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This article is from the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 6 volumes, edited by William S. Powell. Copyright ©1979-1996 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other use directly to the publisher.

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Fuller, Robert Thomas

by Richard L. Niswonger, 1986; Revised by SLNC Government and Heritage Library, December 2022

b. ca. 1824

Robert Thomas Fuller, attorney, circuit judge, and planter, was born at Leasburg, Caswell County. He was graduated from The University of North Carolina in 1844 and studies law. Beginning about 1850 he was a practicing attorney in Arkansas for more than forty years. Fuller settled at Princeton, Ark., in Dallas County and never relocated. His interests included Whig politics and his 2,300-acre plantation. This plantation was worked by with twenty-three enslaved people. When Arkansas's first Secession Convention met on 4 Mar. 1861, the day of Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, Fuller was among the delegates who opposed secession. On 6 May 1861, however, after Fort Sumter, he joined those in the second convention who voted for secession and thereafter gave his firm support to the Confederacy. After the war he served as a state circuit court judge.

Fuller married Agnes B. Smith, the daughter of Dr. W. F. Smith, a physician. They had six children: J. W., Robert C., Alex J., Samuel G., Agnes, and Thomas F.

References:

Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas (1890).

Daniel L. Grant, Alumni History of the University of North Carolina (1924).

Jonathan Kennon Smith, The Romance of Tulip Ridge (1966).

Ralph Wooster, "The Arkansas Secession Convention," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 13 (1954).

Additional Resources:

The Convention. Journal of both sessions of the Convention of the state of Arkansas. Little Rock [Ark.]: Johnson & Yerkes, state printers. 1861. https://archive.org/details/journalofbothses00arka (accessed March 11, 2014).

Subjects: 
Biographies
Judges
Lawyers
Planters
Authors: 
Niswonger, Richard L.
Origin - location: 
Caswell County
From: 
Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, University of North Carolina Press.

1 January 1986 | Niswonger, Richard L.