in 1817–1827 and in the Senate in 1827–1829. He was minister to England in 1829–1831, and secretary of the treasury in Jackson’s cabinet from 1831 (when in his annual report he argued for the United States Bank) until May 1833, when he was transferred to the state department. He retired from the cabinet in June 1834. He was president of the Baltimore & Ohio railway in 1837–1847, minister to England in 1845–1846, and delegate to the Maryland constitutional convention of 1850–1851. He died in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 7th of October 1857.

His son, Robert Milligan McLane (1815–1898), graduated at West Point in 1837, resigned from the army in 1843, and practised law in Baltimore. He was a Democratic representative in Congress in 1847–1851 and again in 1879–1883, governor of Maryland in 1884–1885, U.S. commissioner to China in 1853–1854, and minister to Mexico in 1859–1860 and to France in 1885–1889.

See R. M. McLane’s Reminiscences, 1827–1897 (privately printed, 1897).