In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Appendix Burton Norvell Harrison Burton Harrison had a remarkable father, Jesse Burton Harrison, whose given name confuses readers attracted to either or both men. Moreover, father Jesse was called by his friends and legal associates “Burton,” a further complication. A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, Jesse, as I shall refer to him to distinguish him from his son Burton, had clashed with his own father over his education and, backed strongly by his mother, Burton’s grandmother , had defied his father’s wishes and entered a fine private classical school in Lynchburg rather than a Quaker school back in York County, Virginia , as all the Harrison men seem to have done. Jesse’s wide schooling, nevertheless, enabled him to enter Hampden-Sidney College, from which he graduated in 1821. Hampden-Sidney, although it was regarded at the time as Virginia’s finest college, proved disappointing, and the fiercely independent Jesse determined to go Cambridge, Massachusetts, to enter the law school at Harvard. He did so, completing his legal studies with the distinction of being named an honor scholar in the class of 1825 and earning his LL.B., among the first degrees in law granted at Harvard. Jesse returned to Virginia and was admitted to the state bar at age twenty. He spread his wings. He was a house guest of former president Jefferson, and there at Monticello Jesse became friends with, among others , the diplomat Nicholas P. Trist, Daniel Webster, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, with whom he would correspond from time to time, treating Jefferson as an older friend who displayed an interest not only in his welfare and law practice but also in his ideas. It wasn’t long before Jesse began his long correspondence and most influential friendship with his cousin Henry Clay. They were close. Jesse campaigned for Clay in the presidential election of 1828 against Andrew Jackson, and Jesse, like most Appendix 204 Quakers, held firm, negative views on slavery. Soon he became active in the American Colonization Society, publishing an article in the American Quarterly Review deemed “a powerful and closely reasoned essay” displaying strong Unionist views. After two years of study in Europe and a “residence” at Göttingen, then considered the strongest university in Europe, Jesse settled in New Orleans and was admitted to the New Orleans bar. Fluency in Spanish, French, and German aided him in that city. He became an officer in the Louisiana Historical Society and found time to edit the Louisiana Law Reports and four volumes of Louisiana cases, assisted in the latter task by another exceptional man, his brother-in-law, William Francis Brand (1814–1907), who would develop a strong attachment to Jesse’s son, Burton Norvell. W. F. Brand was an enthusiastic Democrat and, unlike Jesse Harrison, an ardent kinsman and partisan of Andrew Jackson. In the years to come, Parson Brand, as his friends and neighbors called him, would attend the University of Virginia and continue his education in France, returning to New Orleans to practice law with Jesse Harrison, an arrangement that ended only with Jesse’s premature death in 1841. Brand soon changed the direction of his studies and attended classes at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1844 and beginning his ministry at beautiful little St. Mary’s Church near Emmorton, Harford County, Maryland. He would minister there for more than fifty years, having also a school for boys at his place, which he called “Findowry.” “A learned classical scholar, and an authority upon ecclesiastical architecture,” Parson Brand would prove to be a beloved clergymanschoolmaster and a stand-in father to Burton N. Harrison, celebrate his marriage and those of two of his sons. Among the boys attending Parson Brand’s school would be both of Jefferson Davis’s sons. William Francis Brand’s sister Frances married Jesse Burton Harrison, her brother’s law partner, in New Orleans in 1835. Three years later her son Burton Norvell Harrison was born in that city. One of Jesse’s impressions of his thirteen-month-old son was recorded in his ever-present notebook during a visit to Pass Christian, Mississippi. “There he sat,” Jesse wrote, referring to young Burton, “his face between his knees, in the sand, studying mathematics by counting his toes.” He may have been counting birds, too, for all father Jesse knew. Burton’s sons always remembered their father’s love of birds. He would often see in his mind...

Share