ROBINSON, JESSE J. (1797-?). Jesse J. Robinson, farmer and legislator, was born in North Carolina in 1797. He moved to Texas in 1840 and settled in Sabine County. He represented the county in the House of the Seventh Congress, 1842-43, and Sabine and Jasper counties in the Senate of the First Legislature in 1846. In the spring of 1847 Robinson announced himself a candidate for the office of governor and began touring East Texas to gain support. His efforts were largely unsuccessful, for he received only 379 of the almost 15,000 votes cast and thus came in a distant fourth in the election. Although he was never again a candidate for state office, Robinson remained active on the local level. In 1854 he was elected chief justice of Sabine County. On the 1860 census he was listed as a farmer who owned $50,000 in real estate and $10,000 in personal property. The sixty-three-year-old North Carolinian lived alone. He did not appear in the 1870 census.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Texas House of Representatives, Biographical Directory of the Texan Conventions and Congresses, 1832-1845 (Austin: Book Exchange, 1941).
