Tyler Royall Wheeler

Background

Royall Tyler Wheeler was born on August 23, 1810 in Vermont, the son of John and Hannah (Thurston) Wheeler. His father, a native of New Hampshire, moved to Vermont in 1800 and later to Ohio.

Education

Royall studied law in Delaware, Ohio.

Career

He was admitted to the bar. About 1837 he removed to Fayetteville, Ark. , where he became a law partner of Williamson S. Oldham, afterward a member of the Arkansas supreme court. Removing to Texas in 1839, he settled at Nacogdoches, where he formed a partnership with K. L. Anderson, vice-president of the Republic of Texas. Wheeler rose rapidly in his profession and acquired an extensive practice. He served one term as district attorney, and in 1844 was appointed judge of the court in the old Fifth District, embracing much of the eastern part of the Republic. As district judge he became a member of the supreme court, which was composed of the several district judges sitting in banc, and presided over by the chief justice. He was a strong advocate of the annexation of Texas to the Union, and when such union was accomplished, in 1845, he was appointed a member of the supreme court of the state, along with Chief Justice John Hemphill and Associate Justice Abner Smith Lipscomb. After the positions on the court were made elective, in 1851, he was chosen without opposition, and was re-elected in 1856. When Hemphill was sent to the United States Senate in 1858, Wheeler succeeded him as chief justice. The conditions under which he worked during this early period in Texas are shown by the following entry in the diary of Rutherford B. Hayes, who visited Austin in February 1849: "Called at the room of an old law student of Delaware [Ohio], Royal T. Wheeler, now a judge of the Supreme Court. His office as judge, 'den' as he called it, being a log cabin about fourteen feet square, with a bed, table, five chairs, a washstand, and a 'whole raft' of books and papers". Although reared a Whig, Wheeler advocated secession with voice and pen. As chief justice, sitting in chambers at Austin, he upheld and enforced the Confederate conscription law, a position in which he was sustained by a majority of the court. The turmoil and bloodshed resulting from the great civil strife deranged his mind. His death occurred in Washington County in April 1864.

Achievements

• While he was not so brilliant of mind as his two great associates on the first supreme court of the state of Texas, his was the genius of hard labor and patient research. His early experience in the criminal practice resulted in his writing the opinion in a large percentage of the criminal cases coming before the court during his twenty years on the bench. His opinions are to be found in the first twenty-six volumes of the Texas Reports.

Personality

He was a man of blameless character.

Quotes from others about the person

• One of his biographers, George W. Paschal, a strong Union sympathizer, who later became reporter for the Texas supreme court, states that Wheeler "fell into the morbid belief that, more than anyone else, he was responsible for the terrible baptism of blood through which our country was passing. Zealous, ardent, and sensitively conscientious, the ordeal was too severe for a man whose temperament always tended to melancholy. His salary became worthless; he was without income; he had saved little of his fortune; there was no probable, and hardly any possible, employment for his children, whom he so much loved. His reason could not stand the severe strain; he perished by his own hands. The distempered and lamented chief justice was as little responsible for the act by which he threw away his life, as he was for the terrible drama in which so many good men perished".

Connections

In 1839 he married Emily Walker of Fayetteville, a native of Lexington, Ky. , by whom he had three sons and a daughter.

Father:

John Wheeler

Mother:

Hannah (Thurston) Wheeler

Spouse:

Emily Walker of Fayetteville