Andrew Jackson Hamilton

Hamilton practiced law in La Grange before moving to Austin, and by the 1850s he belonged to the "Opposition Clique," a Democratic faction against secession and the reopening of the slave trade. In Congress he sat on the House committee formed in the secession winter of 1860-1861 to try to resolve the crisis. Back home he won a special election to the state Senate, but in July 1862, after alleged plots against his life, he fled to Mexico. In the North he became a hero, speaking in New York and Boston against slavery and the "slave power."

What the plaque says

Andrew Jackson Hamilton (January 28, 1815 - April 11, 1875) A native of Alabama, Andrew Jackson Hamilton moved his family to Texas in the 1840s. He served as state attorney general and as a member of the state legislature before being elected to the U. S. Congress in 1859. An opponent of secession, he left Texas during the Civil War but in 1865 was appointed provisional governor by President Andrew Johnson. He was an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court from 1867 to 1869, and was an unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1866 and 1869. He continued to practice law in Austin until his death in 1875. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George Washington Carver Museum — 0.4 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 0.6 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 0.7 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• Swante Palm — steps away
• Abner Hugh Cook — steps away
• Susanna W. Dickinson — steps away
• John Crittenden Duval — steps away