Ashbel Smith was an American surgeon-general and secretary of state of the Republic of Texas.
Background
He was born on August 13, 1805 in Hartford, Connecticut, United States, the son of Moses and Phoebe (Adams) Smith. Through his father he was descended from Richard Seymour who came to Hartford in 1639; through his mother, from George Adams who died in Watertown, Massachussets, in 1696.
Education
He graduated at Yale in 1824 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and four years later received his medical degree. He continued his medical studies in Paris in 1831-32.
Career
Having taught school in Salisbury, North Carolina, from 1824 to 1826, he later began the practice of medicine. In March 1832 he began his attendance at Neckar Hospital during an epidemic of Asiatic cholera. For his services during this plague he was publicly thanked by the director of the hospital.
Returning to North Carolina in 1832, he continued his practice and became identified with political affairs as editor and part owner of the Western Carolinian, a Nullification paper.
In 1837, Ashbel Smith went to Texas and was made surgeon-general of the new republic. He was one of the commissioners to negotiate a treaty with the Comanches in 1838 and was minister to England and France, 1842-44. In 1843, he made known to his government certain plans of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society for the abolition of slavery in Texas and in the Southern states. These facts he also communicated to the Texan minister at Washington, who placed them in the hands of Calhoun and other Southern leaders.
On the basis of the evidence thus revealed, President Tyler, in 1844, offered annexation to Texas in the form of a treaty, which was rejected by the Whig Senate. Tyler, meanwhile, signed on March 1, 1845, the joint resolution offering annexation to Texas. The issue now rested with the people of Texas, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of annexation. After a brief period of service in the Mexican War, Smith retired to his plantation.
In 1848, he was appointed on the board of visitors to West Point. During the Civil War he served as captain of the Bayland Guards and as lieutenant-colonel and colonel of the 2nd Texas Volunteer Infantry. As brevet brigadier-general he commanded the forces at the head of Matagorda Peninsula which saved the rich coast counties from invasion, and later was placed in command of the defenses of Galveston.
When the war closed he was one of the commissioners sent to New Orleans to surrender the district. Smith was elected to the Texas legislature in 1866 and again in 1878. As president of the board of regents in 1881, he undertook the chief labor of organizing the University of Texas, endeavoring to get the best men that could be induced to go to Texas in order that the institution might start with an established reputation for scholarship.
After his entrance into political life, he practised his profession for the most part only in times of emergency, such as the epidemics of yellow fever in Houston and Galveston.
He died at "Evergreen, " his plantation home.