Associate Justice, Texas Supreme Court, 1867-1869
Andrew Jackson Hamilton was born January 28, 1815 in Huntsville, Alabama. He received his education there and was admitted to the bar in 1841. In 1846 he moved to LaGrange, Texas, where he practiced law for three years. Following his appointment by Gov. Bell to the position of attorney general in 1849, he settled permanently in Austin. He represented Travis County in the Texas Legislature from 1851 to 1853, and in 1859 he was elected to the U.S. Congress.
Hamilton was a strong and vocal opponent of secession. In late 1861 he returned to Austin from Washington and was elected to the state senate. But Texas was now a Confederate state, and the Unionist Hamilton declined to take the oath required for office. Instead he fled to Mexico, and then went to Washington, DC, where he was appointed brigadier general for the Texas troops fighting on the Union side. He was a great orator and gave pro-Union speeches in northern cities. He spent the latter part of the war in New Orleans, which had come under Union control in 1862.
In 1865 President Johnson appointed Hamilton Provisional Governor of Texas. In 1867 Hamilton was appointed an associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court; this was the court known as the Military Court, appointed when Texas came under military command following the Civil War.
Hamilton participated in the Reconstruction Convention of 1868. A moderate Republican, he ran unsuccessfully for governor against the radical E. J. Davis in 1870. Following the election, Hamilton returned to private life, practicing law and working on his farm near Austin. He died of tuberculosis in Austin on April 11, 1875 at the age of sixty, and was buried in Austin's Oakwood Cemetery.
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