In
office
March 8, 1853 – January 3, 1855
Andrew Parsons (July 22, 1817 – June 6, 1855)
was a politician from the U.S. state of Michigan.
Parsons moved to Michigan Territory in 1835 and spent the summer
teaching in Ann Arbor. In the fall, he explored nearly the entire
length of the Grand River valley by canoe, from Jackson to Lake
Michigan. He spent the winter working as a store clerk in Ionia
County and in the spring went to Marshall to live with his brother,
Luke H. Parsons. In the fall of 1836, he moved to Corunna in what
was to become Shiawassee County. This area at that time was mostly
wilderness, and when it was organized into a county in 1837,
Parsons was elected the county's first clerk at the age of
nineteen.
Parsons became an attorney, and in 1840 was elected Register of
Deeds, and reelected in 1842 and 1844. In 1846, he was elected to
the Michigan State Senate from the sixth district and was appointed
Prosecuting Attorney in 1848. He became a Regent of the University
of Michigan in 1851 and was also elected as ninth Lieutenant
Governor in 1852.
Parsons became the tenth Governor of Michigan when Robert
McClelland resigned in March 1853 to become the Secretary of the
Interior under U.S. President Franklin Pierce. Parsons did not
receive the Democratic Party's nomination for governor in 1854, at
least partly because the party was split by question of slavery and
by the formation of the Republican Party (which held its first
convention that year in Jackson, Michigan). During his twenty-two
months as governor, tax laws were improved and the practice of
depositing surplus state funds in banks was opposed.
