Toulmin & Hitchcock

In Alabama, Toulmin's tasks included those of "judge, diplomat, postmaster, and road-surveyor." As a minister, he still performed weddings and funerals. On the side, he seems to have practiced medicine. His main efforts, however, were those of a jurist attempting "to bring order, stability, and the rule of law to a frontier outpost threatened from without by foreign powers and from within by unruly settlers and warring Indian tribes." In 1807 he arrested Aaron Burr. In the years immediately following, he unsuccessfully tried to find nonviolent solutions to the problems that eventually led to open hostilities in the Greek War of 1811-1813. Meanwhile, he busied himself with a second legal compilation, attempting to codify the statutes of the Mississippi Territory. When the state of Alabama was created out of the remnant of the Mississippi Territory in 1819-Mississippi having become a state in 1817-he took part in the statehood convention in Huntsville and was elected to the new legislature.

During most of this time, Toulmin had been making a home with his wife and family on a cotton plantation at Fort Stoddart, where Pickett notes approvingly that he elected to call the courthouse "Wakefield, in memory of Goldsmith's good vicar." Although allegedly appalled by slavery on first arriving in Virginia, he too now owned human chattel. Domestic implication seems eventually to have legislated a partial change in cultural attitude. Near the end of his life, singling out in his will one slave for manumission, he wrote, "He is fit for freedom which few negroes are."

Politically disappointed in an election defeat by Abner Lipscomb for judge of the first circuit courtan appellate position he saw as paving the way for appointment to a new supreme court-Toulmin turned to other work: a third and final major legal compilation. At his death in 1824, the volume, to be entitled Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama, was complete. All it lacked for publication was an index. That would be supplied, posthumously, in a truly compendious 130 pages of the most meticulous source work and annotation by a younger, more energetic successor. This rising star in Alabama law and politics had himself recently made his own publishing mark in the field with a volume entitled Alabama Justice of the Peace. His name was Henry Hitchcock.

ALTHOUGH ANCHORED FIRMLY on this side of the Atlantic, the story of Henry Hitchcock certainly reveals a set of genealogical particulars no less intriguing than those of Harry Toulmin. Born in Vermont, he was a grandson of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Alien. This was decidedly a mixed blessing. Historically, Alien's fame was compromised by his reputation as the original Revolutionary loose cannon, a braggart and military adventurer known for his maverick command style and devotion to the cause of Vermont statehood. Religiously, he was a celebrated infidel, a rational agnostic on the radical side even of such notorious freethinkers as Jefferson or Paine. (The proud author of a Painelike demolition of traditional faith entitled Reason, the Only Oracle of Man (1784), he was called by a fellow Vermonter, the Rev. Nathan Perkins, "one of Ye wickedest men to ever walked this guilty globe.")