Rep. Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart, Sr.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_H._H._Stuart

Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart (April 2, 1807 – February 13, 1891) was a U.S. political figure. Stuart served as the Secretary of the Interior between 1850 and 1853.

Early years

Stuart was born in Staunton, Virginia, to judge Archibald Stuart, a third-generation American of Scots-Irish origin and his wife Eleanor (nee Briscoe), of distant English ancestry.

Stuart attended the College of William and Mary and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Stuart then studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1828.

Political career

Stuart was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from 1836 to 1839 and then elected as a Whig to the 27th Congress. Stuart lost the election to the 28th Congress.

From 1850, Stuart served as United States Secretary of the Interior under Millard Fillmore for three years. The department had a culture of political patronage. Stuart didn't change this, but at least gave rules and standards to the political appointments and removed some of the administrative chaos inherent with patronage.

Stuart then served in the Virginia Senate from 1857 through 1861 and was a member of the Virginia state secession convention in 1861. As the Confederacy was established and the United States divided into two hostile camps, both sides moved steadily toward open conflict. A special delegation, composed of Stuart, William B. Preston and George W. Randolph, travelled to Washington, D.C. where they met President Abraham Lincoln on April 12. Finding the President firm in his resolve to hold the Federal forts then in the South, the three men returned to Richmond, Virginia on April 15. Stuart was a delegate to the National Convention of Conservatives at Philadelphia in 1866, and Stuart presented credentials as a Member-elect to the 39th Congress in 1865 but was not admitted.

Stuart was chairman of the Committee of Nine, which was instrumental in restoring Virginia to the Union in 1870, and was again a member of the Virginia General Assembly from 1874 to 1877.

Stuart served as rector of the University of Virginia from 1874 to 1882 and also as president of the Virginia Historical Society, as well as continuing with the practice of law. Stuart died in his hometown of Staunton in 1891 and is buried there at Thornrose Cemetery. Prior to his death, Stuart had been the last surviving member of the Fillmore Cabinet.

Family

Father: Judge Archibald Stuart, Born March 19, 1757, Died July 11, 1832

Mother: Eleanor Briscoe (1768–1858)

Stuart had three brothers, Thomas Jefferson Stuart (born 1793), Archibald P. Stuart (born 1800), and Gerard Briscoe Stuart (born 1805).

Stuart was the first cousin of congressman Archibald Stuart, whose son was Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, making him his first cousin, once removed.

Stuart married Frances Cornelia Baldwin (1815–1888), and with her had 8 children: Briscoe Baldwin Stuart (1837–1859), Alexander H. H. Stuart Jr. (1846–1867), Archibald Gerard Stuart (1858–1888), Eleanor Augusta Stuart (1838–1878), Frances Peyton Stuart (born 1842), Mary Stuart (born 1844), Susan Baldwin Stuart (1848–1867), and Margaret Briscoe Stuart (1855–1932).

U.S. Congressman, Presidential Cabinet Member. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1828, studied law, was admitted to the bar and commenced to practice law in Staunton, Virginia. He was a member of the Virginia State House of Delegates, (1836-39) and elected as a Whig to the Twenty-seventh Congress, serving (1841-43). An unsuccessful candidate for reelection, he served as Secretary of the Interior in the Cabinet of President Fillmore, (1850-53). He was a member of the Virginia State Senate (1857-61) and with the advent of the Civil War, he was a member of the Virginia State secession convention in 1861. After the war, he was instrumental in restoring Virginia to the Union in 1870 and a member of the Virginia State House of Delegates, (1874-77). From 1882, until his death, he was a rector of the University of Virginia and president of the Virginia Historical Society.* Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Mar 6 2020, 1:28:11 UTC

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https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Stuart_Alexander_H_H_1807-1891

Alexander H. H. Stuart was a member of the House of Delegates (1836–1839, 1873–1877) and the U.S. House of Representatives (1841–1843), secretary of the interior in the administration of Millard Fillmore (1850–1853), a member of the Senate of Virginia (1857–1861) and the Convention of 1861, and a principal member of the Committee of Nine, which negotiated with the federal government for an end to Reconstruction in Virginia in 1869. Born in Staunton, he studied law at the University of Virginia before going into politics. In the General Assembly and then Congress, Stuart was a typical Whig in his support of internal improvements and his moderation on the issue of slavery. After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, he helped pen a government report condemning Northern abolitionist agitation. Stuart voted against secession in 1861 but signed the Ordinance of Secession. Stuart did not serve in government or the military during the American Civil War (1861–1865), but in 1867, amidst controversy over a new state constitution, he helped to form the Conservative Party. He and eight other men, the so-called Committee of Nine, successfully negotiated a plan with the federal government to present an acceptable constitution to Virginia voters and so end Reconstruction in the state. He also served as rector of the University of Virginia (1876–1882, 1886­–1887) and president of the Virginia Historical Society (1881–1891). He died in 1891.

Early Years

Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart was born on April 2, 1807, in Staunton and was the son of Eleanor Briscoe Stuart and Archibald Stuart, a former member of both houses of the General Assembly, delegate to the Convention of 1788, and judge of the General Court. After attending the College of William and Mary and studying law under John Tayloe Lomax at the University of Virginia, Alexander Stuart began to practice law in his native city in 1828. On August 1, 1833, he married a cousin, Frances Cornelia Baldwin. They had six daughters and three sons.

Active in politics at an early age, Stuart attended the Convention of National Republican Young Men in Washington, D.C., in May 1832 and a state convention in Staunton in July, both in support of Henry Clay's unsuccessful presidential campaign. In essence, Stuart was a Whig all his life, from before the founding of the party until long after its demise. In 1836 he won election as a Whig to the first of three consecutive one-year terms in the House of Delegates. He was one of two members representing Augusta County and served on the Committee for Courts of Justice. Stuart was especially interested in the improvement of commercial transportation networks and in January 1838 drafted a report for the Committee on Roads and Internal Navigation (of which he was not a member) proposing a $5 million plan to build canals, roads, and railroads in western Virginia and to improve navigation of the James River. Political friction between eastern and western politicians and between Democrats and Whigs doomed the proposal. In February 1838 Stuart spoke at length against a successful motion to set aside the committee's plan. He had his speech printed as a twenty-three-page pamphlet and received a low-ranking seat on the Committee on Roads and Internal Navigation the following year, but he was unable to revive the project.

Congress and the Cabinet

In April 1841 Stuart defeated Democrat James McDowell (a future governor and congressman) for the seat in the House of Representatives from the district consisting of the counties of Alleghany, Augusta, Botetourt, Floyd, Montgomery, Roanoke, and Rockbridge. In the Twenty-Seventh Congress, which met in three sessions from May 31, 1841, through March 3, 1843, Stuart served on the Committee on Expenditures in the Navy Department, and in February 1842 was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Committee on Foreign Affairs. At the opening of the first session Representative John Quincy Adams, the former president, renewed his campaign to rescind a rule of the House not to receive petitions against slavery. Stuart firmly believed in the right of citizens to petition Congress and was one of the few southern representatives who supported Adams. Stuart introduced the resolution that ultimately broke the deadlock that Adams's motion to amend the rules had created.

The growing sectional divide about slavery and the division of the Whig Party following the death of President William Henry Harrison, which made Virginian John Tyler president, impaired the efforts of Stuart and other Whigs to employ the resources of the national government to stimulate economic development. Stuart strongly criticized Tyler's opposition to a bill to create a national fiscal bank, and he supported a tariff to protect American and Virginian manufacturers. In 1843 Democrat William Taylor defeated Stuart when he ran for reelection.

Stuart continued to practice law in Staunton and remained active in Whig Party politics. As a result of his one term in Congress he was well known to many national politicians and in 1844 accepted an invitation to make an address that he entitled "The Rights, Duties and Responsibilities of the Working Men of America" at the American Institute of the City of New York. Stuart was a candidate for presidential elector on the unsuccessful Whig ticket in 1844 and the successful Whig ticket in 1848.

In September 1850 Stuart accepted appointment as secretary of the interior in the administration of Millard Fillmore. The Department of the Interior had been established in 1849 and consolidated the work of the General Land Office, the Office of Indian Affairs, and the Patent Office. Stuart was the new department's third secretary in less than two years, and it fell to him to organize the bureaucracy. He also oversaw the initial work of the department's Mexican Boundary Commission that between 1850 and 1857 settled the boundary between the United States and Mexico. His tenure concluded with the end of Fillmore's term on March 4, 1853.

John Brown's Raid and Secession

Stuart declined the Whig Party's nomination to the Senate of Virginia that year. The national party disintegrated following the 1852 presidential election. Like many, but not all, Virginia Whigs, Stuart turned to the new American (Know Nothing) Party and hoped it would pursue the Whigs' economic development policies. Know Nothings often exhibited nativism and religious prejudice and some of its northern supporters also opposed slavery. Virginia's Democrats, hoping to win the votes of proslavery former Whigs, denounced the party during the 1855 gubernatorial election and even sought to portray the state's Know Nothings as secret opponents of slavery. In the spring of 1856, after Democratic governor Henry A. Wise continued his criticism of the Know Nothings, Stuart replied with a series of twelve long letters published in the Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser and as a pamphlet, Twelve Letters over the Signature of "Madison," on the American Question. Written by a Distinguished Virginian. Refraining from endorsing or opposing slavery, Stuart praised the American Party's proposals to deny some immigrants rights he believed should belong exclusively to native-born Americans.

In 1857 Stuart won election to a four-year term in the Senate of Virginia to represent Augusta County. Following John Brown's failed attempt to seize the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, the General Assembly created a large joint committee to investigate the incident. Stuart was the senior senator on the committee. Its report condemned the raid as the product of Northern abolitionist agitation and recommended three main responses: strengthening local militia units, encouraging Virginia's domestic manufacturing, and achieving commercial independence from the North. Some of the report's arguments about the history and constitutionality of slavery and about Southern economic independence closely resembled Stuart's known opinions.

Between the raid on Harpers Ferry and his appointment to the investigating committee, Stuart addressed the Central Agricultural Society of Virginia and advocated industrial and commercial development of Virginia as in the best interest of Southern agricultural prosperity. He indicated that he fully accepted slavery as an integral part of Virginia and Southern agriculture and believed that it also benefited the Northern economy. He feared that emancipation would result in devastating violence. Stuart owned nine enslaved people in 1860.

In the presidential election of 1860 Stuart supported the Constitutional Union Party's candidate, John Bell, a former Whig congressman and Know Nothing senator from Tennessee who narrowly won Virginia's electoral votes. The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln led seven lower South slave states to secede early in the winter of 1860–1861. On February 4, 1861, Augusta County voters elected Stuart, John Brown Baldwin (Stuart's brother-in-law), and George Baylor to represent the county in the state convention that met beginning on February 13 to deal with the secession crisis. All three men opposed secession. Appointed to the important Committee on Federal Relations, Stuart declined to serve on the grounds that he was still a member of the Senate of Virginia and would not neglect the duties of one appointment in order to fulfill the duties of another. Stuart voted against secession on April 4 when the motion failed by a two-to-one margin.

Four days later the convention directed Stuart and two other delegates to go to Washington to ask Lincoln about his plans for Fort Sumter. By the time they saw the president on April 13, the fort had surrendered, and Lincoln informed them that he planned to retake the fort and all other property of the federal government. Lincoln's subsequent call for 75,000 militia, including men from Virginia, to put down the rebellion tipped the scales in the Virginia convention. On April 17 the convention voted 88 to 55 to submit an ordinance of secession to the voters for ratification. Stuart, Baldwin, and Baylor all voted against secession, but they remained loyal to Virginia and on June 14, at the second session of the convention, they signed the ceremonial copy of the ordinance.

At Stuart's suggestion, on May 1, the last day of the convention's first session, the president appointed a seven-member committee, with Stuart as chair, to prepare amendments to the state constitution. References to the United States needed to be changed to refer to the Confederate States after the convention ratified the constitution of the new confederacy; but Stuart's committee, probably at his prompting, suggested several other important changes to the Constitution of 1851, which he condemned as too democratic. In his speech when introducing the proposals, Stuart blamed unrestrained democratic practices in free states for Lincoln's election and the resulting Civil War. He also criticized free public schools in the North as dangerous. The committee recommended restricting the suffrage to adult white men who paid taxes, and a minority of the committee, almost certainly including Stuart, wished to restore to the assembly authority to elect the governor, reversing an 1851 reform that for the first time had allowed Virginia's voters to elect governors. The committee also suggested restructuring the state's court system and removing the voters' rights to elect judges and other court officials. The convention accepted some of the committee's recommendations and submitted a revised constitution to the voters, who in a referendum on March 13, 1862, rejected it.

Civil War and Reconstruction

Stuart held no public office in the government of Virginia or the Confederacy during the Civil War, but he made public speeches in support of relief efforts for soldiers. In March 1864 he declined an appointment to travel to Canada to support Confederate efforts aimed at securing an advantageous peace agreement with the United States. On May 8, 1865, a month after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Stuart chaired a mass meeting in Staunton, where resolutions were adopted to inform the U.S. Army that opposition to the federal government no longer existed in Augusta County and to ask the army's protection for the people. He took oaths of allegiance to the United States and to the loyal government of Virginia as required by the General Assembly to be qualified to vote that autumn, and on October 12, he easily won election to the House of Representatives. The radical Republican majority in Congress refused to seat legislators from Virginia and other former Confederate states, however.

In June 1866 in a commencement address at the University of Virginia, Stuart lamented the end of old Virginia. In March 1867 when radical Republicans enjoyed majorities in both houses, Congress placed Virginia and most of the other former Confederate states under military rule and ordered them to write new state constitutions. Congress allowed African American men to vote in the election of delegates and be eligible to serve in the conventions. The delegates elected in October 1867 for the convention that met in Richmond from December 3 through the following April 17 included numerous men of northern birth, native white Virginians who had remained loyal to the United States during the Civil War, and two dozen African Americans, some of whom had been enslaved as recently as two or three years earlier. The radical agendas of Congress and of the convention led numerous respected prewar political leaders, many of them former Whigs, to form an opposition party. Stuart presided over the founding meeting of the Conservative Party in Richmond on December 11, 1867.

The constitution the convention adopted in April 1868 made numerous important changes in Virginia's government. It reformed local government on more democratic lines, created the state's first free public school system, and guaranteed all adult men the right to vote except former Confederate officers, soldiers, and most officeholders. Because the constitution allowed only men who were eligible to vote to serve on juries, it also excluded a large proportion of white Virginia men from jury service.

For a variety of reasons the army put off holding the necessary referendum to ratify the constitution and the general election scheduled for 1868. In the meantime the state Republican Party nominated three radicals for statewide office. Alarmed at the political prospect and opposed to many features of the proposed constitution, Stuart published a letter signed Senex in the Richmond Daily Dispatch on December 25, 1868, and recommended that a delegation of Conservatives write an alternative constitution to submit to Congress. On January 1, 1869, Conservatives appointed a nine-member committee to negotiate with congressional leaders and seek support from prominent northerners in and out of government. Stuart chaired the committee that, like the Conservative Party's leadership, included mostly Whigs. Later that month, members of the Committee of Nine testified before the Reconstruction committee of the House of Representatives and the Judiciary committee of the Senate, met individually with many members, and conferred with President-elect Ulysses S. Grant. They reached an agreement to allow the ratification referendum to take place on July 6, 1869, when the voters could separately decide whether the disfranchisement clauses would be ratified or rejected. The voters then ratified the constitution and rejected disfranchisement of former Confederates. That preserved the right to vote for African American men and the other democratic reforms in the constitution. The following January Congress gave its formal approval and seated senators and representatives from the state, bringing Reconstruction in Virginia to an end.

Later Years

Stuart never regained the statewide public attention he had received as leader of the Committee of Nine. In 1873 Augusta County voters elected him to one of its three seats in the House of Delegates. He was appointed chair of the important Committee on Finance. The most important issue the assembly then faced was how to pay the antebellum public debt that had been created to finance road, railroad, and canal construction. Some legislators, later known as Readjusters, wished to refinance the debt at a lower rate of interest or even repudiate part of the principal in order to fund the new public school system. Others, later called Funders, believed in paying the full principal and interest. Stuart identified with the Funders but was willing to allocate money for the schools. He had changed his mind about public education and believed that universal manhood suffrage under the new state constitution required educated citizens. Stuart won reelection in 1875, but resigned when the result was contested. In a special election in January 1876 he again won election and resumed his seat as chair of the Finance committee. When he retired from politics in 1877 the problems of the debt and paying for the schools had grown worse rather than better and political divisions about the debt grew wider.

Stuart was rector of the University of Virginia from 1876 to 1882 (when Funders forced out all the university's officers) and again from 1886 (after the Readjusters had dissolved as a political party) to 1887, first president of the board of the Virginia Institution for the Education of the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, in Staunton from 1839 to 1851, a trustee of the Peabody Education Fund from 1871 to 1889, and president of the Virginia Historical Society from 1881 until his death. In 1888 at the Virginia Historical Society's request he published a small book containing texts of many of the important documents associated with the Committee of Nine. Stuart died at his Staunton home on February 13, 1891, and was buried next to his wife, who had died on November 16, 1885, in Thornrose Cemetery in that city. The Department of the Interior observed a thirty-day period of mourning, and many Virginia newspapers noted his passing as the end of an era.

Time Line

April 2, 1807 - Alexander H. H. Stuart is born in Staunton.

1828 - Alexander H. H. Stuart begins to practice law in Staunton.

May 1832 - Alexander H. H. Stuart attends the Convention of Republican Young Men in Washington, D.C.

August 1, 1833 - Alexander H. H. Stuart and his cousin Frances Cornelia Baldwin marry.

1836–1839 - Alexander H. H. Stuart represents Augusta County in the House of Delegates.

1839–1851 - Alexander H. H. Stuart serves as the first president of the board of the Virginia Institution for the Education of the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, in Staunton.

May 31, 1841–March 3, 1843 - Alexander H. H. Stuart serves in the U.S. House of Representatives.

1844 - Alexander H. H. Stuart delivers a speech on the "Working Men of America" at the American Institute of the City of New York.

September 1850–March 4, 1853 - Alexander H. H. Stuart serves as secretary of the interior in the administration of Millard Fillmore.

1856 - Alexander H. H. Stuart publishes Twelve Letters over the Signature of "Madison," on the American Question, which defends the American Party's anti-immigrant policy proposals.

1857–1861 - Alexander H. H. Stuart represents Augusta County in the Senate of Virginia.

February 4, 1861 - John Brown Baldwin, Alexander H. H. Stuart, and George Baylor, all Unionists, are elected to represent Augusta County in the convention called to discuss the possibility of secession.

April 13, 1861 - George Wythe Randolph, William B. Preston, and Alexander H. H. Stuart meet with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the secession crisis. Lincoln vows to meet force with force and soon after, Virginia secedes.

April 17, 1861 - John Brown Baldwin, Alexander H. H. Stuart, and George Baylor all vote against secession but the motion wins 88 to 55. They later sign the Ordinance of Secession.

May 1, 1861 - The Virginia Convention appoints a seven-member committee, chaired by Alexander H. H. Stuart, to prepare amendments to the state constitution.

March 13, 1862 - Virginia voters reject recommended changes to the state constitution.

May 8, 1865 - Alexander H. H. Stuart chairs a mass meeting in Staunton convened to inform the U.S. Army that the county no longer resisted the federal government.

October 12, 1865 - Alexander H. H. Stuart is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but the body will not seat legislators from the former Confederacy.

June 1866 - Alexander H. H. Stuart delivers a commencement address at the University of Virginia lamenting the end of old Virginia.

March 1867 - Amid mounting pressure from Radical Republicans, the U.S. Congress places Virginia under the military command of General John M. Schofield.

December 3, 1867–April 17, 1868 - Delegates, including many African Americans, meet in Richmond for the constitutional convention, chaired by John C. Underwood. African American men were able to vote for delegates to the convention, and many white men refused to vote in protest.

December 11–12, 1867 - Convening in Richmond, a group of former Democrats, former Whigs, and moderate Republicans, led by Alexander H. H. Stuart, forms the Conservative Party.

December 25, 1868 - Alexander H. H. Stuart writes a letter to the Richmond Daily Dispatch recommending that Conservatives submit an alternative constitution to Congress.

January 1, 1869 - Conservatives appoint the so-called Committee of Nine, led by Alexander H. H. Stuart, to seek support in Congress and from President Ulysses S. Grant for an alternative state constitution.

July 6, 1869 - Voters ratify a new state constitution, often called the Underwood Constitution, rejecting separate provisions that would have disfranchised men who had held civil or military office under the Confederacy. The new constitution supplants the former one, proclaimed on April 7, 1864.

1871–1889 - Alexander H. H. Stuart serves as a trustee of the Peabody Education Fund.

1873–1877 - Alexander H. H. Stuart represents Augusta County in the House of Delegates.

1876–1882 - Alexander H. H. Stuart serves as rector of the University of Virginia.

1881–1891 - Alexander H. H. Stuart serves as president of the Virginia Historical Society.

November 16, 1885 - Frances Baldwin Stuart, the wife of Alexander H. H. Stuart, dies in Staunton. She is buried in Thornrose Cemetery.

1886–1887 - Alexander H. H. Stuart serves as rector of the University of Virginia.

February 13, 1891 - Alexander H. H. Stuart dies at his home in Staunton. He is buried in Thornrose Cemetery.

Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart was a prominent Virginia lawyer and American political figure associated with several political parties. Stuart served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly (1836-1838, 1857-1861 and 1874-1877), as a U.S. Congressman (1841-1843), and as the Secretary of the Interior (1850 - 1853). Despite opposing Virginia's secession and holding no office after finishing his term in the Virginia Senate during the American Civil War, after the war he was denied a seat in Congress. Stuart led the Committee of Nine, which attempted to reverse the changes brought by Reconstruction. He also served as rector of the University of Virginia.

Stuart was born in Staunton, Virginia, one of three sons of judge Archibald Stuart, a protege of Thomas Jefferson and third-generation American of Scots-Irish origin and his wife Eleanor (nee Briscoe), of distant English ancestry.

After education by private tutors, Stuart attended the College of William and Mary. He studied law under John Tayloe Lomax and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville before marrying his cousin Frances Cornelia Baldwin in 1833. They had six daughters and three sons, as discussed in the family section below.

Stuart was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1828 and soon became active in the National Republican Party. He supported the unsuccessful campaign of Henry Clay in the 1832 U.S. Presidential Election.

Augusta County voters first elected Stuart as one of two men representing them in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1836. Re-elected twice as a Whig to what were then single-year terms (and a position which is still part-time), Stuart served on the Committee for Courts of Justice and also advocated internal improvements (the James River Canal as well as railroads). Although recommendations in his critical report concerning deficiencies in such improvements were not adopted, during 1838 Stuart became a junior member of the Committee on Roads and Internal Navigation.

In 1840 Stuart won election as a Whig to the 27th Congress, as the incumbent Jacksonian Democrat Robert Craig declined to run for re-election. He defeated Democrat and future Virginia governor James McDowell in that election. Stuart served on the committee concerning the Navy Department, and beginning in February 1842 on the Committee on Foreign Affairs. He was one of only two Southern representatives to support former President John Quincy Adams when Adams proposed to end the rule forbidding petitions against slavery. After President William Henry Harrison's death, Stuart criticized the new President, fellow Virginian John Tyler for opposing a new national bank, and also supported a tariff to protect American (and Virginia) manufacturers. In 1843, post-census redistricting combined his district with Virginia's 11th congressional district held by John Minor Botts; Democrat William Taylor defeated Stuart and won election to the 28th Congress. However, Stuart continued politically active, serving as a presidential elector for the Whig ticket in both 1844 (when it lost) and 1848 (when it won).

Stuart also resumed his legal practice full time. Beginning in 1849, he was one of the attorneys defending the new Wheeling Suspension Bridge, following a lawsuit in the United States Supreme Court brought by Edwin M. Stanton and Cornelius Darragh on behalf of the State of Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania interests that complained about obstruction of the Ohio River.

From 1850, Stuart served as United States Secretary of the Interior under new President Millard Fillmore for three years. That Department had been founded on the suggestion of one of his fellow counsel in the Wheeling Bridge case, and neither of his predecessors had lasted long. The department which consolidated the General Land Office, the Office of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Patent Office also worked to resolve the boundary with Mexico. Stuart didn't change the culture of political patronage, but at least gave rules and standards to the political appointments and removed some of the administrative chaos until resigning as President Fillmore's term ended in 1853.

As the Whig Party disintegrated in 1852, Stuart declined to become its candidate in the U.S. Senate. Instead, he aligned himself with the nativist Know Nothing Party, which some criticized as secretly working against slavery. When Virginia's Democratic governor Henry A. Wise criticized the Know Nothings, Stuart (as "Madison") published twelve long letters on the "American Question" in the Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser and later as a combined pamphlet. Neither endorsing nor opposing slavery, Stuart praised American Party's proposals to deny some immigrants rights accorded native-born Americans.

Later that year, Augusta County voters again elected Stuart to the Virginia General Assembly, this time to the Virginia Senate, where he served from 1857 through 1861. He was the senior senator on the committee to investigate John Brown's Raid against the arsenal in Harper's Ferry (then still in Virginia) in October 1859. The committee's report condemned abolitionist agitation, and recommended strengthening local militia units, as well as achieving commercial independence from the North by encouraging Virginia's domestic manufactures.

By 1860, Stuart owned nine enslaved persons. At a speech before the Central Agricultural Society of Virginia, Stuart fully accepted slavery as in the best interest of Southern agricultural prosperity and argued it benefited the Northern economy as well as that emancipation would lead to violence.

In the 1860 U.S. Presidential Election, Stuart supported the Constitutional Union Party and its candidate, John Bell (a former Whig who had represented Tennessee in the U.S. Congress). Bell won a majority of Virginia votes, although he ultimately received fewer votes than either major party candidate. As the United States divided into two hostile camps after President Abraham Lincoln's election, seven lower Southern states began establishing the Confederacy beginning in December 1860. Augusta County voter elected Unionists Stuart, John Brown Baldwin (his brother-in-law) and George Baylor to represent them in the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861. He voted with the anti-secession majority on the initial vote on April 4. Stuart, William B. Preston and George W. Randolph as a special Virginia delegation traveled to Washington, D.C. and met President Lincoln on April 12 after the surrender of Fort Sumter. Finding Lincoln firm in his resolve to hold the federal forts in the South, the three men returned to Richmond, Virginia on April 15. Two days later, the secession resolution again came before the convention. All three Augusta County delegates again voted against it, but it passed and was ratified by voters. On June 14, 1861, Stuart was among those signing the ceremonial secession ordinance. Stuart then proposed amendments to Virginia's Constitution of 1851, which he thought too democratic. Stuart blamed unrestrained democratic practices in free states for Lincoln's election and also criticized the North's free public schools. However, Virginia voters, on March 13, 1862, rejected the committee's proposal, which would have removed the popular election of the governor and reorganized the judiciary.

After Virginia seceded, Stuart declined to hold any Confederate or Virginia office after his state senate term ended, and he did not support the Wheeling Convention, which ultimately led to the creation of West Virginia. However, he supported relief for Virginia's soldiers. Furthermore, two relatives served as Confederate generals: his brother-in-law John Brown Baldwin and his cousin, J. E. B. Stuart. A. H. H. Stuart also specifically declined appointment to a peace commission in March 1864.

About a month after Virginia's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, on May 8, 1865, Stuart chaired a mass meeting in Staunton, which adopted resolutions asking the U.S. Army's protection and declaring the populace not in rebellion. Stuart also took oaths of allegiance to the United States and to the loyal government of Virginia. Because he had never held Confederate office, Stuart was eligible for election and was again elected U.S. Representative in 1865. However, despite presenting credentials as a member-elect to the 39th Congress in 1865, he was denied a seat as were other newly-elected Southern delegates, because Virginia was not yet readmitted to the Union, pending its adoption of a new state constitution outlawing slavery, among other measures.

As the University of Virginia commencement speaker in June 1866, Stuart lamented the end of Old Virginia. He also opposed Congressional Reconstruction. In 1866, Stuart was a delegate to the National Convention of Conservatives at Philadelphia. In 1867, Stuart criticized the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1868, which was elected with universal suffrage and included black delegates. Shortly after it convened, Stuart became chairman of the Committee of Nine, which lobbied the new president Ulysses S. Grant, and managed to secure separate votes for the new state constitution, which passed overwhelmingly, and anti-Confederate measures, which failed. Thus, Virginia was restored to the Union in 1870. Augusta County voters again elected Stuart to represent them in the Virginia General Assembly in 1873, and he served on the Committee on Finance. His re-election was contested, but he won the second vote and served from 1874 to 1877.

Stuart also served as rector of the University of Virginia from 1874 to 1882 and from 1886 to 1887, during which he came to accept public education but realized the funding problems (the institution received no funding from 1882 to 1884, and all its officers were forced out). He also served as president of the Virginia Historical Society from 1881 to his death, published a booklet concerning the Committee of Nine at its request, and continued his legal practice.

Stuart died at his home in Staunton in 1891 (six years following his wife's death). They are buried at Thornrose Cemetery in Staunton's Newtown Historic District. Before his death, Stuart had been the last surviving member of the Fillmore Cabinet. His papers are held by the Virginia Historical Society and the University of Virginia, which has made some available online.

His son in law, John M. P. Atkinson (husband of Frances Peyton Stuart) was the tenth president of Hampden–Sydney College from 1857 to 1883.

His home at Staunton, the Stuart House, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

Father: Judge Archibald Stuart, Born March 19, 1757, Died July 11, 1832 Mother: Eleanor Briscoe (1768–1858) Stuart had three brothers, Thomas Jefferson Stuart (born 1793), Archibald P. Stuart (born 1800), and Gerard Briscoe Stuart (born 1805). Stuart was the first cousin of congressman Archibald Stuart, whose son was Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, making him his first cousin, once removed. Stuart married Frances Cornelia Baldwin (1815–1888), and with her had 8 children: Briscoe Baldwin Stuart (1837–1859), Alexander H. H. Stuart Jr. (1846–1867), Archibald Gerard Stuart (1858–1888), Eleanor Augusta Stuart (1838–1878), Frances Peyton Stuart (born 1842), Mary Stuart (born 1844), Susan Baldwin Stuart (1848–1867), and Margaret Briscoe Stuart (1855–1932). Stuart's daughter Mary Stuart married Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, Chief Surgeon, Stonewall Jackson's corp. Dr. McGuire was also President of the American Medical Association.

U.S. Congressman, Presidential Cabinet Member. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1828, studied law, was admitted to the bar and commenced to practice law in Staunton, Virginia. He was a member of the Virginia State House of Delegates, (1836-39) and elected as a Whig to the Twenty-seventh Congress, serving (1841-43). An unsuccessful candidate for reelection, he served as Secretary of the Interior in the Cabinet of President Fillmore, (1850-53). He was a member of the Virginia State Senate (1857-61) and with the advent of the Civil War, he was a member of the Virginia State secession convention in 1861. After the war, he was instrumental in restoring Virginia to the Union in 1870 and a member of the Virginia State House of Delegates, (1874-77). From 1882, until his death, he was a rector of the University of Virginia and president of the Virginia Historical Society.

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Dec 2 2022, 22:30:43 UTC