USGENWEB PROJECT ARCHIVES: TENSAS PARISH LOUISIANA http://files.usgwarchives.org/la/tensas/ --------------------------------------------------------- Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.org/copyright.htm --------------------------------------------------------- Biography of Henry A. Garrett, Tensas Parish, Louisiana Submitted to the USGENWEB Archives Project by Mike Miller, AUG 2001. Hon. Henry A. Garrett, Tensas Parish, Louisiana Hon. Henry A. Garrett, lawyer, St. Joseph, La. The career of the lawyer is a succession of contests, and the successes won in the legal profession are probably more than in any other calling in life examples of the "survival of the fittest." To become distinguished at the bar requires not only capacity, but excellent judgment and a clear understanding of men and motives. These qualifications are combined to an unusual extent in Hon. Henry A. Garrett., of St. Joseph, Tensas parish, La. He was born in Adams county, Miss., near the city of Natchez, on the 25th day of December, 1841, and is the son of Henry A. and Jane (Dunbar) Garrett, the father a native of East Tennessee, born in 1804, and the mother born in Adams county, Miss. The elder Garrett graduated from Greenville college in East Tennessee, and subsequently studied law with Andrew Johnson, the successor of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States, under the same preceptor. He practiced law a few years in his native place, and then removed to Canton, Miss., where he continued to practice his profession for sixteen years. From that place he removed to his wife's plantation near Natchez, Miss. He died in 1844. He was a man of high character and noble instincts. His father, the Rev. William Garrett, was a native of Kentucky, and a Methodist preacher, contemporary with Peter Cartwright, McKendree, and the earlier divines of the southwest. He was a man of considerable distinction, and the town of Garrettsburg, in Kentucky, was named for his family. His wife, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Grey, was of the famous family of that name in Tennessee. They reared a large family of sons and daughters, and all of the sons became lawyers except one, Phineas Garrett, who for many years was the recorder of deeds at Nashville, Tenn. The elder son, William Garrett, became the most distinguished of the family, having been secretary of state for Alabama for many years, and was also a member of the constitutional convention in that state, called after reconstruction, and he was several times tendered the position of governor by the democratic party, of which he was a lifelong member. He is the author of "Public Men of Alabama," and was, during his long life, a distinguished citizen of Alabama. The great-grandfather of our subject was a native of Virginia, and moved to Kentucky late in the last century. He was of Anglo-French origin, and the family name, according to the oldest tradition, was "Girard," and the French ancestor of that name came from France and settled in England after the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV., he being a Huguenot who would not bow down to the behest of the Catholic king. In the course of time family dissensions broke out in the family, and the different members assumed different spelling of the original name, such as Garrard, Garit, Guerrant, and finally "Garrett." The mother of our subject, Mrs. Jane Dunbar Garrett, died in 1852, at the residence of her brother-in-law, the Hon. J. F. H. Claiborne, near the Bay of St. Louis, Miss. She was a woman possessed of many noble traits of character, and universally loved. Her father, William Dunbar, was a native of North Carolina, and settled in Natchez, Miss., about the close of the eighteenth century. He belonged to the family of that name from the lowlands of Scotland, who immigrated to North Carolina about the middle of the eighteenth century, which furnished many ministers to the Presbyterian church. His wife was Martha Willis, daughter of Gen. John Willis, of North Carolina, an officer of the Revolutionary war, and distinguished in the campaigns of Gen. Henry Lee. Mrs. Dunbar was left a widow in middle life with twelve children, all of whom she educated in a manner becoming their station in life, and all of whom she lived to see settled successfully in life. She was a woman of wonderful firmness of character, probity and self-reliance. Her sons all became successful planters in the river counties of Mississippi and Louisiana. One of her daughters, Martha Dunbar, married Col. John F. H. Claiborne, who was a member of congress in 1834 to 1838, from Mississippi, and who was celebrated all over the South for his talents as a writer and historian, his greatest work being the history of Mississippi, published just before his death in 1884. Mrs. Garrett was left a widow at twenty-seven, with two children: Mary and Henry A. Garrett. The son was left an orphan at eleven years of age, and was educated at Oakland college,. Mississippi, where he graduated in the class of 1860. He then attended the law school at the University of Mississippi at Oxford until April, 1861, when he joined a cavalry company from Natchez to go to the seat of war in Virginia, his captain being William T. Martin, who rose to the rank of major-general of cavalry. He was in nearly all the battles in Virginia in which the cavalry were engaged: Williamsburg, Seven Pines, around Richmond, Gettysburg, etc. Just after the battle of Gettysburg he became a member of the personal escort of Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, the most celebrated cavalry officer of the confederate army. After the death of Stuart he was assigned as a member of the escort of Gen. Wade Hampton, with whom he served during the arduous campaigns of 1864-85. He was in the last fight of the war at Bentonville, N. C., and a few days later his company escorted Gen. Jo. Johnston to meet General Sherman at Durham station, where the surrender of Johnston's army took place. Returning home with his parole in his pocket, he went to a plantation that he owned in Tensas parish and began to plant cotton, but lost his property during the disastrous years of 1866 and 1867. In 1868 he returned to Natchez and resumed the study of law with Judge Alexander Montgomery, and was soon afterward admitted to the bar before the supreme court of Mississippi at Jackson, and in 1870 settled at St. Joseph, La., where he took charge of the "Tenses Gazette," which he edited for some time. He was also deputy recorder of the parish, and at the same time studied the civil law as practiced in Louisiana. In 1871 he was admitted to the Louisiana bar and has since been practicing law at St. Joseph. From 1872 to 1874 he was a partner of Henry W. Drake, who was the son of Rev. B. M. Drake, a distinguished Methodist minister. In 1874 he became a member of the law firm of Steele & Clinton, but soon afterward Mr. James W. Clinton was assassinated in a most foul manner by a negro in St. Helena parish, where he had gone to be married the next week, and by the removal of Judge Hiram R. Steele to New Orleans, where he became judge of the superior criminal court, the partnership was broken up. In 1876 Mr. Garrett was a law partner with Judge S. Charles Young, the present incumbent of the bench in Tenses parish. In 1877 he resumed partnership with Judge Steele, and the firm was Steele & Garrett until 1888, when the partnership was dissolved by the removal of Judge Steele from the Tenses practice. In 1888 he went into partnership with his present partner, Judge Thomas P. Clinton, who has been district attorney, judge of the court of appeals, and a prominent member of the bar for over thirty years. This is one of the best law firms in north Louisiana, and Mr. Garrett owes much of his success to his fidelity to business and to his prompt business habits. He is earnestly in favor of the development of his section, and has been largely identified with the real estate business which is a large part of a country lawyer's business. He believes in the small-farm system, and claims that when the large plantations are cut up into farms, that the agricultural prosperity of the South will be as largely increased as was the condition of France when the great estates of the nobles were cut up after the revolution of 1789, and sold out to the thrifty peasantry, but he wants the white people always to rule and says the negro will make the best of peasantry if treated fairly. He earnestly believes in the encouragement of every enterprise that will tend to diffuse instead of concentrate wealth. He is a Mason and has been several times master of his lodge, and is also a Knight Temp1ar and Knight of Pythias. He has been twice married, the first time in 1875, to his cousin, Hallie McAllister, and again in 1881, to his present wife, Martha E. Claiborne, daughter of Col. J. F. H. Claiborne, and Mr. Garrett's first cousin. Mrs. Garrett is a lady of unusual attainments, and of the finest traits of character, and is among the most cultured and refined of the fair daughters of Mississippi, her native state. The excellent taste and judgment she evinces in the management of her household affairs make her home a very attractive one to all who enter her hospitable doors; her beauty of person, grace and elegance of manner, and her dignified but wholly charming demeanor, places her among the foremost women of the society where she lives. That she is a lady of the newly dawning era in the South may be inferred from an expression of hers made to the writer: "That the ladies of the South are dignifying labor by the industry with which they are assisting their husbands in retrieving their fortunes laid waste by the ravages of the late Civil war." She is a leading member of the Episcopal church at St. Joseph, La. Mr. Garrett is a fair specimen of the kind of men of the South, who, born to affluence, went into the war with heart and soul, believing he was right, and lost all their possessions, but who, instead of repining at fate, put their shoulders to the wheel and are doing all in their power to build up the country, glorying in the heroic memories of the past of the South, ashamed of nothing in her history and looking the future in the face with hope and confidence. Biographical and Historical Memoires of Louisiana, (vol. 1), pp. 432-434. Published by the Goodspeed Publishing Company, Chicago, 1892.