Andrew Hunter

Andrew H. Hunter (March 22, 1804 – November 21, 1888) was a Virginia lawyer, slaveholder and politician who served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly. He was the Commonwealth's attorney for Jefferson County, Virginia, who prosecuted John Brown for the raid on Harpers Ferry. Early life Hunter was born in 1804 to Col. David Hunter (1761–1829) and his wife, the former Elizabeth Pendleton (1774–1825) in Martinsburg, then in Berkeley County, Virginia, where his father long served as the county clerk. Although he had three brothers, one the Presbyterian clergyman Rev. Moses Hunter of New York, the family had resources sufficient to pay for his education at Washington Academy, now Washington and Jefferson College, further along the National Road in Washington, Pennsylvania, then at Hampden-Sydney College, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1822. He married Elizabeth Ellen Stubblefield (d. 1873) and they had two sons, Henry Clay Hunter (1830-1886)—apparently named for the Kentucky politician Henry Clay—and Andrew Hunter Jr., and seven daughters. Hunter and slavery Although he was not a pro-slavery spokesman—that honor belonged to his near-neighbor and author of the new Fugitive Slave Law, Senator James M. Mason—Hunter, like every Virginia politician, was firmly pro-slavery in any public context. At the time of the 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Hunter owned five slaves: a 36 year old black male, black females aged 35 and 40, and a 6 year old mulatto boy.