Robert Martin
Douglas
Robert Martin Douglas (1849-1917) was a North Carolina Supreme Court
justice and political figure. At the beginning of his career, the
young attorney served the Republican governor of the state and
President Ulysses S. Grant's Reconstruction administrations.
Born on January 28, 1849 at his maternal grandmother's home in
Rockingham County, North Carolina, he was the first of two sons of
Senator Stephen A. Douglas
(Democrat of Illinois) and Martha Martin, originally of North
Carolina. Martha died after the birth of her third child, a
daughter, in 1853, and the unnamed infant died a few weeks later.
Robert was only four. He and his brother Stephen spent considerable
time when young with their maternal grandmother and the Martin
family in their mother's home state. After his father married Adele
Cutts, from a Maryland Catholic family, with his permission she had
the boys baptized and reared them as Catholic.
The family
split their time between homes in Washington, DC and Chicago,
Illinois during his father's Senate service. Douglas graduated from
Georgetown College in Washington, DC in 1867. He later earned a
Master's degree and a doctoral degree in law from the same
institution.
In the aftermath of the American Civil War,
Douglas turned away from the Democratic Party to which his father
had belonged. He believed that the party had died during the war. he
became a leading Republican and active in Reconstruction era
governments.
During 1868, Douglas served as private secretary to
the Governor of North Carolina. From 1869 to 1873, he was appointed
private secretary to President Ulysses S. Grant.
For the next
decade, he served as United States Marshal for North Carolina. In
1888 he was appointed to serve as Master in Chancery to the United
States Circuit Court. He continued until 1896, when he was elected
as a Republican to the North Carolina Supreme Court.
In 1901,
Justice Douglas and Chief Justice David M. Furches (also a
Republican) were impeached by the Democratic Party-controlled North
Carolina House of Representatives "for issuing an allegedly
unconstitutional mandamus ordering the State Treasurer to pay out
money." Neither was removed from office by the necessary two-thirds
vote of the North Carolina Senate, although a simple majority of
senators favored removal. Douglas served his eight-year term and
then retired from the court.
On June 23, 1874, Douglas
married Jessie Madeline Dick, daughter of the Honorable Robert Paine
Dick, a Supreme Court justice of North Carolina. They had four
children together:
Madeleine Douglas (who later married Col.
Edward Warren Myers),
Robert
Dick Douglas (1875-1960),
Stephen Arnold Douglas (b. 1879),
and
Martin F. Douglas (b. 1886).
Robert Martin Douglas
died at his home in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 8, 1917.
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