Andrew H. Hunter (March 22, 1804 – November 21, 1888) was a Virginia lawyer, slaveholder and politician who served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly. He was the Commonwealth's attorney for Jefferson County, Virginia, who prosecuted John Brown for the raid on Harpers Ferry.
Early life
Hunter was born in 1804 to Col. David Hunter (1761–1829) and his wife, the former Elizabeth Pendleton (1774–1825) in Martinsburg, then in Berkeley County, Virginia, where his father long served as the county clerk. Although he had three brothers, one the Presbyterian clergyman Rev. Moses Hunter of New York, the family had resources sufficient to pay for his education at Washington Academy, now Washington and Jefferson College, further along the National Road in Washington, Pennsylvania, then at Hampden-Sydney College, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1822. He married Elizabeth Ellen Stubblefield (d. 1873) and they had two sons, Henry Clay Hunter (1830-1886)—apparently named for the Kentucky politician Henry Clay—and Andrew Hunter Jr., and seven daughters.
Hunter and slavery
Although he was not a pro-slavery spokesman—that honor belonged to his near-neighbor and author of the new Fugitive Slave Law, Senator James M. Mason—Hunter, like every Virginia politician, was firmly pro-slavery in any public context.
At the time of the 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Hunter owned five slaves: a 36 year old black male, black females aged 35 and 40, and a 6 year old mulatto boy.
A Northern newspaper described Hunter as a "furious advocate of slavery". He declared that the slave trade was "the source of great benefit, not only to the whites in those States, but particularly to the slaves themselves", and declared himself opposed to "sentimental legislation" that suppressed the foreign slave trade. Nevertheless, another newspaper described him as "a warm friend of [abolitionist] Horace Greeley, strange as that may seem."
Career
Attorney, frequently for railroads
Hunter was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1828, and practiced law in what became the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia in his lifetime. His elder brother became a prominent lawyer in Martinsburg, the Berkeley County seat, and Hunter began his practice in Harpers Ferry, then settled in Charles Town (Jefferson County's seat). Beginning in 1840, Andrew Hunter became one of the local attorneys for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), and for many years assisted it, first in acquiring the right of way to lay tracks in the county for the connection at Harper's Ferry, although beginning in 1844 Hunter was also a director of the Winchester & Potomac Railroad Company and represented them in their attempts to be taken over by the B&O as it tried to lay track to Wheeling (then in western Virginia). Hunter was a presidential elector for the Whig party in 1840, but declined nomination for Congress.
Virginia politician
Jefferson County voters elected Hunter as one of their (part-time) representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1846, and he also worked for the B&O while in Richmond, but neither he nor his colleague William B. Thompson won re-election.
In 1850, Jefferson County voters and those from neighboring Berkeley and Clarke Counties elected Hunter to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850, along with Charles J. Faulkner (another local B&O attorney), William Lucas, and Dennis Murphy. Hunter and Lucas were "states' rights" men, although in the South Carolina nullification crisis of 1833, Hunter and Thompson had spoken strongly condemning South Carolina's course.
Hunter was Virginia governor Henry A. Wise's personal attorney.
It has been said that it was the John Brown affair that made Hunter a national figure, but even before John Brown's raid, he was mentioned as a possible presidential candidate: