Andrew Jackson Hamilton was born on January 28, 1815, in Huntsville, Alabama. He grew up and attended school in Alabama and eventually earned admission to the bar. He married Mary Jane Bowen, and they had at least six children: Mary, born around 1845; Frank, born around 1847; John, born around 1848; Betty, born around 1851; Lilly, born around 1857; and Emil, born around 1860.

 

The family moved to Texas around 1846. By 1850, he was working as a lawyer in Austin, Texas, and he owned $2,000 of real estate. He supported the Democratic Party, and he served in the state legislature in the early 1850s. Voters elected him to Congress in 1858. He was a political moderate who opposed secession and remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. In the spring of 1861, he won a special election to the Texas state, but Confederates forced him to resign and flee to Mexico the following year.

 

In November 1862, he received a commission as brigadier general in the Union army. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him military governor of Texas, and he served as the state’s provisional civilian governor from June 1865 until August 1866. He became a Radical Republican early in Reconstruction. Eventually, however, he withdrew his support for Black suffrage and began calling for an end to Reconstruction. He joined the state’s Supreme Court in 1867, and he ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1869. He died of tuberculosis in Austin on April 11, 1875.

 

Image: Andrew Jackson Hamilton (courtesy Wikicommons)

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