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biography
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Brackenridge, Henry Marie, jurist and author, son of Hugh Henry Brackenridge: b. Pittsburg, Pa., May 11, 1786;
d. there Jan. 18, 1871. From his seventh to his tenth year he was at school at Genevieve, La., for the purpose of learning French; after which his father took personal charge of his education.
He was admitted to the bar in 1806 and practiced in Baltimore and Somerset, Md. In 1810 he revisited Louisiana and practiced there a short time, and in 1811 became deputy attorney general for the
territory of Orleans, as it was then called. He became district judge in 1812. In the War of 1812 he gave important information to the government, and, moving to Baltimore in 1814, he published a
popular history of the war, which was translated into French and Italian. His advocacy of the acknowledgment of the South American republics, in a pamphlet addressed to President Monroe, gained him
the appointment of secretary of the commission sent to those republics in 1817. The next year he published A Voyage to South America, containing an extraordinary mass of information. In 1821 he rendered
valuable service to General Jackson in Florida. He was United States judge for the western district of Florida until 1832, when he removed to Pittsburg. In 1840 he was elected to Congress, but did not
take his seat, being named commissioner under the treaty with Mexico in 1841. From this time he devoted himself to literature. Other works are: Recollections of Persons and Places in the West (1834);
Essay on Trusts and Trustees (1842); and A History of the Western Insurrection (1859).
THE SOUTH in the Building of the Nation Volume XI; Ed. by James Curtis Ballagh, Walter Lynwood Fleming & Southern Historical Publication Society; Publ. 1909; Transcribed and submitted by Andrea Stawski Pack
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