Henry Horatio Wells (September 17, 1823 – February 12, 1900), a Michigan lawyer and Union Army officer in the American Civil War, succeeded Francis Harrison Pierpont as the appointed provisional governor of Virginia from 1868 to 1869 during Reconstruction.

[1][2] A Radical Republican labeled a carpetbagger, Wells was defeated for election in 1869 by Gilbert C. Walker, who also became his appointed successor.

In his private legal practice, Wells defended men accused of assisting fugitive slaves.

He served one term (1854–1856) and advocated temperance, free public schools, abolition of slavery, and extending civil and political rights to African Americans.

[1] During the American Civil War, Wells received a commission as a major in the 26th Michigan Infantry and was soon promoted to lieutenant colonel.

As provost marshal since February 1863 (and full colonel as of March 30, 1864), Wells led military police in Alexandria and soon supervised law enforcement in all Union-controlled territory south of the Potomac River.

He was also associated with the proceedings before Judge Underwood in which the captured Jefferson Davis was charged with treason (although that prosecution was later quashed).

He associated with Judge Underwood and local Alexandria attorney S. Ferguson Beach, who held Radical Republican views.

Wells and Hunnicutt wanted to protect Black voting rights and disenfranchise Confederate veterans and sympathizers.

On Christmas Day, 1868, both Richmond newspapers published a letter from Stuart advocating "universal amnesty."

General Ulysses S. Grant and influential Republican Congressmen had met with Virginia's Conservative leaders (including the Committee of Nine formed about a week after Stuart's letter), as well as Wells and his allies, and Gilbert C. Walker (another former Northerner turned Norfolk businessman) and Franklin Stearns of Richmond).

However, in 1869, on July 6, 1869, voters selected Gilbert C. Walker, who had support from Mahone's "True Republicans" and the Conservatives, by a vote of 119,535 to 101,204.

[6] Wells gave up his office on September 21, 1869, and Schofield appointed Walker, as his successor until the newly elected governor's swearing-in on January 1, 1870.

An overcrowded balcony collapsed, as did the courtroom's floor, which both fell into the hall of the Virginia House of Delegates.

He then continued a private legal practice with his son Henry Hunt Wells, who had been his deputy U.S. Attorney but who died in early 1894.