| Name | Hugh Reid MILLER |
| Birth | 14 May 1812, Abbeville, SC |
| Death | 18 Jul 1863, Gettysburg, PA10,11 |
| Burial | Lot 156, Aberdeen Cemetery, Aberdeen MS |
| Occupation | Attorney , Circuit Judge |
| Education | Univ. Of S.C. 1834 |
| Father | Ebenezer MILLER (1767-1848) |
| Mother | Margery REID (1778-1856) |
Miller attended Baker's School in Abbeville and entered South Carolina College in 1831. He remained there until early 1833, when he graduated with his A.B., then returned in the fall of that year to study law. By January 1835, he had returned to Abbeville.
By April or May of 1835, Miller had determined to move to Mississippi and received a letter of recommendation from Ezekiel Pickens:
He is in search of a settlement which would offer him a good prospect for the practice of law. He studied with a gentleman I know and who speaks well of his studious habits.
He settled in Pontotoc, which at the time was a settlement which met the above description. The Chickasaw Session in October 1832 had opened up to settlement, gradually but with increasing momentum, the lands in North Mississippi. Pontotoc was described by Reuben Davis as follows:
It was the location of the land offices for the Chickasaw Indians. In consequence, it became a great field for trading and speculating, and wealth flowed in quickly. Men who had money and knew how to use it were attracted from all quarters, enormous business transactions were made, paper passed from hand to hand and fortunes were lost and won as in gambling spectulations. Litigation was a necessary consequence and the bar numbered able men among its attorneys.
HRM was not the only person from South Carolina who was attracted by the relatively easy availability of land in the Chickasaw Country. On letter to him notes he was "surrounded by Carolina friends." Later, in 1835, his brothers Andrew, Erskine and Robert and his father Ebenezer moved to the area.
From 1835 to 1839, HRM was engaged in law practice at Pontotoc. This was a period which began in flush times but which also saw the Panic of 1837 followed by an economic depression. HRM was aSouthern Whig (perhaps because of his South Carolina connection to Calhoun, who was also from the Abbeville area), but was a friend (and for a short time law partner) of Jacob Thompson, who was elected to Congress in 1939 as a Democrat over Reuben Davis, the Whig candidate.2 The hard times still existed; a letter from Edwin McKey dated March 3, 1839 stated:
The times are hard here. There is no money to be had. There will be more suits brought at our next court by 1/2 than ever brought before.
Nothwithstanding the hard times, HRM had become engaged to Susan Gray Walton and they were married May 9, 1839.
In late 1841, HRM was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Whig. He was opposed to Governor Tucker, and in his letter to his wife in January 1842, he describes Tucker's innauguration as "a most dull and uninteresting affair." He also railed against the Locofoco anti-bond Democrats. Apparently, party politics kept much from being accomplished at the legislative session in 1842. HRM's letter to his wife reflected his frustration:
I am sickened to death, listening to the senseless jargon of fools and villians...I have thought of changing my residence for the last two years. If I was clear of what little property I have at Pontotoc, and other difficulties I would not remain there a single day. I have no means of making a livlihood except by my profession and it yields nothing at that place now.
Another letter (2/16/42) refers to debate on "a motion to censure about 30 of us Whigs because we refused to vote on certain resolutions...."
The 1843 legislative session was similar. HRM describes the Democratic convention, which nominated A. G. Brown for Governor and among others, Jacob Thompson, for Congress, as follows:
The antibond men had everything their way & allowed the bond payers of the democratic party no share in the offices of the state, and in the convention treated them with gross disregard.
Possibly because of the travel and his wife's complaints about his absence, but more probably because of his political frustration and reelection prospects, HRM did not stand for reelection and returned to full time law practice.
In October 1841, Samuel Miller, HRM's youngest brother, killed someone in an argument with a pocket knife. HRM and his brother Andrew rode to Georgia and attended and assisted in his trial.
By July 1845, after ten years as an attorney in Pontotoc, HRM was back on the campaign trail, running for circuit judge, a job which paid $2000 per year. He had three opponents--Wilson, Withers and Houry. HRM won (with a plurality of the vote), polling 4433 votes versus 3216 for Houry, 2099 for Wilson and 105 for Withers. His judicial district was the seventh, composed of Desoto, Marshall, Tippah, Tishomingo, Itawamba, Pontotoc, Lafayette and Panola Counties. HRM won the election and served as circuit judge of the seventh district for the next eight years, until 1853. His letters from this period to his wife were generally from the towns where the court sat--Oxford, Holly Springs, Fulton, Jacinto, Ripley, Hernando. They frequently contained instructions as to various farm chores for his slaves. HRM had a total of six slaves in 1850--the ones most frequently mentioned in his letters of this period were Jesse, Patrick and Hannah. The other three were children.
In 1851 Miller, while a sitting judge, ran as a "Southern Rights" candidate to a state convention called to elect delegates to a convention of Southern States which was to take place in Nashville, Tennessee. The Southern Rights group were basically secessionist in outlook, and were led by John A. Quitman, while the Unionist or procompromise forces were led by Henry Foote. Quitman and Foote battled in the November 1851 Governor's race, but its results were predicted by the results in the convention delegate balloting in September, when procompromise delegates were elected by a 2 to 1 margin. Miller and the two other Southern Rights candidates lost by approximately 4 to 3 margin.
By the end of his eight year term in 1853, Miller had tired of the travel and seperation from his home life involved in the district judgeship, and he declined to stand for reelection. He returned to the fulltime practice of law, practicing from 1853 until 1861. His law partner for most of this period was his wife's cousin, William H Kilpatrick, and the firms name was Miller & Kilpatrick. In 1854 he was one of the organizers of the Pontotoc Male Academy. Miller apparently served as local cousel to the Mississippi Central Railroad and the Mobile and Ohio Railroad (which was under construction). He was also a partner in a group which held a contested title to a substantial tract of property in the Mississippi Delta which the group sought to sell to settlers who would undertake the necessary clearing and ditching. In 1855, Miller campaigned for the Know-Nothings, whose candidate for governor was Charles Fontaine of Pontotoc.
By late 1860, secession fever had gripped Mississippi, and HRm ran for election as a delegate to the Secession Convention following the election of Lincoln. In a letter to Eli Ayers, one of his partners in the Delta land partnership, dated December 8, 1860, he expressed his views:
I shall be awfully pressed for time this winter. If I am elected,
I must give some time to the country. I am prepared to stake
all I have or hope to be on this issue. It is an issue of life-
or death--liberty or slavery--and we cannot avoid it if we would.
He was elected on December 20, 1860 as a delegate to the State Convention from Pontotoc County, and that same month he organized and was elected captain of the "Pontotoc Minute Men." Miller was one of the "Committee of Fifteen" that drafted the Ordinance of Secession and along with his brother Andrew, who was a delegate from Tunica County, signed the document.
Following the Convention, Miller rejoined the Pontotoc Minute Men, which were mustered into the Confederate Army as Company G of the Second Mississippi Regiment. This regiment was ordered to Virginia, where they joined General Bernard Bee's Brigade. They played a key role in the First Battle of Manassas, and Miller was near General Bee when the latter was killed. Following the victory at Manassas, however, there were no significant engagements for the Company for the balance of 1861. They remained at winter quarters at Camp Fisher, near Dumfries, Virginia.
In the spring of 1862, the enlistment of many of the Confederate troops who had volunteered in the spring of 1861 was up, and the regiments in the Army of Northern Virginia were "reorganized:" that is, elections were held for the officer positions. Col. Falkner, Captain John Stone (later governor) and Captain Miller ran for the colonelcy of the 2nd Mississippi. According to Joel Williamson's recent book, William Faulkner and Southern History, in the initial balloting Miller came in third, with 129 votes to Stones 250 and Falkner's 240. Miller had already had communication with Joseph Davis, Jefferson Davis' nephew, concerning the organization of a brigade comprised wholly of Mississippi soldiers, and after his election loss, he was authorized to raise a regiment of volunteers. He returned to Mississippi in the late spring of 1862 to secure his men.
On May 14, the 42nd Mississippi Regiment was organized at Oxford, with the election of Hugh R. Miller as Colonel, Dr. Hillary Moseley of Panola as Lt. Colonel and W. A Feeney of DeSoto County as Major.
The 42nd Mississippi Regiment arrived at Richmond on July 3, 1862 and until December was stationed near there in a camp of instruction guarding prisoners and drilling. In December, the regiment, by then a part of Joseph Davis' Brigade (including Miller's former regiment, the 2nd Mississippi and another north Mississippi regiment, the 11th Mississippi, together with the 55th North Carolina), deployed during the winter to Goldsboro, NC, then Greenville, NC, then Franklin, VA. During February and most of March, 1863, they were camped near Ivor Station, Virginia. Their only action during this time (December 1862 to March 1863) was an engagement with Union Cavalry at Beaver Dam Church on March 30, 1863
The 42nd, along with the rest of Davis' Brigade, participated in the seige of Suffolk, Virginia, under General Longstreet, from mid-April until the end of early May, whereupon it returned to Ivor and remained there until mid- June, when it, along with the rest of Davis' Brigade, rejoined the Army of Northern Virginia and became part of Henry Heth's Division. Davis' Brigade (and the 42nd, 2nd, and 11th Mississippi Regiments) remained with Heth's Division for the duration of the Civil War.
Shortly after joining Heth, the 42nd , with with rest of the Division and the Army of Northern Virginia, embarked on what was later known as the Gettysburg Campaign. Heth's Division was the initial assault force of the Confederate Army on the Union forces at Gettysburg. On July 1, Heth directed the 42nd, 2nd and 55th NC regiments up McPerson's Ridge on the left side of the Cashtown Pike. These regiments routed the 147th New York, the 56th Pennsylvania and the 76th New York regiments of Cutler's Brigade as they advanced up McPherson's Ridge. However, other Union troops on the right later charged the advancing Confederate forces, who took shelter in an unfinished railroad cut. When the Union forces charged the cut, its sides were too deep and steep for the troops to fire, and the Union troops captured a significant portion of the 2nd and 42nd Regiments. Miller and most of the 42nd Miss. Regiment escaped out of the southern end of the cut. However, the action there and earlier had decimated the regiment.
On July 2, Heth's Division, which had suffered heavy casualties on the preceding day, took no part in the Gettysburg battle. However, on July 3, the remains of Davis' Brigade, formed part of the left wing of the Confederate assault on the Union forces. Miller apparently was shot near a fence close enough to the Union forces as to be intermingled with them. Suffering from a lung wound and assumed by his son George to be dead, Hugh Miller survived the battle itself. His son Edwin Miller allowed himself to be captured by Union forces so that he could search for his father among the wounded. Hugh Miller was ultimately hospitalized in a Gettysburg house, where, after appearing to improve, he ultimately died of his wounds on July 19, sixteen days after he was shot. His son Edwin, with some difficulty, was able to persuade the Union authorities to allow him to transport his father's body back to Richmond, where he was interred initially. After the Civil War, his sons had his (and his wife's) body buried in Aberdeen, Mississippi.
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Gravestone inscription reads: "H.R. Miller married Susan Grey Walton in 1838 at Cotton Gin Port, Monroe County, Misissippi. Col Miller served his state as Circuit Judge of the Northern District, as legislator 1842-1843, as a member of the Committe of Fifteen who drafted the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, January 15, 1861. Organized and captained Ponotoc Minute Men, Go. G, 2nd Regiment Mississippi Volunteers, General Bee's Brigade, Army of Northern Virginia. Later organized and elected colonel of 42nd Regiment, Miss. Vols., Joseph r. Davis Bigade of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Mortally wounded on Cemetery Hill, July 3, 1863 at Gettysburg while commanding Davis Brigade.
A true and loyal son, who with many comrades made the supreme sacrifice upon the altar of their beloved Southland.
Erected A.D. 1932 by children of his son George Miller of Oxford, Mississippi.
| 1 | Susan Gray WALTON |
| Birth | 21 Apr 1821, Cotton Gin Port, MS |
| Death | 10 Jan 1864, Cumberland Co., VA |
| Burial | Lot 156, Aberdeen Cemetery |
| Religion | Methodist |
| Father | Jesse WALTON (1774-1830) |
| Mother | Joanna Lawson HOBSON (1779-1852) |
| Marriage | 9 May 1839, Monroe County MS |
| Children | George (1840-1897) |
| Edwin Hugh (1842-1891) |