Daniel Gooch

Daniel Wheelwright Gooch (1820-1891) was a Republican Congressman from Massachusetts at several points in the mid-nineteenth century. During the American Civil War, he served on the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Gooch was born in Wells, Maine, in 1820. He attended Phillips Andover Academy and Dartmouth College, where he earned a law degree. He was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Boston in 1846.

After being elected to the Massachusetts House and the state Constitutional Convention in the 1850s, he was elected to fill a vacancy to a congressional seat in 1858. He was elected to a full term the same year as a Republican, and served until 1865. In 1865, he resigned at the end of his fourth full term to manage the port of Boston, but was removed from the position by President Andrew Johnson in 1866.

In 1872, Gooch returned to the political fray and was elected to Congress over incumbent Nathaniel P. Banks. He was unsuccessful in a reelection attempt in 1874, and became a pension agent in Boston and resumed his law practice. He died in Melrose, Massachusetts, in 1891.

In 1864, Gooch joined Senator Benjamin Wade, the Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, in travelling to a US Army hospital in Tennessee to interview survivors of the Fort Pillow "Massacre" in order to compile a report on the action for the Committee. In their interviews, Wade and Gooch pressured the survivors to exaggerate the brutality of Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops and to implicate Forrest himself in the atrocities, for propaganda's sake.