Altgeld, John P
lawyer, governor, was born in December, 1847, in Germany.
When sixteen years of age he entered the Union army, and carried a musket in the James river campaign. At nineteen he began to teach school, and at twenty-one went farther west. In 1884 he published a small volume entitled Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims, and in 1890 a volume entitled Live Questions, being a discussion of some of the problems of the day. In 1894 he published volume two of the work last named. He was elected judge of the superior court of Chicago in 1886, and was for a time chief justice of that court. After serving on the bench about five years he resigned to devote himself to private affairs. Meanwhile he had become interested in Chicago real estate, and built six of the finest business blocks in Chicago, one of them a sixteenstory fire-proof structure called The Unity, which is regarded as one of the finest office buildings in the country. In 1892 he was elected governor of the state of Illinois.