Biographical Background

  Born in Huntsville, Alabama December 28, 1814, Jeremiah Clemens graduated from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in 1833; studied law at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky; was admitted to the bar in 1834 and practiced in Huntsville. He was appointed United States district attorney for the northern district of Alabama in 1838; member, state House of Representatives 1839-1841; raised a company of riflemen in 1842 and served in the Texas War of Independence; member, state House of Representatives 1843-1844; served in the United States Army during the Mexican War where he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was an unsuccessful candidate for election in 1848 to the Thirty-first Congress of the United States. He was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Dixon H. Lewis and served from November 30, 1849 to March 3, 1853.

  He moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1858 and became editor of the Memphis Eagle and Enquirer in 1859. He returned to Alabama and served as a delegate to the convention in 1861 in which Alabama voted to secede from the Union. He voted in opposition.

  As a novelist, Union loyalist Jeremiah Clemens was a relative of Mark Twain’s. The anti-Confederate Tobias Wilson: A Tale of the Great Rebellion (1865) was one of the first Civil War novels to appear in print. He died May 19, 1865 and was intered at Maple Hill Cemetery, Huntsville, Alabama.

Letter to President Abraham Lincoln

  In 1865, Jeremiah Clemens wrote the following letter to President Abraham Lincoln. It is among the presidential papers of Abraham Lincoln at the Library of Congress.