Table of Contents Judge Harry Toulmin ..............................................................................3 The Blockhouse at Fort Mims ................................................................18 Marietta Johnson’s Organic School of Education....................................19 The Fairhope “People’s Railroad” ..........................................................21 JUDGE HARRY TOULMIN 1766 to 1823 Prepared at the request of the Baldwin County Historical Society by Harry T Toulmin Daphne, Alabama December 1976 Submitted by Joe Baroco Table of Contents Introduction Parentage and Early Years Virginia and Kentucky Judge of the Tombigbee District The West Florida Controversy The Fort Mims Massacre Mississippi and Alabama Statehood Last Years Appendix A Bibliography B The Children of Judge Harry Toulmin Introduction Judge Harry Toulmin was born in Taunton, England on April 7, 1766, and died at Washington Courthouse (1), Alabama on November 11, 1823. The vast Tombigbee District of the Mississippi Territory (later the Alabama Territory) where he served as federal judge included Baldwin County (2). The seat of justice where first held court was at McIntosh Bluff, and in 1809 this courthouse became the first seat of government of Baldwin County. Harry Toulmin also was a delegate from Baldwin County to the 1819 Alabama State Constitutional Convention. For these reasons his life is of interest to the Baldwin County Historical Society. Parentage and Early Years Harry Toulmin was the eldest child of the Reverend Joshua Toulmin and Jane (Smith) Toulmin. These were people of considerable erudition, numbering among their friends the noted Joseph Priestly and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Joshua Toulmin was a dissenting minister but was also a prolific historian and biographer. One of his more notable biographies was Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Faustus Socinus - Socinus having formulated the doctrinal bases of Unitarianism. Joshua Toulmin was also politically sympathetic to both the American and French Revolutions. During the excitement of the latter, which began in 1789, an effigy of Thomas paine was burned before his door in Taunton. Although Joshua Toulmin never came to America himself, he was awarded a diploma by Brown University in 1769 and a degree of Doctor of Divinity by Harvard in 1794. To supplement his meager earnings as pastor, Dr Toulmin kept a school at the church meeting house Page 3 in Taunton, and his wife carried on a booksellers shop nearby. Most of the education of Harry Toulmin was secured in his father’s school and in his mother’s book store. During this early period Harry Toulmin met Joseph Priestly and impressed the philosopher-scientist. “ I am pleased with your son”, he wrote to Joshua Toulmin in 1782, “and I wish you every satisfaction in his improvement and conduct.” Harry Toulmin’s only more formal education was secured at Hoxton Academy which he attended for a brief time before entering the Unitarian ministry at Monton, Lancashire, in 1786. Between 1786 and 1792, in Monton and Chowbent, Harry Toulmin preached to large congregations. While his liberal political views and religious teachings were favorably received by many, they aroused disapproval among partisans of the established church and monarchy. Influenced by these adverse feelings and by the violent reactions they prompted, Harry Toulmin began to contemplate emigration. In 1792 it was agreed with some of his parishioners that he should go to America and that in doing so he would gather information about the new country and report it back to them and to his other friends in Lancashire. Virginia and Kentucky On May 14, 1793, with his wife and four small children, Harry Toulmin sailed from Bristol on the American ship “SISTERS” bound for Norfolk. They arrived there on July 20. True to his promise Harry Toulmin both kept a journal and wrote letters back to England relative to his early travels, life, and observations in America. Many of these letters were reprinted contemporaneously in The Monthly Magazine of London. Early portions of his journal were sent back to England too, but there they became widely dispersed. A copy survived in the United States, however, and was published 155 years later ( in 1948 ) by The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Even now The Western Country in 1793, Reports on Kentucky and Virginia provides discursive and detailed background data for Virginia and Kentucky historians. Upon his arrival in America, Toulmin wasted little time in getting his family settled ( at Winchester, Virginia ) and beginning his exploratory travels. His first such journey, in the summer of 1793, was to the valley of the Shenandoah and elsewhere in Virginia. During the fall of that year he visited Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the following winter he spent in Kentucky. During his stay in Virginia he became personally acquainted with James Madison, and when he went to Kentucky he was preceded by a letter from Madison to John Breckinridge enlisting his assistance on Toulmin’s behalf. The year before ( 1792 ) Breckinridge had felt the opportunity and call of Kentucky so strongly that he had given up his position in Congress ( to which he had just been elected from Virginia ) in order to settle near Lexington, Kentucky. Thomas Jefferson, also, wrote a letter of introduction for Toulmin to be hand-carried to Breckinridge. Arrived in Lexington, Toulmin first issued a prospectus for a private school, but soon thereafter, on February 5, 1794, the Board of Trustees of Transylvania College - which included John Breckinridge, - met and voted Harry Toulmin to become the second president of that institution. His succession to that office was to occur the following fall, on October 9, 1794. Prior to that in the spring of 1794,Toulmin journeyed to Philadelphia to visit friends, including Dr. Joseph Priestley’s three sons who had recently arrived from England. Dr. Priestley himself was soon to arrive in America. As Toulmin noted in a letter dated April 29, 1794, from Philadelphia back to James Breckinridge in Lexington, Kentucky: “He ( Joseph Priestley, Jr. ) heard today from his father that he is packing up. Sixty of the Scotch Convention arrived. The persecutions in England are beyond example. ( King ) George, it seems, is mad again.” Toulmin’s election to the presidency of Transylvania College was not completely orthodox or without dissent. There was already an incumbent president and although he had had a troubled administration with a declining enrollment and curriculum, he had not actually resigned. At the February 1794 meeting of the Board of Directors it was summarily moved that the Board ballet for the presidency. The motion carried and in the balloting, according to the record, “there appeared a majority of votes in Page 4 favor of Mr. Harry Toulmin.” The vote was 8 to 5. The minority desired that it be entered on the record that the election was premature, “being about eight months before a vacancy . and that it does not appear that the present teacher is not of good behavior or well qualified.”The election stood, but the Presbyterians on the Board thought Toulmin’s religious views to be “tainted with Socinian errors”. The leader of the opposition , a minister, “resigned his seat and with great warmth predicted the downfall of the institution and charged the Board with committing the management of it into the hands of an infidel.” The other minority members likewise withdrew and together they established a separate school. Toulmin served at Transylvania in Lexington for only two years, but during his term enrollment increased from six to thirty students, a school library was established, and the curriculum was expanded to include Greek, Latin, French, bookkeeping, astronomy, composition, elocution, geography, geometry, history, logic, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and politics - fourteen subjects in all. In April 1796 Toulmin resigned from Transylvania, stating low salary and impermanence of the position as the reasons. A few weeks later he was appointed Secretary of State of Kentucky by Governor James Garrard, a Jeffersonian Republican of some prominence. Toulmin accepted the new position with pleasure and moved to Frankfort, the state capital. Not a post of excessive challenge, the position of Secretary of State still required a steadiness and attention to detail consonant with his former positions as pastor and educator. As Secretary of State he signed the famed Kentucky Resolutions in 1798, and many supposed the young English liberal instrumental in the agitation which generated them. The Resolutions were actually written by Thomas Jefferson, with the advice of John Breckinridge. They were passed by the Kentucky General Assembly in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the U. S. Congress and stated that the federal government had no powers not specifically delegated to it by the U. S. Constitution. They, and the parallel Virginia resolutions, were later considered the first notable statement of states’ rights theory. During this political interlude as Secretary of State, Toulmin busied himself in his spare hours with remunerative efforts which ranged from selling sets of Blackstone’s Commentaries to breeding racehorses. One major outside interest stood him in in good stead during his later years. He began to study and research extensively, first the laws of the State of Kentucky, and later in the laws of the new United States. During and immediately following the last years of his Kentucky residence he published several major works on Kentucky and American law. One of these, prepared with James Blair, was A Review of the Criminal Law of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, ( 2vols., 1804-06 ); it received high praise from a rising young politician named Henry Clay and was designated the standard work of criminal law in Kentucky. He also compiled A Collection of the Permanent and Public Acts of the General Assembly of Kentucky ( 1802 ), and prepared The American Attorney’s Pocket Book ( 1807 ) and The Magistrates’ Assistant ( 1801 and following ). As the second term of Governor Garrard drew to a close in 1804, the termination of Toulmin’s own tenure as Secretary of State also became apparent.