William L. Brent

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William L. Brent
Born20 February 1784 Edit this on Wikidata
Died7 July 1848 Edit this on Wikidata (aged 64)

William Leigh Brent— (February 20, 1784 – July 7, 1848) was a lawyer and plantation owner in Maryland and Louisiana, and three-term U.S. Representative representing Louisiana's 3rd congressional district.[1]

Early and family life

Maria Fenwick Brent

Brent was born at

Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, on February 20, 1784, the first child of Robert Brent (1759–1810) and Dorothy Leigh Brent. His father's family (including lawyer/nun Margaret Brent) had owned land in that area of Maryland since about 1640, but some had fled to Virginia before the American Revolutionary War. His maternal grandfather, William Leigh, owned St. Bernards, a plantation near the Port Tobacco River at Pomonkey
, which he gave to Robert and Dorothy when they married.

Robert Brent built a house which he named Brentfield (the manor house which later burnt to the ground was about a mile from Bel Alton, Maryland). However, because William Leigh Brent married a local heiress, his father secured William's consent to leaving it to his younger brother, George Brent (1817–1881), who became a Judge of Maryland's Seventh Judicial District and of the Circuit Court of Appeals. Virginia congressman and Senator Richard Brent (1757–1814) was a paternal cousin. Another paternal cousin was Robert Brent (1764–1819), who became the first mayor of Washington, D.C., and freed his slaves in his will.

William Leigh Brent studied law and was admitted to the bar of Maryland. In 1809 he married his first cousin Maria Fenwick (daughter of Col. James Fenwick and Teresa Brent), with whom he would have nine children (as discussed in the Legacy section below).[2]

Career

William Leigh Brent and his new wife soon moved to Louisiana, where Brent began his legal career. President James Madison named him Deputy Attorney General for the western district of the Territory of Orleans. After the international slave trade became illegal, many Maryland and Virginia-born enslaved people were shipped through Port Tobacco to the sugar plantations of Louisiana; prosecuting fugitive slave cases was part of his job.

In 1822 Brent was elected as an

Adams-Clay Republican to the Eighteenth Congress and moved to Washington, D.C. The following year, his father-in-law died and he and Maria inherited an estate called Pomonkey on the creek of the same name near a village called Fenwick. W.L. Brent remained in Washington and Maryland until 1844, when he returned to Louisiana. He was Louisiana's representative in Congress from March 4, 1823, until March 3, 1829, having been elected as an Adams Republican to the Nineteenth, and Twentieth Congresses
.

Representative Brent was a founding member of Louisiana's

Jacksonian Democrat General Walter Hampden Overton, whose family had moved from Virginia when he was young, who became a war hero at the Battle of New Orleans
and whose daughter married one of W.L. Brent's sons.

As his political career ended, Brent resumed the practice of law in Louisiana and in Washington, D.C.

Death and legacy

Brent died in

Acadian population of Teche Bayou in St. Martin Parish.[3]

Four of their sons became lawyers and politicians. Their eldest son

Interior Department until his death in Georgetown.[4]

References

  1. ^ "Bioguide Search".
  2. ^ David M. French, The Brent Family; the Carroll Families of Colonial Maryland (Alexandria, Virginia typescript copyright 1981) p. 85
  3. ^ French at p. 86
  4. ^ French pp. 85-86
U.S. House of Representatives
Preceded by
None
 Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Louisiana's 3rd congressional district
1823 – 1829 		Succeeded by
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