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Leon Abbett

Leon Abbett (8 October 1836-4 December 1894) was the Democratic Governor of New Jersey from 15 January 1884 to 18 January 1887 (succeeding George C. Ludlow and preceding Robert Stockton Green) and from 21 January 1890 to 17 January 1893 (succeeding Green and preceding George T. Werts).

Biography[]

Leon Abbett was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1836, and he became a lawyer in 1857 and moved to Hoboken, New Jersey in 1859 and became corporation counsel for Jersey City; he briefly practiced in New York City from 1861 to 1866. Abbett supported George B. McClellan's 1864 Democratic presidential bid and served in the General Assembly from 1865 to 1867 and from 1869 to 1870, and he was a Copperhead during the American Civil War. After the war, he served in the State Senate from 1875 to 1878 and as Governor from 1884 to 1887, vigorously campaigning for railroad taxation and challenging the state Democratic Party's Bourbon establishment. He failed in his 1886 bid for the US Senate, but he returned to the governorship in 1890 and created labor laws, free public libraries, scholarships for the agricultural college at Rutgers, highway improvements, increased funding for public schools, and the establishment of the state department of banking and insurance. From 1893 to 1894, he served as a judge, and he died in Jersey City in 1894.

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