Alexander M. Clayton (1801–1889)

Alexander M. Clayton, a Virginia-born lawyer, had a thirty-five-year career as a jurist, diplomat, and leader of the Southern causes of slavery and secession, starting with one unremarkable year on the highest court of territorial Arkansas, the Superior Court (the predecessor of the Arkansas Supreme Court). He was barely known in the Arkansas Territory when President Andrew Jackson nominated him for the Superior Court. His tenure on the territorial court ended after only a year, when he resigned owing to what he called an incapacitating illness. He spent the rest of his long career in Mississippi.

Alexander Mosby Clayton was born on January 15, 1801, near Lynchburg, Virginia, to William Willis Clayton and Clarissa Mosby Clayton. He read law with a Lynchburg attorney, a common way then to be licensed to practice law, and was admitted to the bar in 1823. He married Mary Walker Thomas and moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, to practice law. When she died in 1832, leaving him with a son and infant daughter, he migrated to the Arkansas Territory and opened a law practice.

The act of Congress in 1819, which created the territory of Arkansas and put it on course for statehood, directed the president to appoint an appellate court of three members. This court, the Superior Court of Arkansas, would be replaced by the Supreme Court when Arkansas became a state in 1836. President Andrew Jackson appointed Charles Bibb, a twenty-year-old lawyer in Kentucky, to the court, but he died of cholera in October 1832 after serving for only a short time.

On January 16, 1833, only a few months after Bibb’s death, the Arkansas Gazette passed on a tip from Ambrose Sevier, the territory’s delegate to Congress and the territory’s most powerful politician, that President Jackson was going to appoint “a gentleman by the name of Clayton of Clarksville, Tennessee,” to the Superior Court seat. Clayton had been practicing law in Arkansas for only a few weeks and apparently was hardly known. The Gazette confirmed the appointment on January 23 and later noted briefly that he was on the job. He had arrived at the capital city on the steamboat Little Rock and was sworn in the same day. The newspaper never again mentioned him, his work, or any decision that he authored until he resigned.

In January 1834, the Gazette carried a report from the Helena World that Judge Clayton, exactly a year after taking office, was resigning because of poor health, which made it impractical for him to perform his “laborious duties” as a judge. In the only report that ever appeared in the Gazette, which also was the official record of the territorial government, the paper carried this encomium about Clayton: “Although his leaving the Bench of the Superior Court of the Territory will be a source of deep and unfeigned regret to those associated with him, as well as to all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance, we highly commend his conduct in resigning an office the duties of which he finds himself unable promptly and regularly to discharge.” Sickness and death were ever-present perils in the Arkansas Territory, illustrated by the illnesses and deaths of judges and others in that short period and the occasional taunts in the Gazette about federal appointees turning back owing to mosquitoes or else quickly fleeing the territory.

The Superior Court produced few notable decisions in its seventeen years, including Clayton’s year. Its docket consisted mostly of property disputes, including claims from Arkansas’s Spanish and French periods. When Clayton resigned after only a year, President Jackson in April 1834 appointed Thomas J. Lacy of Nashville, Tennessee, to the court to finish Bibb’s and Clayton’s term, which was to run until 1836. The Gazette reported that Lacy was “detained” from coming to Arkansas, also owing to illness. He eventually came and remained on the court until statehood, when he became one of the original three justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

After his resignation, Clayton headed for Mississippi and began a successful political and judicial career there. He acquired a plantation and was elected to the Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals, serving from 1842 until 1852, when he was defeated for reelection. For eight of those years, he was president of the University of Mississippi Board of Trustees. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed him the American consul to Havana, Cuba.

After secession in 1861, Clayton briefly represented Mississippi in the provisional Confederate congress and later was a Confederate state judge. He was elected to the Mississippi secession convention and wrote the declaration to withdraw from the union. He was a delegate to the convention at Montgomery, Alabama, that established the Confederacy, signed the provisional constitution, and was chair of the Judicial Committee of the Confederate Congress. Confederate president Jefferson Davis appointed him to the Confederate District Court of Mississippi for the duration of the Civil War, but it functioned very little owing to Union control of much of the state. He was appointed a Mississippi circuit judge in 1866 but was removed because of his disloyalty to the United States. He went back to his plantation and served as a director of the Mississippi Central Railroad.

He died on September 30, 1889, and is buried in Hill Crest Cemetery at Holly Springs, Mississippi, between Memphis, Tennessee, and Tupelo, Mississippi.

For additional information:
Arkansas Gazette, notice of Clayton resignation, January 28, 1834, p. 3.

“Death of Judge Clayton.” Clarion-Ledger, October 3, 1889, p. 4.

Southwick, Leslie H. “Alexander Clayton (1801–1889) Judge.” Mississippi Encyclopedia. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/alexander-clayton/ (accessed November 8, 2024).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas