White, Hugh L. (Senator)

Born: 1773-10-30 Iredell County, North Carolina

Died: 1840-04-10 Knoxville, Tennessee

The son of a Revolutionary War veteran, White settled with his family in a part of North Carolina that eventually became part of Tennessee. He fought in the territorial militia against the Cherokee. He studied the classics in Philadelphia, studied law in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, gained admission to the bar in 1796, and began the practice of law in Knoxville, Tennessee. White married Elizabeth Moore Carrick in 1798, and they had twelve children. Elizabeth died in 1831, and White married Ann E. Peyton in 1832. White was a U.S. district attorney, a judge on the Tennessee superior court and supreme court, and served in the Tennessee Senate before his election to the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1825-34 as a Jacksonian. White, a slaveowner, also supported Jackson's Indian Removal policy. He lost favor with the administration, however, and won election to his sixth term in Congress as an Anti-Jacksonian before becoming a Whig Senator from 1837-1840. In 1836, he was a Whig presidential candidate. He finished a very distant third.

Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-2005 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), 2150; Jonathan M. Atkins, "White, Hugh Lawson," American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23:219-20.