Martin Hardin Cofer was an American soldier and jurist. He served as Kentucky associate justice of the court of appeals from 1874 to 1881 and as a Kentucky chief justice in 1881.
Background
Martin Hardin Cofer, the son of Thomas and Mary Cofer, was born on April 01, 1832 at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, United States. His mother was a daughter of Martin Plardin, for whom he was named and from whom the county took its name. His grandfather, William Cofer, came from Virginia and settled in Bullitt County, Kentucky, in 1781. Martin’s boyhood was spent upon a farm.
Education
Martin received little education largely through his own efforts.
Career
When twenty years of age, Cofer began teaching in the common schools and at the same time commenced the study of law. The next year he removed to Illinois where he remained three years, not returning however before he had been admitted to the Illinois bar. In 1856 he began to practise his profession in Elizabethtown and continued there until the beginning of the Civil War. Being a Democrat and a Southern sympathizer of pronounced views, he began to take an active part in the heated controversy in 1860. In this year he became the editor of the Elizabethtown Democrat and after the election of Lincoln tried to bring about the secession of Kentucky.
He ran for the legislature in the August (1861) election on the Southern Rights ticket and was defeated. Seeing no possibility now of forcing the secession of the state, he took the short cut of raising volunteers for the Confederacy. He helped to organize the 6th Kentucky Infantry, C. S. A. , became its lieutenant-colonel, and fought with it in every engagement except Murfreesboro up to August 30, 1864, being severely wounded at Shiloh in 1862. He was promoted to a colonelcy in 1863 and the next year, when Hood’s army retreated from Atlanta into Tennessee, he was made provost-marshal of the Army of Tennessee. He showed great skill in reorganizing the scattered remnants of Hood’s army after the disastrous defeat before Nashville. He then helped to lead them into North Carolina, there to join General Joseph E. Johnston in time for the surrender near Durham.
After the war Cofer returned to Kentucky and took up his practise of law at Elizabethtown. In 1867 he published A Supplemental Digest of Decisions of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, 1853-1867, which became the standard authority for the state. After serving as judge of the circuit court (1870 - 1874), in August 1874 he was elected associate justice of the state court of appeals and held this position until 1881 when he became the chief justice. Cofer was broad in his sympathies and attitudes and exact in his information. Not until March 1871 were his federal disabilities removed, by an act of Congress, yet two months later he violated Kentucky laws and court decisions by admitting African Americans testimony against white persons, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment so required. He died in Frankfort while yet in office.