American state constitutions: a study of their growth
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Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock, Major and Assistant Adjutant General of Volunteers, November 1864-May 1865
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“Tomorrow morning we set out on a campaign which will b...)
“Tomorrow morning we set out on a campaign which will be remembered. God grant it aid to bring to a speedy end this terrible and lamentable war!” So wrote Major Henry Hitchcock on the eve of General William Sherman’s epic march across Georgia to the sea. Hitchcock, a new member of Sherman’s staff, was right about the fame, or infamy, that would attach to the campaign. His diaries and letters describe at first hand the destructive swath Sherman’s army cut through Georgia and the Carolinas. The major, religious and trained in the law, watches the burning and pillage with as much sorrow as satisfaction. If his sympathy for the Southern people is strong, so is his devotion to the Union and its unstoppable general.
Henry Hitchcock was an American lawyer. He was a co-founder of the American Bar Association, and served as its 12th president in 1889. He was also the first dean of St. Louis Law School.
Background
Henry Hitchcock was born on July 3, 1829 in Spring Hill, Alabama, United States. He was of English and Irish ancestry, and descended from Luke Hitchcock, freeman of New Haven, Connecticut. Hitchcock was a great-grandson of Ethan Allen, a nephew of General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, and a brother of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, secretary of the interior under President Roosevelt. His parents were Henry and Anne (Erwin) Hitchcock. His father, a Vermonter by birth and education, was a distinguished lawyer and chief justice of the Alabama supreme court.
Education
Young Hitchcock graduated from the University of Nashville with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1846, and from Yale in 1848. He studied law in the office of Willis Hall, Corporation Counsel of New York City, and the office of William F. Cooper, who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.
Career
After a year's experience as teacher in a Massachusetts high school Hitchcock went to St. Louis in 1851 and was admitted to the bar. He remained a trained lawyer in the convention until it finally adjourned in July 1863. Later, appointed assistant adjutant-general with rank of major, but actually legal adviser, he served on the staff of General Sherman, who was his friend in St. Louis before the war, during the march to the sea and the campaign resulting in the surrender of Johnston. Returning to St. Louis, as a director of Washington University Hitchcock organized the university's law school, being dean for seven years without compensation and permitting his wife to give money for the school's endowment. At the same time he was engaged until his death in a constantly increasing private practice, confined entirely to civil, as distinguished from criminal, law. In 1889-1890 he was president of the American Bar Association.
His pro-Union speech in the state convention, March 15, 1861, is a plausible argument for what is now the orthodox view of American federalism. A more literary quality appears in his address, "The Supreme Court and the Constitution, " at the celebration of the centennial of the United States Supreme Court. His American Bar Association address on corporations embodies a protest against the use of "eminent domain" for "private gain, " quoted with approval in Bryce's American Commonwealth (1888), which also contains a quotation from Hitchcock's American State Constitution (1887). The posthumous Marching with Sherman (1927), based upon campaign letters and diaries, ably edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe, is vividly relevant to a controversial subject. Through Hitchcock's effort the notable library on alchemy collected by his uncle, General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, on the latter's death was acquired by the Mercantile Library, St. Louis.
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“Tomorrow morning we set out on a campaign which will b...)
Politics
Opposed to the extension of slavery, Hitchcock voted for Lincoln and was elected on the "unconditional union" ticket as a delegate to the state convention which met in February 1861, authorized by the legislature "to consider the relation of Missouri to the union. " He was an active and somewhat radical member of the majority group opposed to secession which eventually assumed quasi-revolutionary powers when the governor and legislature defied federal authority.
Membership
Hitchcock was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1882.
Connections
On March 5, 1857, Hitchcock married Mary Collier, who, with their two children, survived him.