Hardeman, Bailey

Born: 1795-02-26 Davidson County, Tennessee

Died: 1836-10-12 Matagorda County, Texas

Born into a politically-prominent southern family, Hardeman managed a shop near Nashville, Tennessee, before earning appointment as deputy sheriff of Williamson County, Tennessee, and later practicing law. He fought under Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, serving as a private before earning promotion to first lieutenant. In 1820, he married Rebecca Wilson. Hardeman moved to Missouri in 1821 and became involved in the Santa Fe trade, which took him into the American southwest, and he returned to Williamson County a wealthy man. After a brief residence in Hardeman County, Tennessee, he moved to Texas in 1835 and joined the independence forces. He represented Matagorda County in the Texas independence convention and ended up one of the drafters of independence declaration and the new constitution. He later served as acting secretary of state and negotiated the Treaty of Velasco in that capacity, ending the Texas Revolution. Hardeman then traveled to Mexico City to ensure ratification. He died of disease that same year.

Gravestone, Texas State Cemetery, Austin, TX; Nicholas P. Hardeman, Wilderness Calling: The Hardeman Family in the American Westward Movement, 1750-1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977); Louis Wiltz Kemp, The Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence (Houston, TX: Anson Jones Press, 1944), 161-66.