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Senate Years of Service: 1847-1861 Party: Democrat
HUNTER, Robert Mercer Taliaferro, a Representative and a Senator from Virginia; born at Mount
Pleasant, near Loretto, Essex County, Va., April 21, 1809; tutored at home;
graduated from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1828; studied
law; admitted to the bar in 1830 and commenced practice at Lloyds; member,
State general assembly 1834-1837; elected as a States-Rights Whig to the
Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-seventh Congresses (March 4, 1837-March
3, 1843); Speaker of the House of Representatives in the Twenty-sixth Congress;
unsuccessful candidate for reelection to the Twenty-eighth Congress; elected to
the Twenty-ninth Congress (March 4, 1845-March 3, 1847); chairman, Committee on
the District of Columbia (Twenty-ninth Congress); elected to the United States
Senate in 1846; reelected in 1852 and 1858 and served from March 4, 1847, to
March 28, 1861, when he withdrew; expelled from the Senate on July 11, 1861,
for support of the rebellion; chairman, Committee on Public Buildings
(Thirtieth through Thirty-second Congresses), Committee on Finance
(Thirty-first through Thirty-sixth Congresses); delegate from Virginia to the
Confederate Provincial Congress at Richmond; Confederate Secretary of State
1861-1862; served in the Confederate Senate from Virginia in the First and
Second Congresses 1862-1865 and was President pro tempore on various occasions;
was one of the peace commissioners that met with President Abraham Lincoln in
Hampton Roads in February 1865; briefly imprisoned at the end of the Civil War;
State treasurer of Virginia 1874-1880; collector for the port of Tappahannock,
Va. 1885; died on his estate Fonthill, near Lloyds, Va., on July 18, 1887;
interment in Elmwood, the family burial ground, near Loretto, Va.
BibliographyDictionary of American Biography; Fisher, John
E. Statesman of a Lost Cause: The Career of R.M.T. Hunter, 1859-1887. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Virginia, 1966; Moore, Richard Randall, Robert
M.T. Hunter and the Crisis of the Union, 1860-1861.
Southern Historian 13 (Spring 1992): 25-35.
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