Henry Watkins Collier was an American jurist and politician. He served on the Alabama Supreme Court for 18 years and was the 14th Governor of the state of Alabama from 1849 to 1853.
Background
Henry Watkins Collier was the son of James and Elizabeth (Bouldin) Collier, both members of prominent Virginia families. He was born on the ancestral plantation in Lunenburg County, Virginia, United States. When he was a year old his parents removed to the Abbeville District of South Carolina, and, in 1818, to the newly opened cotton lands of the Tennessee Valley, in Madison County, Alabama.
Education
Henry received his basic education in the famous school of Dr. Moses Waddel at Willington, South Carolina, where Calhoun, McDuffie, Petigru, and Longstreet also were instructed. After the removal to Huntsville, Alabama, he took up the study of law at Nashville under the tutelage of Judge John Haywood of the supreme court of Tennessee. He was admitted to the Huntsville bar in 1822.
Career
In 1823 Collier started to practise law in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was at this time a well-knit young man with ample brow and kindly gray eyes. His bearing was dignified, his manner reserved, and his temperament judicial. Though apparently lacking in the qualifications of a Western politician, he espoused the Democratic cause, and was elected to the legislature in 1827.
During the next year he was elected by that body to membership in the highest court of the state. When the supreme court was separately organized for the first time in 1832, Collier was retained on the circuit bench. In 1836 the governor gave him an appointment ad interim to the supreme court, and at its next session the legislature confirmed the governor’s choice and elected him to the place. He was elected the following year to the chief justiceship and served in that capacity for twelve years.
Lacking brilliant mental qualifications, he performed his judicial duties with laborious care and left himself little time to look after his private interests as a planter.
That a man lacking in oratorical or political gifts should be nominated for the governorship in 1849 and elected by a vote of 36, 330 to 364 indicates not only the dominance of the Democratic party in the state at that time, but also the power within the party of its conservative leaders. This was not the brand of democracy which Andrew Johnson represented during the same period in Tennessee. As governor, Collier retained the placid dignity which had characterized him as judge. When he was renominated in 1851, he refused to take the stump, saying that he would stand on his record alone.
The question of the compromise measures of 1850 was the leading issue in the campaign. William L. Yancey represented the extreme Southern faction which opposed compromise, while B. G. Shields stood for unconditional submission to the Union. Collier stood for the compromise and the Georgia platform, refusing to go to either extreme represented by the other two men. He was elected by a large majority.
On his retirement from the governorship he was offered a seat in the Senate of the United States, but his health had been undermined by hard work and he died while seeking to regain his strength at Bailey Springs, Alabama, in 1855.
Collier was a faithful Methodist, and became one of the leading supporters of his denomination in Tuscaloosa.
Politics
Collier was a member of the Democratic Party. In matters of state policy, he stood for the free banking system, and for educational and judicial reforms. He took a keen interest in the humanitarian movement which was in progress at the time, and, visited by Dorothea L. Dix, used his influence to secure in the state penitentiary system some of the reforms which she advocated.
Connections
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1826, Collier married Mary Ann Battle of North Carolina, a sister of one of his Tuscaloosa colleagues.