State Web Site

Higher Office(s) Served: Representative

Military Service: Army

War(s) Served:  Creek War

WILLIAM HALL was born in Surrey County, North Carolina and moved with his parents to Tennessee at the age of ten. In 1796 he was commissioned a Second Major in the Sumner County Militia and became Colonel and ultimately Brigadier-General in the Tennessee Volunteer Infantry. He served four terms in the Tennessee House of Representatives and four in the Tennessee Senate. As Senate Speaker in 1829, he became governor upon the resignation of Sam Houston, serving until the inauguration of his successor. Two years later he was elected to a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives, after which he retired to his estate near Castalian Springs in Sumner County. There he wrote Early History of the Southwest. He was a delegate to the Nashville Convention of 1850, which considered means by which Southern states might protect the rights of their people in the U.S. territories. Hall died at his home in Sumner County, where he is buried in the family graveyard.

Sources:

Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress

The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. 7. New York: James T. White & Company.

Past Governors of Tennessee

Philips, Margaret I. The Governors of Tennessee. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001.

Sobel, Robert, and John Raimo, eds. Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789-1978, Vol. 4. Westport, CT: Meckler Books, 1978. 4 vols.

White, Robert H. Messages of the Governors of Tennessee, 1821-1835. Nashville: The Tennessee Historical Commission, Vol. 2, 1952.