congressman judge lawyer politician
Edmund Dragan was born on April 15, 1805, in Wadesboro, North Carolina, United States. Son of a Baptist preacher and farmer and his wife Lilly. His father died while he was young, and Dargan subsequently earned his living as a farm laborer.
Though practically self-educated, Dargan acquired a fair knowledge of the classics. He studied English, Latin, and Greek, and in 1828 read law in the office of Colonel Joseph Pickett in Wadesboro.
Edmund Dargan went to Alabama, walking the entire distance to Washington, Autauga County, where he was admitted to the bar and commenced practice, at the same time teaching school.
He was elected a justice of the peace, but there was little scope for a lawyer in that district and in 1833 he moved to Montgomery, opened a law office, and in a short time, despite certain peculiarities of habit and temperament, obtained a good connection. Defeated for the state legislature in 1840, Dargan was the following year elected by the General Assembly judge of the circuit court for the district of Mobile and took up his residence in that town, but resigned in 1842 in order to resume practice.
He had now commenced taking an active interest in public affairs, and in 1844 became mayor of Mobile, in the same year serving as a member of the state Senate.
In 1845 Edmund went to the Twenty-ninth Congress as a Democrat and took a prominent part in the House discussions on the Oregon question.
It was he who, in the course of the debate, suggested the compromise settlement which was ultimately adopted.
Declining a renomination at the end of his term, he was elected by the General Assembly a judge of the supreme court of Alabama, December 16, 1847, becoming chief justice on July 1, 1849. On the bench, he displayed a judicial ability which his somewhat erratic temperament had ill-prepared the public to expect. His opinions were characterized by originality which did not detract from their soundness.
His resignation, December 6, 1852, deprived the court of the most picturesque figure in its history. He resumed practice in Mobile, abstaining from active politics until the crisis which induced the constitutional convention of 1861, in which, as a delegate from Mobile, he voted for the ordinance of secession. His district also elected him to the Confederate Congress of 1862, but he declined reelection in 1864, and thereafter took no part in public affairs.
Edmund was a Democrat. He supported the Davis administration.
Dargan's eccentricity in dress and habits was a source of many anecdotes, and his general views upon current events indicated a train of thought that was independent of environment or precedent.
Quotes from others about the person
“In-person, Judge Dargan has a dull and unattractive look, as if he was always drowsy, and dissatisfied with things about him. His conversation is sluggish, and he appears to be in a reverie most of his time, when he is without a law-book in his hand, and when not engaged in Court. There, he wakes up... a transformation comes over him and the purest logic and the boldest grasp of thought comes to his aid as if by intuition... his face is luminous with intellectual life until he closes his argument, and then he looks sleepy again."
In 1837 Edmund married Roxana Brack. The couple had five children.
