Henry G. Smith
American judge (1807–1878)
Henry Grattan Smith (June 23, 1807 – December 31, 1878) was a justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court from 1867 to 1870.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 23, 1807, Smith was the son of Moses Smith Jr. and his wife Phoebe L. Adams. He attended Trinity College in Hartford, graduating in 1828. Smith then worked as a private tutor in Maryland before serving as a tutor at the University of North Carolina from 1830 to 1832. He studied law and began to practice in Somerville, Tennessee, before moving to Memphis, Tennessee in about 1842. He became a professor of commercial law at the new University of Memphis in 1846. The university closed after its building was destroyed by fire in 1849, and Smith resumed his private practice.
Smith was one of the judges serving on the highly partisan "apocryphal" court, which was in place in Tennessee between the end of the American Civil War and the enactment of the Constitution of 1870. The justices who served on this court "without exception, were bitter partisans" who "had all been Union men, and...
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