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Ossian B. Hart

American judge and politician (1821–1874)

Field	Value
name	Ossian Bingley Hart
image	Florida Governor Ossian B. Hart.jpg
office1	Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida
predecessor1	Inaugural
successor1	Franklin D. Fraser
office2	Member of the Florida House of Representatives
term2	1845
birth_date
birth_place	Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.
death_date
death_place	Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.
party	Republican
spouse
signature	Signature of Ossian Bingley Hart.png
office	Governor of Florida
term_start	January 7, 1873
term_end	March 18, 1874
order	10th
lieutenant	Marcellus Stearns
predecessor	Harrison Reed
successor	Marcellus Stearns
termstart1	1868
termend1	1873
parents	Isaiah Hart

Ossian Bingley Hart (January 17, 1821 – March 18, 1874) was the 10th Governor of Florida from 1873 to 1874, and the first governor of Florida who was born in the state.

Early life and career

Born in Jacksonville to Isaiah Hart, one of the city's founders, he was raised on his father's plantation along the St. Johns River. He was a lawyer in Jacksonville. He moved to a farm near Fort Pierce, Florida in 1843, and was a founding member of the St. Lucie County Board of Commissioners. In 1845, Hart became Florida State Representative for St. Lucie County. In 1846 he moved to Key West where he resumed his law practice. In 1856, he moved to Tampa, Florida. Among his clients was "Adam", a black man who was lynched after the Florida Supreme Court declared his murder conviction a mistrial.

Despite his upbringing, Hart became a Republican and openly opposed secession from the United States, causing some difficult times for him during the American Civil War. Following the war, he helped reestablish the governments of the state and of the city of Jacksonville. In 1868, he was appointed a justice of the Florida Supreme Court. In 1870, he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress, only to be elected governor two years later on November 5, 1872. He appointed Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs as Florida's first African-American Superintendent of Public Instruction. During his tenure, "limited civil rights legislation was passed, and some improvements were made in the state's weakened finances." Weakened by the campaign, he fell ill with pneumonia and died in Jacksonville. He was succeeded by lieutenant governor Marcellus Stearns, Florida's last Republican governor until 1967.

Personal life

He married his wife Catherine Smith Campbell, a resident of Newark, New Jersey, on October 3, 1843.

References

Shofner, Jerrell H., ''History of Brevard County volume 1''
Allman, T. D.. (2013). "Finding Florida. The True History of the Sunshine State". [[Atlantic Monthly Press]].
"Ossian Bingley Hart". myflorida.com (Florida Department of State).
"Historical Monument Trail : Visit : Friends of the Riverwalk".
"Ossian B. Hart Correspondence and Documents".

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

1821-births 1874-deaths members-of-the-st.-lucie-county-board-of-county-commissioners justices-of-the-supreme-court-of-florida republican-party-governors-of-florida lawyers-from-jacksonville,-florida deaths-from-pneumonia-in-florida members-of-the-florida-territorial-legislature 19th-century-american-lawyers 19th-century-florida-state-court-judges 19th-century-members-of-the-florida-legislature

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