Background
Rensselaer Russell Nelson was born on May 12, 1826 in Cooperstown, New York, United States. He was the son of Catherine Ann (Russell) and Samuel Nelson. He was of mixed New England and Irish ancestry, with a dash of Dutch and Scotch.
Rensselaer Russell Nelson was born on May 12, 1826 in Cooperstown, New York, United States. He was the son of Catherine Ann (Russell) and Samuel Nelson. He was of mixed New England and Irish ancestry, with a dash of Dutch and Scotch.
The boy was prepared for college at a military academy at Cooperstown and at Haerwick Seminary. He was graduated from Yale in 1846.
Nelson read law in the offices of James R. Whiting of New York and George A. Starkweather of Cooperstown, and was admitted to the bar in 1849.
After practising a short time in Buffalo, he went to Minnesota Territory in 1850 and opened a law office in St. Paul, although informed by the landlord of his hotel that the population of the town (about a thousand) included "fifty lawyers, mostly starving. " Soon thereafter he joined with five other St. Paul men in a land speculation, which in August 1853 took them as settlers to Superior, Wisconsin.
Having helped to organize Douglas County, with Superior as the county seat, Nelson was appointed county attorney by the governor, and at the first election, in November 1854, he was elected to the same office. But the vision of Superior as a great inland port was not to be realized at so early a day, and he returned to St. Paul in 1855.
In 1857 Nelson was appointed by President Buchanan associate justice of the supreme court of Minnesota Territory.
In the same year he rendered an important decision, refusing a writ of mandamus to compel the territorial officers to remove the capital from St. Paul to St. Peter. A bill for this removal had passed both houses of the legislature but had been sequestered by the chairman of the committee on engrossed bills until the legislature had adjourned. Nelson ruled that, the power to fix the location of the territorial capital having been granted to and exercised by the first territorial legislature, no subsequent legislature had the power to change that location; he further ruled that the bill substituted for the missing bill and signed by the governor was not the bill passed by the legislature and that hence no act had been passed.
He had no temptation to forsake the bench for politics and did not retire until 1896.
Nelson was reputed to be an unprejudiced and liberal-minded judge whose decisions were seldom reversed; he had "a serene composure which seemed natural to the man, becoming to a judge, " and "the courteous gentility of the old school of which he was one of the best examples. "
On November 3, 1858 he married Emma F. Wright (née Beebe) of New York.