Isaac Roberts Hawkins

Isaac Roberts Hawkins (May 16, 1818 – August 12, 1880) was an American soldier, lawyer, and politician who represented Tennessee’s 7th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. He was born on May 16, 1818, near Columbia in Maury County, Tennessee, to Samuel Hawkins and Nancy Roberts Hawkins. His mother, Nancy, was the daughter of General Isaac Roberts and Mary “Polly” Johnston Roberts and the maternal granddaughter of Ann Robertson Johnston Cockrill, an early Tennessee pioneer and sister of James Robertson, a founder of Fort Nashborough, which later became Nashville. Through his father, whose mother was Cassandra Roberts (a sister of General Isaac Roberts), Hawkins was part of a family network deeply rooted in early Tennessee history; his parents, Samuel and Nancy, were first cousins, a not uncommon practice at the time. In 1828 he moved with his parents to Carroll County, Tennessee, settling on land that formed part of a 1790 North Carolina land grant to General Roberts.

Hawkins was educated in the common schools of Carroll County and, like many young men of his region and era, first engaged in agricultural pursuits. He later turned to the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1843. He commenced the practice of law in Huntingdon, the county seat of Carroll County, where he established himself as a local attorney. He married Ellen Ott; her sister Justina Ott married Hawkins’s first cousin Alvin Hawkins, who would later serve as governor of Tennessee, further intertwining Isaac Hawkins with a prominent political family in the state.

During the Mexican–American War, Hawkins served as a lieutenant, gaining his first formal military experience. After the war he resumed his legal practice in Huntingdon. By the late 1850s and early 1860s he had become known as a staunch Unionist in a state deeply divided over secession. In 1861 he was chosen as a delegate from Tennessee to the peace conference held in Washington, D.C., an eleventh-hour effort to devise a means of averting the impending Civil War. He was also elected to the Tennessee convention called for the consideration of federal relations, reflecting his prominence among Unionist leaders in the state.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Hawkins’s legal and political activities were joined by renewed judicial and military service. In 1862 he served as a judge of the circuit court, but that same year he entered the Union Army as lieutenant colonel of the 7th Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry (U.S.). In March 1864 he and his regiment were captured at Union City, Tennessee, and he was held as a prisoner of war until exchanged in August 1864. After his exchange he returned to active duty and was placed in command of the Union cavalry forces in western Kentucky, a post he held until the close of the Civil War. In 1865 Governor William Gannaway Brownlow commissioned him as one of the chancellors of Tennessee, a significant judicial appointment, but Hawkins declined to qualify for the position, choosing instead to continue in political and legal pursuits.

Upon the readmission of Tennessee to representation in Congress after the Civil War, Hawkins was elected as an Unconditional Unionist to the Thirty-ninth Congress and then re-elected as a Republican to the Fortieth and Forty-first Congresses. He thus served three consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from December 4, 1865, to March 3, 1871, representing Tennessee’s 7th congressional district. As a member of the Republican Party during the Reconstruction era, he participated in the legislative process at a critical moment in American history, helping to shape policies affecting the reintegration of the former Confederate states and the rights of newly freed African Americans. During the Forty-first Congress he served as chairman of the House Committee on Mileage, a standing committee responsible for matters relating to the travel expenses of members, and he was also a delegate to the 1868 Republican National Convention, underscoring his role in national party affairs.

After leaving Congress in 1871, Hawkins returned to Huntingdon, Tennessee, where he resumed private life. Although no longer in federal office, his earlier service as a soldier, judge, and legislator had established him as a significant figure in Tennessee’s Unionist and Republican circles during and after the Civil War. He continued to be associated with the community in which he had long lived and practiced law.

Isaac Roberts Hawkins died in Huntingdon, Carroll County, Tennessee, on August 12, 1880, at the age of 62. He was interred in the Hawkins family burial ground near Huntingdon, on land connected with his family since the early settlement period, closing a life that linked Tennessee’s frontier era, the turmoil of civil war, and the challenges of Reconstruction.