HAMILTON, ROBERT (1783?-1843?). Robert Hamilton, early settler and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence,qv son of William and Euphemia (Alston) Hamilton, was born in Scotland about 1783. With four of his six brothers he immigrated to the United States about 1807 and settled in Granville County, North Carolina. In 1812 the brothers started a commercial enterprise in which each one continued his own business as a managing partner but for the benefit of the concern. After some years Robert Hamilton withdrew from the business and in 1834 moved to an area on the Red River claimed by both Arkansas and Texas. According to his statement to the Red River County commissioners in 1838, he arrived in the area on December 15, 1834, a single man.
Hamilton, probably the wealthiest man to sign the Declaration of Independence,qv was one of the five men sent by Pecan Point and vicinity or the Red River District to the Convention of 1836qv at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Because of his financial experience, wealth, and extensive connections, Hamilton was appointed, with George C. Childress,qv on March 19, 1836, to go to Washington, D.C., to seek recognition of the independence of Texas and establishment of commercial relations with the United States. On December 20, 1836, President Sam Houstonqv nominated him chief justice of Red River County, and in this post Hamilton authorized law enforcement in the area.
He evidently died while staying at the Pavilion Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 16, 1843. Some sources, however, including letters in the Thomas Jefferson Ruskqv papers, suggest that Hamilton did not die until 1845, or at least that his heirs did not learn of his death until then. Believing that Hamilton died in Red River County, the Texas Centennialqv Commission erected a monument to his memory in the old Rowland Cemetery, twenty-two miles from Clarksville.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Louis Wiltz Kemp, The Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence (Salado, Texas: Anson Jones, 1944; rpt. 1959). Thomas Jefferson Rusk Papers, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.
L. W. Kemp
