Adam Huntsman

Huntsman was born in Charlotte County, Virginia, on February 11, 1786.^[2] He came to Knox County, Tennessee, in 1809, where he settled for about three years. It was here that he studied law under John Williams, one of Knoxville's most prominent attorneys in the early nineteenth century and later a United States Senator.

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Huntsman carried the legal skills he learned from Williams with him westward to Overton County, Tennessee and later Madison County, Tennessee, where he became a highly regarded criminal lawyer.

Huntsman served in the Tennessee state senate from 1815 to 1821 and from 1827 to 1831. A proponent of revision to the state constitution, he was elected a delegate for Madison County, Tennessee, at the constitutional convention held in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1834. He defeated David Crockett for the Twelfth Congressional seat in 1835, a loss that led to Crockett's journey to Texas and his death at the Alamo.

Huntsman served one term as a Jacksonian Democrat to the Twenty-fourth Congress. A leader of the Democratic Party in West Tennessee in the 1830s and 1840s, he corresponded with notable politicians of his day such as Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, James Buchanan, and John C. Calhoun. His term lasted from March 4, 1835, to March 4, 1837.^[3] He ran unsuccessfully for re-election to the Twenty-fifth Congress, losing to John Wesley Crockett, his predecessor's son.

Huntsman died in Jackson, Madison County, Tennessee on August 23, 1849 (aged 63) and is interred at Old Salem Cemetery near Jackson.^[4]

His daughter, Anne Huntsman Scurlock, had a grave marker placed in the "colored section" of Riverside Cemetery in Jackson, Tennessee, for an enslaved man named Silas, who died in 1857. The marker reads "He is not forgotten by his attached mistress."^[5]