Peter Marshall Hitchcock was an American lawyer, teacher, farmer and soldier.
Background
Peter Marshall Hitchcock was born on October 19, 1781 in Cheshire, Connecticut, United States. He was the youngest son of Valentine Hitchcock and his wife Sarah, the daughter of Henry Hotchkiss. He was fifth in descent from Matthias Hitchcock who came to Boston from London in 1635.
Education
Hitchcock entered Yale at the age of seventeen and taught at intervals to defray his expenses. He graduated in 1801. Following graduation he studied law, was admitted to practice in March 1803.
Career
Hitchcock opened an office in Cheshire. Attracted by the opportunities of the West, he journeyed to the new state of Ohio in an ox-drawn wagon. Near Burton, Geauga County, he settled upon an unimproved farm which was thenceforth his home. Clearing the land and teaching in Burton Academy were his chief occupations for a time, but in such legal business as came to him he displayed a mind so accurate, logical, and resourceful that his clientele grew rapidly.
In 1810 his neighbors sent him to the legislature, where he served, first in the lower house, then in the upper, until 1816. During his last session he presided over the Senate. In 1816 he was elected to Congress, but before the end of his term was chosen (1819) by the Ohio legislature as judge of the state supreme court. He sat upon the bench for four seven-year terms, failing of reëlection in 1833 and 1842 because of the control of the legislature by his political opponents. From 1833 to 1835 he was again in the Senate, and in 1845 he began his final term in the supreme court, which he lacked a week of completing when the new constitution, providing for popular election of judges, retired him. During six of the twenty-eight years, including the last three, he had been chief judge.
Early in 1853, as he returned from a visit to Columbus on professional business, he was seized with dysentery, and died at the home of a son in Painesville.
Achievements
Religion
Hitchcock exhibited the traditional virtues of his Puritan stock--sobriety, industry, and integrity. In middle life he united with the Congregational Church.
Politics
Originally a Jeffersonian Republican, Hitchcock became a Whig during Jackson's presidency through devotion to what he conceived to be the fundamentals of popular government. The trend of his thought is indicated by the fact that as a member of the constitutional convention of 1850 he himself advocated the provision which deprived him, a trifle prematurely, of his office; and also by his opposition to the executive veto as an unwarranted check upon the acts of the people's representatives.
Personality
Hitchcock's simple honesty and modesty, made him a man of influence throughout the Western Reserve before he had been five years in the state. Up to the time of his retirement from the bench he had enjoyed robust health and great physical and mental endurance.
Connections
On December 12, 1805 in Cheshire, Hitchcock married Abigail Cook.