Samuel Smith (S.S.) Nicholas (April 1797 - November 27, 1869) was a jurist in the state of Kentucky and an author of law essays.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, and orphaned at the age of eight, Nicholas was raised by his uncle, Baltimore merchant and Maryland Senator Samuel Smith. At the age of sixteen, he was sent as his uncle's supercargo on voyages to South America and China. In the early 1820s, Nicholas became a merchant in New Orleans. In 1825, he went to Frankfort, Kentucky, where he studied law under George M. Bibb. [1] He gained prominence quickly and was appointed to Kentucky's highest court, the Court of Appeals, by Governor Thomas Metcalfe, and he received his commission on December 23, 1831. [2] After resigning in 1837, he was elected that year to represent Louisville in the Kentucky House of Representatives. [1] [3] In 1850, he was appointed by Governor John J. Crittenden to revise the Code of Practice of Kentucky. He did so with Charles A. Wickliffe and Squire Turner, and in 1852, they released the revised code of Kentucky. [1] [4]
Nicholas also wrote the following works:
Judge Willard Saulsbury, Sr. quoted the works of Nicholas in his speech on the resolution proposing to expel Jesse D. Bright, and said "...we all know that since the commencement of this struggle no man has written or spoken more earnestly than has Chancellor Nicholas, of Kentucky..." [5]
The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was a law passed by the 31st United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern interests in slavery and Northern Free-Soilers.
Herschel Vespasian Johnson was an American politician. He was the 41st Governor of Georgia from 1853 to 1857 and the vice presidential nominee of the Douglas wing of the Democratic Party in the 1860 U.S. presidential election. He also served as one of Georgia's Confederate States senators.
Charles Anderson Wickliffe was a U.S. Representative from Kentucky. He also served as Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives, the 14th Governor of Kentucky, and was appointed Postmaster General by President John Tyler. Though he consistently identified with the Whig Party, he was politically independent, and often had differences of opinion with Whig founder and fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay.
Joseph Holt was an American lawyer, soldier, and politician. As a leading member of the Buchanan administration, he succeeded in convincing Buchanan to oppose the secession of the South. He returned to Kentucky and successfully battled the secessionist element thereby helping to keep Kentucky in the Union. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army. He served as Lincoln's chief arbiter and enforcer of military law, and supporter of emancipation. His most famous roles came in the Lincoln assassination trials.
Jesse David Bright was the ninth Lieutenant Governor of Indiana and U.S. Senator from Indiana who served as President pro tempore of the Senate on three occasions. He was the only senator from a Northern state to be expelled for being a Confederate sympathizer. As a leading Copperhead he opposed the Civil War. He was frequently in competition with Governor Joseph A. Wright, the leader of the state's Republican Party.
John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham was an American attorney and politician who served as the 35th governor of Kentucky and a United States senator from Kentucky. He was the state's first popularly-elected senator after the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment.
Lazarus Whitehead Powell was an American politician who was the 19th Governor of Kentucky, serving from 1851 to 1855. He served as a U.S. Senator from Kentucky from 1859 to 1865.
John Breathitt was an American politician and lawyer who was the 11th Governor of Kentucky. He was the first Democrat to hold this office and was the second Kentucky governor to die in office. Shortly after his death, Breathitt County, Kentucky was organized and named in his honor.
Isaiah Rogers was an American architect from Massachusetts who eventually moved his practice south, where he was based in Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. He completed numerous designs for hotels, courthouses and other major buildings in Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City, before that relocation.
John Rowan was a 19th-century politician and jurist from the U.S. state of Kentucky. Rowan's family moved from Pennsylvania to the Kentucky frontier when he was young. From there, they moved to Bardstown, Kentucky, where Rowan studied law with former Kentucky Attorney General George Nicholas. He was a representative to the state constitutional convention of 1799, but his promising political career was almost derailed when he killed a man in a duel stemming from a drunken dispute during a game of cards. Although public sentiment was against him, a judge found insufficient evidence against him to convict him of murder. In 1804, Governor Christopher Greenup appointed Rowan Secretary of State, and he went on to serve in the Kentucky House of Representatives and the U.S. House of Representatives.
John White Stevenson was an American politician and attorney who was the 25th governor of Kentucky and represented the state in both houses of the U.S. Congress. The son of former Speaker of the House and U.S. diplomat Andrew Stevenson, John Stevenson graduated from the University of Virginia in 1832 and studied law under his cousin, future Congressman Willoughby Newton. After briefly practicing law in Mississippi, he relocated to Covington, Kentucky, and was elected county attorney. After serving in the Kentucky legislature, he was chosen as a delegate to the state's third constitutional convention in 1849 and was one of three commissioners charged with revising its code of laws, a task finished in 1854. A Democrat, he was elected to two consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives where he supported several proposed compromises to avert the Civil War and blamed the Radical Republicans for their failure.
Willard Saulsbury Sr. was an American lawyer and politician from Georgetown, Delaware. He was a member of the Democratic Party, who served as Attorney General of Delaware, U.S. Senator from Delaware and Chancellor of Court of Chancery of Delaware.
Henry Cornelius Burnett was an American politician who served as a Confederate States senator from Kentucky from 1862 to 1865. From 1855 to 1861, Burnett served four terms in the United States House of Representatives. A lawyer by profession, Burnett had held only one public office—circuit court clerk—before being elected to Congress. He represented Kentucky's 1st congressional district immediately prior to the Civil War. This district contained the entire Jackson Purchase region of the state, which was more sympathetic to the Confederate cause than any other area of Kentucky. Burnett promised the voters of his district that he would have President Abraham Lincoln arraigned for treason. Unionist newspaper editor George D. Prentice described Burnett as "a big, burly, loud-mouthed fellow who is forever raising points of order and objections, to embarrass the Republicans in the House".
Ashbel Parsons Willard was state senator, the 12th lieutenant governor, and the 11th governor of the U.S. state of Indiana. His terms in office were marked by increasingly severe partisanship leading to the breakup of the state Democratic Party in the years leading up to the American Civil War. His brother-in-law John Edwin Cook was involved in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and was executed. Willard went to the south to advocate unsuccessfully for his release, and became despised by southerners who accused him of having a secret involvement in the raid. He died two months before the start of the war while giving a speech on national unity, and was the first governor of Indiana to die in office.
Thomas Elliott Bramlette was the 23rd Governor of Kentucky. He was elected in 1863 and guided the state through the latter part of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction. At the outbreak of the war, Bramlette put his promising political career on hold and enlisted in the Union Army, raising and commanding the 3rd Kentucky Infantry. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him district attorney for Kentucky. A year later, he was the Union Democratic Party's nominee for governor. Election interference by the Union Army gave him a landslide victory over his opponent, Charles A. Wickliffe. Within a year, however, federal policies such as recruiting Kentucky African-Americans for the Union Army and suspending the writ of habeas corpus for Kentucky citizens caused Bramlette to abandon his support of the Lincoln administration and declare that he would "bloodily baptize the state into the Confederacy".
William Preston was an American lawyer, politician, and ambassador. He also was a brigadier general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War.
Horatio Washington Bruce was a Confederate politician during the American Civil War.
Oscar Turner was an American attorney and politician from Kentucky. A Democrat, he was most notable for his service in the United States House of Representatives from 1899 to 1901.
The Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, 12 Stat. 755 (1863), entitled An Act relating to Habeas Corpus, and regulating Judicial Proceedings in Certain Cases, was an Act of Congress that authorized the president of the United States to suspend the right of habeas corpus in response to the American Civil War and provided for the release of political prisoners. It began in the House of Representatives as an indemnity bill, introduced on December 5, 1862, releasing the president and his subordinates from any liability for having suspended habeas corpus without congressional approval. The Senate amended the House's bill, and the compromise reported out of the conference committee altered it to qualify the indemnity and to suspend habeas corpus on Congress's own authority. Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law on March 3, 1863, and suspended habeas corpus under the authority it granted him six months later. The suspension was partially lifted with the issuance of Proclamation 148 by Andrew Johnson, and the Act became inoperative with the end of the Civil War. The exceptions to Johnson's Proclamation 148 were the States of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, the District of Columbia, and the Territories of New Mexico and Arizona.
Sally Ward Lawrence Hunt Armstrong Downs, also known as Sallie Ward, was a "Southern belle." Born into the Southern aristocracy of Kentucky in the Antebellum South, she married four times. After a failed marriage into the Boston Brahmin elite, she married three more times and became a socialite in New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky. She was one of the first women in the United States to wear cosmetics, and she wore daring outfits. She embodied "an old Kentucky way of life."
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