Toulmin & Hitchcock

To Allen's credit, as an aggressive land speculator with the Onion River Company, he did not neglect, at least, to become fabulously wealthy. On the domestic front, one of the direct beneficiaries of his fame and fortune seems to have been his second daughter, Lucy Caroline, Hitchcock's mother, "a woman of high character, rare delicacy and refinement, and great beauty-widely esteemed and beloved." Hitchcock's father, Samuel, carved out a career as a distinguished Vermont judge. Henry Hitchcock benefited accordingly from educational privileges available only to the few, beginning his studies at Middlebury College and then moving to the University of Vermont, where he graduated with honors in 1811. It was the death of his father while he was in college, requiring Hitchcock to find a steady income for his family, that seems to have turned him from 1815 onward to the practice of law. This vocational choice launched him, in 1816, on a set of American peregrinations not unlike Toulmin's.

Traveling overland from Burlington to Pittsburgh, Hitchcock made his way down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers by flatboat to Natchez and then overland again to Mobile, where he arrived in 1817. There he quickly prospered as a lawyer, paying off his travel debts and buying a home in St. Stephens for his mother, two sisters, a brother, and a young cousin. His private success was repaid in public trust. On May 14, 1818, six months after the formation of the Alabama Territory, Governor William W. Bibb appointed him territorial first secretary, a role that effectively empowered Hitchcock to perform the duties of the chief executive in Bibb's absence. Meanwhile, he became one of the leading citizens of the Tombigbee settlement. With Alabama statehood imminent, Hitchcock was duly elected, along with future governor Israel Pickens, as one of the two Washington County representatives to the July 1819 constitutional convention. There he was one of fifteen attendees delegated to prepare a draft, and one of three then responsible for the final document, which was adopted on August 2, 1819. In December of the same year, with Alabama admitted to statehood, an election was held by the assembly for the state's first attorney general. The selectee by a wide margin was Henry Hitchcock.

It was on the basis of these pioneering responsibilities that Hitchcock composed and published the text now known-in fact achieving such status by a whisker over Toulmin's-as the state's first book, Alabama Justice of the Peace. Quickly it became the standard for legal functionaries at outposts of frontier justice ranging from the county courthouse to the muddy crossroads and village square.

Meanwhile, Hitchcock continued to enjoy a burgeoning private career as a lawyer and businessman, first in Cahaba, and then, when the capital was moved to Tuscaloosa, back in Mobile. Along the way, like Toulmin, he accrued some reputation as a man of letters. He was remembered for his Fourth of July oration at St. Stephens in 1818, his eulogy of Governor Bibb in 1820, and his 1825 address of welcome to the touring Marquis de Lafayette. In politics, he trumped his distinguished elder, realizing one last ambition by being elected in 1835 to the Supreme Court.