Albert Hall Whitfield Biography - Mississippi Genealogy Trails

Albert Hall Whitfield

Courts, Judges, and Lawyers of Mississippi, 1798-1935, By Dunbar Rowland, B.S., LL.B., LL.D., Press of Hederman Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 1935, pgs 121 - 126

Albert Hall Whitfield of Jackson, Mississippi, chief justice of the supreme court of the State of Mississippi, was born October 12, 1849, near Aberdeen, Monroe county, Mississippi. He was the son of Robert Donnell Whitfield and wife, Jane Amanda McMillan. His ancestors came from England in 1679 on the ship “Prosperous”, and settled in Vandemond county, Virginia. The first of the name to settle in America was Matthew Whitfield. The family later removed to the Carolinas. Robert Donnell Whitfield was a native of North Carolina, and on removing from the State was the proprietor of a large country estate near Aberdeen Mississippi, not far from the plantation of Colonel Creed Tayloe Rowland. As time passed, the two families enjoyed much pleasant social intercourse. Robert Donnell Whitfield was educated in the best schools and colleges of the country; was a graduate of Bingham School, North Carolina, and later entered the sophomore class at Yale. He came of the slave-holding aristocracy of the old South and represented its best customs and traditions.

In the deep South the Whitfields prospered, and with their many relatives became influential in the ante-bellum period of the country. Numerous intermarriages of cousins kept a large property lands and slaves in the family and lent to it a haughty significance of exclusiveness like that of so many of the old colonial families whose sons won the American Revolution.

Albert Hall Whitfield was prepared for college by Professor Henry Tutwiler of the famous Green Springs School of Hale County, Alabama. He was too young to take any part in the secession period of the nation’s history, and only to a limited extent was active in the military reconstruction of the South that followed the War Between the States. He entered the University of Mississippi in 1871, and was graduated with first honors, taking the B.A. degree. He was adjunct professor of Greek at the University of Mississippi from 1871 to 1874; also taught Latin, English, and History, taking the degree of A.M. and LL.B., while acting as adjunct professor. After leaving the university he located at Aberdeen for the practice of law, and continued there until 1875-1876. In 1876 Judge Whitfield removed to Grenada for the practice of law and in December of 1876 was married to Miss Isadore Buffaloe, daughter Joseph Monroe Buffaloe, and wife, Marina Kitchens Robbins of Raleigh, North Carolina, and later of Grenada. To them were born five children; Mrs. Chalmers Alexander, Garland Quinche, Mrs. Kate Coffman Hardy, Albert Hall, Jr., and Robert Joseph.

From Grenada Judge Whitfield moved to Oxford, Mississippi, and formed a partnership for the practice of law with W. W. Sullivan, afterwards United States senator from Mississippi. Later, in 1892, Whitfield succeeded Chancellor Edward Mayes as professor of Law at the University of Mississippi. With this thorough preparation, and gifted with a brilliant mentality, he was marked for future promotion in his chosen profession. Although he came in competition with a superior class of men before the mountebank and charlatan had taken possession of the public affairs of the State, it was no surprise when he was appointed associate judge of the supreme court of Mississippi in 1894 by Governor John M. Stone, and reappointed in 1903 by Governor A. H. Longino, and as chief justice of the supreme court from April 1, 1900 to January 14, 1908. In 1910 Chief Justice Whitfield resigned to accept appointment as a member of the supreme court commission. Later he returned to the practice of law in Jackson having for his law partner his young son, Garland Q. Whitfield, who chose his father’s profession an is at present engaged in the practice of law in that city.

Judge Whitfield’s erudition covered a wide range, and during his service on the bench he handed down some of the most important decisions that have ever been made in the history of the court, some of the most notable being: Railroad v. Adams, 77 Miss., 194, which was, on appeal to the supreme court of the United States, unanimously affirmed; Adams v. Colonial Mortgage Co., 82 Miss.; Ballard v. Cotton Oil Co., 81 Miss., 507; Attorney-General v. Powell, 77 Miss., 543; Insurance Co. v. Phelps, 77 Miss., 625; Brahan v. Building and Loan Association, 80 Miss., 807; Millsaps v. Shotwell, 76 Miss., 923; Fire Insurance Co. v. State, 75 Miss., 24, and Morrison v. American Snuff Co., 79 Miss., 330.

In addition to his legal attainments, which were of a highly cultural nature, Judge Whitfield was intensely fond of good literature, both prose and poetry, and was himself a writer of what might be termed a golden flow of rhetoric, more convincing perhaps to the ear and heart than to the purely scientific mind. He was also, a speaker of such fascination and charm that an audience of a like culture sat spellbound under his voice. His oratory, however, did not stem from a genre adapted to the hustings but, like that of Bishop Charles B. Galloway, was more appropriate to those cultural public occasions that aroused and elevate the aspirations of a people, such as the dedication of public buildings, monuments, movements of great historical import, and legal cases were erudition as well as facts were required to move men. He scorned with a merry but stinging satire the cheap form of oratorical speech and gesticulation that were coming into vogue with the new character of public speakers in the South and so generally employed by the vulgar demagogue. With a desire for creative expression that would advance him into the class of authorship he frequently contributed to magazines. One of his most notable efforts was “Should the Philippines be Annexed”, which appeared in January 1903 number of the Cosmopolitan. Inheriting a pronounce sense of superiority-complex he had left nothing undone to make himself worthy of it, and any claim that he made it did not appear incongruous, as in the instance of the pretender and mere claimant. Intellectual, cultured, suave, and polished, and gifted with a ready, somewhat humorous satire, he took high rank with his compeers at that period of the South’s restoration before the public affairs of the State had been dominated by a coarse and vulgar type of public official and an ignorant electorate. Sociable and affable sometime to the point of camaraderie with his intimate, he never descended to a common familiarity and always impressed those about him with a sense of his super-personality. A little vain of his accomplishments he was never to the extent of ignoring the opinion of others, and often read his speeches to men he liked for their criticism. He frequently sought the office of the Director of the State historical department where he discussed the various policies and problems of the State.

Although, strictly speaking, his features were not what the Greek type requires, he was impressive in appearance and what one would call handsome. Of good medium height, rather stockily built, alert and graceful in movement, with a full round, rosy, vivacious face, a soft, silky, brown beard that spread out in a little fan shape, more as an some brilliantly plumaged bird poised for flight. At the age of thirty-five he probably would have suggested a dashing cavalry officer of high rank. But meeting him on the street in the rich zenith of fifty years before any sign of physical decline had touched him, immaculately attired in black with a rose in his lapel, and a roll of documents in his hand that spoke of learned studies and opinions, one felt with a thrill that in this aristocrat of the bar one beheld an apt pupil of the great Blackstone. He head not, as has been stated, on account of his youth, figured in the great historical movement that beset the South and North in the mid-nineteenth century. What a personality like his would have meant to the crises this period produced in the nation’s history is not as easy to conceive of as that summer follows spring; but one can well imagine that with a nature so easily diverted by the pleasant, the best, with a proneness to look out and not in, forward and not backward, he would have emerged from the debacle of war with wings not so badly broken but that he could again “take off”. However, one may be quite sure that he would have taken his stand, and with the trumpeter’s high note, for it is well known that he fretted and fumed a great deal over things, whether of State or society, that he felt were not justified by ethical standards. He was always careful, and somewhat vain of his good-breeding, and even in hated controversy was never uncouth in speech nor demeanor, making much of such value as intellectual honesty, truth, and courtesy. The harshest criticism that he was ever known to make of his fellowman, as the new type of public citizen kept forging to the front Dervishes.” Of such he sometimes spoke impatiently. While he frequently made use of the word “damn” which was more often than otherwise accompanied with a flash of bland humor, he abhorred a coarse, low level of profanity and could never have been sociable and companionable with the up and coming aspirant for social and political position. He took deep and sudden aversions, especially to ambitious, self-seeking, public men whose ethical views did not measure up to their public aspirations. These hasty flashes of indignation, however, were not indulged in to the extent of any permanent injury to his happy conception of life and the intense enjoyment he experienced in living it. He was more than once heard to cry out rather ruefully but with a little chuckle of infectious laughter. “Life is just one damn thing after another.” But with all he found it good and liked it too well to quarrel with it.

He was a member of the First Baptist church of Jackson and was loyal to the church of his ancestors. While not the amen-corner type of church-goer, he was sound in all the essentials of Christianity, and in common with the deep piety prevalent in the South at that period, accepted with a child-like trust the faiths and doctrines of his church.

After a brilliant career in which he had borne himself well in both public and private life he retired to his library to happily browse among his books. It was not long after his retirement that he died. His career had much in it of personal triumph, but it gave assurance to the world at large that the South, Phenix-like, had sprung from its ashes. Judge Whitfield died November 12, 1918. His portrait adorns Mississippi’s Hall of Fame.