William Tecumsah Avery

William Tecumsah Avery ( born November 11, 1819 Hardeman County, Tennessee, † May 22 1880 in Crittenden County, Arkansas ) was an American politician. Between 1857 and 1861 he represented the state of Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Career

William Avery attended the common schools and the Jackson College near Columbia. He later moved to Memphis. After a subsequent study of law and its made ​​in 1840 admitted to the bar he began to work in his new profession. At the same time he proposed as a member of the Democratic Party launched a political career. In 1843 he was elected to the House of Representatives from Tennessee.

In the congressional elections of 1856, Avery was in the tenth electoral district of Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington DC chosen, where he became the successor of Thomas Rivers on March 4, 1857. After a re-election in 1858 he was able to complete in Congress until March 3, 1861 two legislative sessions. These were shaped by the events in the immediate run-up to the Civil War. In 1860, Avery gave up for reelection.

During the Civil War William Avery was Lieutenant Colonel in the army of the Confederacy. Between 1870 and 1874 he served as usher at the criminal court in Shelby County. He also practiced law in Memphis. He died on 22 May 1880, when he in an accident at Ten Mile Bayoo, a river near Memphis, drowned.