Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart (April 2, 1807 – February 13, 1891) was a prominent Virginia lawyer and American political figure associated with several political parties. Stuart served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly (1836-1838, 1857-1861 and 1874-1877), as a U.S. Congressman (1841-1843), and as the Secretary of the Interior (1850 - 1853). Despite opposing Virginia's secession and holding no office after finishing his term in the Virginia Senate during the American Civil War, after the war he was denied a seat in Congress. Stuart led the Committee of Nine, which attempted to reverse the changes brought by Reconstruction. He also served as rector of the University of Virginia. Early years Stuart was born in Staunton, Virginia, one of three sons of judge Archibald Stuart, a protege of Thomas Jefferson and third-generation American of Scots-Irish origin and his wife Eleanor (nee Briscoe), of distant English ancestry. After education by private tutors, Stuart attended the College of William and Mary. He studied law under John Tayloe Lomax and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville before marrying his cousin Frances Cornelia Baldwin in 1833. They had six daughters and three sons, as discussed in the family section below. Career Stuart was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1828 and soon became active in the National Republican Party. He supported the unsuccessful campaign of Henry Clay in the 1832 U.S. Presidential Election. Delegate and Congressman Augusta County voters first elected Stuart as one of two men representing them in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1836. Re-elected twice as a Whig to what were then single-year terms (and a position which is still part-time), Stuart served on the Committee for Courts of Justice and also advocated internal improvements (the James River Canal as well as railroads). Although recommendations in his critical report concerning deficiencies in such improvements were not adopted, during 1838 Stuart became a junior member of the Committee on Roads and Internal Navigation. In 1840 Stuart won election as a Whig to the 27th Congress, as the incumbent Jacksonian Democrat Robert Craig declined to run for re-election. He defeated Democrat and future Virginia governor James McDowell in that election. Stuart served on the committee concerning the Navy Department, and beginning in February 1842 on the Committee on Foreign Affairs. He was one of only two Southern representatives to support former President John Quincy Adams when Adams proposed to