Henry S. Foote

Henry S. Foote
19th Governor of Mississippi
In office January 10, 1852 – January 5, 1854
Preceded by	James Whitfield
Succeeded by	John J. Pettus
United States Senator from Mississippi
In office March 4, 1847 – January 8, 1852
Preceded by	Joseph W. Chalmers
Succeeded by	Walker Brooke
Personal details
Born	Henry Stuart Foote February 28, 1804 Fauquier County, Virginia
Died	May 20, 1880 (aged 76) Nashville, Tennessee
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Elizabeth Winters Rachel (Boyd) Smiley
Alma mater	Washington College
Profession	Politician, Lawyer

Henry Stuart Foote (February 28, 1804 – May 20, 1880) was a United States Senator from Mississippi from 1847 to 1852 and elected on a Unionist ticket as Governor of Mississippi from 1852 to 1854. His strong leadership on the Senate floor helped secure passage of the Compromise of 1850, which for a time averted a civil war in the United States. A practicing attorney, he published two memoirs related to the Civil War years, as well as a book on Texas prior to its annexation, and a postwar book on the legal profession and courts in the South.

Biography

Early life

Henry S. Foote was born on February 28, 1804 in Fauquier County, Virginia.^[1] He was the son of Richard Helm Foote and Catherine (Stuart) Foote. He pursued classical studies in 1819 and graduated from Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). He later studied the Law and was admitted to the bar in 1823.

Career

In 1825, he moved to Alabama, where he began his law practice in Tuscumbia.^[1] Meanwhile he also established a newspaper. He became a co-founder and trustee of LaGrange College, later known as the University of North Alabama. Shortly after, he moved to Mississippi, where he practiced law in the state capital, Jackson, and in the river towns of Natchez, Vicksburg, and Raymond, which were centers of business associated with the cotton and slave trades.^[1] He also visited the state of Texas and wrote a two-volume book about it.

He was elected by the Mississippi legislature as a Democrat to the United States Senate, where he played a key role in securing the Compromise of 1850. During Senate debates over the projected compromise resolutions, Thomas Hart Benton refused to support the compromise and became enraged by Foote's verbal attacks. According to the historian James Coleman, during heated Senate debates over the projected compromise resolutions, Foote drew a pistol on Benton^[2] after Benton charged him.^[3] Other members wrestled Foote to the floor; they took the gun away and locked it in a drawer. The incident created an uproar that prompted an investigation by a Senate committee.^[2]

Foote served in the Senate from March 4, 1847, until January 8, 1852, when he resigned to become governor after defeating Jefferson Davis in the election of 1851. Foote was elected on a Unionist platform at a time of increasing sectional tension. It was the last Unionist ticket in Mississippi. Because of Foote's distress with rising anti-Union fervor in Mississippi, in 1854 after his term as governor, he moved to California.

American Civil War

Henry S. Foote, c. 1860

On the eve of the American Civil War of 1861–1865, Foote returned to Vicksburg. In 1859, he was a member of the Southern convention held in Knoxville. He moved to Tennessee and settled in Nashville, where he was elected to the First and Second Confederate Congresses.^[1] As a member of the Confederate House of Representatives, he criticized the war policies of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis.^[1] In one debate, he verbally attacked the Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, and expressed virulent antisemitism.^[4][5]

Early in 1865, Foote attempted to cross to Union lines and travel to Washington, D.C., but was arrested by Confederates before he could do so. The Confederate House of Representatives voted on January 24, 1865, to expel him, but the vote failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority. Later, he was appointed a Mississippi Commissioner for Confederate POWs being held by the North (his own son among them). He resigned from office in 1865 and moved to Washington, where he sought a meeting with President Lincoln but was refused. Given the choice of leaving the United States or being sent back to the Confederacy, Foote fled to Canada and later to London. There he started writing a memoir of the war years.^[1]

After the war, he returned to the United States and settled in Washington, D.C.. He practiced law and joined the Republican Party. He published two memoirs and a history of the law in the region. He was the appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes to serve as the Superintendent of the New Orleans Mint from 1878 to 1880. He retired in Nashville in 1880.

Personal life

Old Central

In the late 1850s, he married a widow named Rachel Douglas Boyd Smiley.^[1] They briefly resided at Old Central in West Nashville, a house built in 1858 on land she had inherited from her grandfather, John Boyd, a state congressman from Texas.^[1] The land and house later became property of Vanderbilt University, where it still stands today.^[1] They later resided in Washington, D.C..

Death

Foote died on May 20, 1880 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was buried at the Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Nashville.

Bibliography

• Texas and the Texans; or, Advance of the Anglo-Americans to the South-west; Including a History of Leading Events in Mexico, from the Conquest by Fernando Cortes to the Termination of the Texan Revolution (1841).
• War of the Rebellion (1866).
• Casket of Reminiscences (1874).
• The Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest (1876).

Footnotes

1. Bill Carey, Old Central built by former governor who slugged Jefferson Davis, Vanderbilt Register, April 08, 2002
2. Coleman, James P. "Two Irascible Antebellum Senators: George Poindexter and Henry S. Foote," Journal of Mississippi History 46 (February 1984): 17-27
3. "Incidents of American politics during the Great Struggle". The Week : a Canadian journal of politics, literature, science and arts 1 (10): 156. 7 Feb 1884. Retrieved 25 April 2013.
4. Herbert T. Ezekiel and Gaston Lichtenstein, "The Brains of the Confederacy", excerpt from The History of the Jews of Richmond from 1769 to 1917, 1917, p. 166, at Jewish-History.com,
5. Eli Evans, Judah Benjamin, The Jewish Confederate, Chapter 34, excerpted at The American Jewish Historical Society, accessed July 23, 2008

Further reading

• Coleman, James P. "Two Irascible Antebellum Senators: George Poindexter and Henry S. Foote." Journal of Mississippi History 46 (February 1984): 17-27.
• Evans, Eli N. Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate, New York: The Free Press, 1988
• Ezekiel, Herbert T. and Gaston Lichtenstein, The History of the Jews of Richmond from 1769 to 1917, 1917
• Gonzales, John Edmond. "Henry Stuart Foote: Confederate Congressman and Exile," Civil War History 11 (December 1965): 384-95.

External links

• United States Congress. "Henry S. Foote (id: F000251)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Henry S. Foote at Find A Grave
• Henry Stuart Foote Family website