CONFEDERATE BIOGRAPHY:  WILLIAM B. OCHILTREE - Jefferson, TX

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Submitted by Peggy Brannon - peggybrannon@hotmail.com
02 November 2001
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TEXANS WHO WORE THE GRAY by Sid S. Johnson

WILLIAM B. OCHILTREE

William B. Ochiltree, of Jefferson, was born in Cumberland county, North 
Carolina, Oct. 18, 1811.  He was admitted to the bar in Alabama in 1835 and 
four years later removed to the Republic of Texas, locating in the town of 
Nacogdoches. In 1842 he became judge of the fifth district  of the Republic 
which made him ex-officio one of the judges of the Supreme Court.  In 1844 
he was made Secretary of the Treasury of the young republic and a year or 
two later became its Attorney General. Upon the annexation of Texas to the 
United States he was chosen a delegate to the convention which framed the 
constitution of the state. This constitution is said to have no superior in 
statesmanship in the history of organic law in the Union. He was a member of 
the Secession Convention in 1861, and was one of the delegates to the 
Provisional Congress of the Confederate States at Montgomery, Ala. When 
hostilities began he resigned his seat, raised a regiment of infantry of 
which he was elected colonel (18th Texas) and which he led with conspicuous 
gallantry. He died in 1867. His son, Hon. Thomas P. Ochiltree, was the first 
native Texan ever elected to Congress from this state and was famous in 
America and Europe as a wit and after-dinner. speaker. He, too, was a brave 
Confederate soldier like his father.