TODD, GEORGE T. (1839-1913). George T. Todd, lawyer, soldier, and politician, was born in Matthews County, Virginia, on May 6, 1839, the son of Eliza Ann (Hudgins) and William Smith Todd.^qv The family moved to Texas in 1840 and settled at Boston. They later moved to Clarksville and eventually to Jefferson. Todd attended Hampton Academy in Virginia for three years and the University of Virginia one year. He returned to Jefferson in 1860, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. In May 1861 he enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private in Company A, First Texas Infantry, Hood's Texas Brigade.^qv He was made captain in 1862 and fought in several major battles. He was wounded at Antietam (Sharpsburg) and resigned from the regiment on October 30, 1863. He served as adjutant of the Third Texas Cavalry under Col. Walter P. Lane^qv from May 1864 to the end of the war. Todd later published an account of his war experiences entitled Sketch of History: The First Texas Regiment, Hood's Brigade (1909). After the war Todd returned to Jefferson and practiced law. He was elected district attorney of the Eighth Judicial District and held the office until he was removed as an "impediment to Reconstruction." In February 1869 he was practicing law in partnership with J. C. Todd, and on May 6 of that year he married Edwina Van Dyke of Clarksville; they had one child. George Todd was one of a number of defense lawyers in the famous Stockade Case,^qv and he was a prosecutor in the notorious Rothschild murder trial in 1878. On March 13, 1873, he married Marion Miller in Brandon, Mississippi; they became the parents of four children. From January 11, 1881, to March 5, 1882, Todd represented the Eleventh District in the House of the Seventeenth Legislature. After leaving office he continued to be active in state politics. Todd attended the Democratic state conventions of 1882 and 1886, the Antiprohibition state convention in 1887, and the State Freight Rate Convention in 1889. He remained loyal to James Stephen Hogg^qv at the Democratic state convention of 1892, but sometime thereafter he switched to the People's (Know-Nothing) party.^qv In 1898 and again in 1900 he unsuccessfully ran for the Court of Criminal Appeals on the People's party ticket, and he was that party's unsuccessful candidate for attorney general in 1904. He was an active figure in local Confederate veterans' affairs. Todd died at Jefferson on January 29, 1913, and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lucille Blackburn Bullard, Marion County, Texas, 1860-1870 (Jefferson, Texas, 1965). William S. Speer and John H. Brown, eds., Encyclopedia of the New West (Marshall, Texas: United States Biographical Publishing, 1881; rpt., Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1978). Fred Tarpley, Jefferson: Riverport to the Southwest (Austin: Eakin Press, 1983). George T. Todd, Sketch of the History of the First Texas Regiment, Hood's Brigade (1909?; rpt., as First Texas Regiment, Waco: Texian Press, 1963). E. W. Winkler, Platforms of Political Parties in Texas (Austin: University of Texas, 1916).

Julia L. Vivian