The New International Encyclopædia/Jackson, Howell Edmunds

JACKSON, Howell Edmunds (1832-95). An American jurist, born at Paris, Tenn. He graduated at the University of Virginia in 1854, and at the law department of Cumberland University in 1856, and then began the practice of law in Jackson and Memphis. He was strongly opposed to secession, but went with his State, and after the establishment of the Confederacy was appointed receiver for West Tennessee property confiscated by the new Government. This office left him abundant leisure, which he devoted to the study of law, and at the close of the war he became a member of the Tennessee Court of Referees, a provisional Supreme Court created to hear the cases which had accumulated during the Civil War. In 1880 he was elected to the Tennessee Legislature, and the next year to the United States Senate. Before the expiration of his term he was appointed by the President a judge of the United States Circuit Court, and in 1893 President Harrison appointed him an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. When stricken with fatal illness he forced himself to attend the second hearing of the income-tax law, and his vote would have caused it to become effective had not Justice Shiras (q.v.) reversed his previous decision.