Chichester Chaplin, jurist in
Texas and Louisiana, was born in Ireland on November 17, 1800.
He probably immigrated to southeastern Louisiana between 1810
and 1820. Marriage records of St. Tammany Parish reveal his
marriage on October 10, 1824, to Tabitha Beall Edwards Aydelot,
daughter of empresarioqv Haden
Edwards.qv
Chaplin was then a fledgling lawyer. Tabitha died on November
24, 1827. Chaplin undoubtedly followed his father-in-law to the
Nacogdoches area of East Texas, where he became a key figure in
the Fredonian Rebellionqv
(1826), led by Haden and Benjamin W. Edwards,qv
along with Martin Parmer,qv
who later became Chaplin's second father-in-law. Edwards ordered
an election held on January 1, 1826, to select an alcaldeqv
for the Nacogdoches District. Chaplin actually received the most
votes, but the losing candidate, Samuel Norris,qv
an American who had married a Spanish colonial woman and was the
choice of the old settlers, appealed the election to the
political chief of Texas, who declared Norris the legally
elected candidate.
When the Fredonian Rebellion
erupted in December 1826, Chaplin joined the Edwards forces in
revolt, and when the rebellion collapsed he fled eastward across
the Sabine River with the Edwards brothers and Parmer. The
Chaplin family settled in Natchitoches, where, on June 4, 1827,
Chaplin was named a justice of the peace for Natchitoches
Parish, a post he held for less than a year. With his selection
as a Louisiana justice in 1827, he began a judicial career in
both western Louisiana and eastern Texas that spanned almost
four decades (1827-64). In 1827-28 he served as probate judge
and from 1829 to 1834 as parish judge of Claiborne Parish,
Louisiana, newly formed from a portion of the original
Natchitoches Parish.
Sometime late in 1833 or early
in 1834 he returned to Jefferson County, Texas, where in 1836 he
was chosen the first chief justice of the county. He served in
that office for a short time and in 1838 was made a member of
the Board of Land Commissioners of San Augustine County, Texas.
Since he was in Texas before 1835, Judge Chaplin was awarded a
Mexican land grant of a league in San Augustine County, on May
18, 1835. In December 1839 he received a headright grant of 640
acres in Jasper County from the Republic of Texas.qv
By 1845, however, he was again
in Louisiana serving as district attorney for Sabine Parish, a
post he held until 1853, when he was installed as district judge
of the parish. When a district court for the Sixteenth District
was established in 1855, he began functioning as judge of both
the old Ninth District Court and the new Sixteenth District
Court, both headquartered in Sabine Parish; he held this dual
post until December 1864. In 1865 Chaplin completed his public
service as the attorney for the Natchitoches Parish police jury.
While he was a fugitive from
the Fredonian Rebellion, Chaplin married his second wife, Emily
Parmer. This marriage must have occurred in 1829 or 1830,
probably in Natchitoches Parish. They had six children. In 1870
Chaplin was grand master of Phoenix Lodge No. 38 in
Natchitoches. He died on October 14, 1874, and Emily died on
August 9, 1878. Both are buried in the American Cemetery in
Natchitoches.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Biographical and Historical Memoirs of
Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana
(Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Mills Historical Press, 1985). George L.
Crocket,
Two Centuries in East Texas
(Dallas: Southwest, 1932; facsimile reprod., 1962). Joe E.
Ericson,
Judges of the Republic of Texas
(1836-1846): A Biographical Directory
(Dallas: Taylor, 1980). Judge R. B. Williams, "The History of
the Judiciary of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana,"
Natchitoches Genealogist,
April 1978.
Joe E. Ericson
- Handbook of Texas
Online, s.v. ","
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/CC/fch62.html
(accessed March 3, 2008).
(NOTE: "s.v." stands for sub verbo, "under the word.")
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