Peter Joseph Hamilton

Mobile native Peter Joseph Hamilton (1859-1927) was a lawyer, historian, professor, and judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. A prolific scholar, Hamilton’s work documenting the colonial history of the Gulf Coast, Colonial Mobile: An Historical Study, has served as a foundational text for understanding the early history of Mobile and the broader region since it was published in 1897. His legal career, spanning several decades, was defined by expertise of both common and civil law systems.

Hamilton was born on March 19, 1859, in Mobile, Mobile County, to Peter Hamilton and Anna Martha Beers Hamilton; he had three siblings. His father was a prominent attorney who was elected to the Alabama Senate in 1872 and the Alabama House of Representatives in 1847 and 1882 and briefly as U.S. district attorney. Hamilton came of age during the Civil War, an experience that would inform his writing. He later recalled witnessing the explosion of the federal magazine (ammunitions warehouse) north of downtown Mobile while playing in the yard of his childhood home on Government Street. One of Hamilton’s daughters related in her adulthood that during the U.S. Army occupation of Mobile, officers were quartered in an unconnected wing of the large house, and her father found them to be “not monsters,” but “nice gentlemen” with whom he became friends. He received his early education at the Towle Institute, a boys’ school on Old Dauphin Way, and later attended Bellefonte Academy in Pennsylvania, the state where his father was born.

In 1879, Hamilton earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from Princeton University, followed by a master’s degree in 1882. He pursued further study in philosophy at the University of Leipzig in Germany, documenting his time in Europe in his first book, Rambles in Historic Lands (1893). Upon returning to the United States, he briefly studied at Spring Hill College in Mobile before earning a law degree from the University of Alabama. He subsequently joined his father and uncle’s law practice, locally known as the “Hamiltons.”

Hamilton entered public service in 1891 with his election to the Mobile City Council. After his uncle Thomas Hamilton retired in 1894, Peter assumed leadership of the family law firm and was also elected Mobile City Attorney that same year. Following the death of his father in 1885, Hamilton collaborated with Robert C. Brickell, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, on the publication of a digest of Alabama law. He later played a central role in codifying Mobile’s municipal ordinances.

Hamilton’s scholarly reputation was cemented with the publication of Colonial Mobile: An Historical Study in 1897, with support from fellow historian Thomas McAdory Owen, co-founder of the Southern History Association and later founder and director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Published by Houghton Mifflin, the work was revised and expanded in 1910 to include 11 additional chapters and 22 appendices. Colonial Mobile was widely praised in publications such as The American Historical Review and The Nation, and it earned Hamilton honorary degrees from both Spring Hill College and the University of Alabama. Colonial Mobile, Hamilton’s most ambitious work, drew extensively from original sources to document the history of the Alabama-Tombigbee Rivers region from 1519 to 1821. Though he acknowledged weaknesses in his treatment of Alabama's Indigenous people and the British period, which he rectified in later editions, Colonial Mobile was widely praised for shedding light on overlooked figures and establishing a new perspective on Gulf Coast history.

In addition to Colonial Mobile, Hamilton published several other works, including Art Work of Mobile and Vicinity (1894), a large-format photographic volume; Early Southern Institutions (1898); The Colonization of the South (1904); The Reconstruction Period (1910); and Mobile of the Five Flags (1913), a textbook intended for high school students.

Hamilton married Rachel Wheeler Burgett in 1891. The couple had three children, including a son who died in childhood. During World War I, Rachel and daughter Charlotta survived a harrowing incident on June 2, 1918, when their ship, the S.S. Carolina, was approached and stopped by a German submarine (U-boat) off the coast of New Jersey while sailing from Puerto Rico to New York. The Germans ordered the ship abandoned and then sunk it by shellfire. The pair spent two days in a lifeboat before it was washed ashore in New Jersey.

In 1913, Pres. Woodrow Wilson (a former Princeton classmate whom Hamilton affectionately called “Tommy”), appointed him as U.S. District Judge for Puerto Rico. Hamilton served two terms, from 1913 to 1921, during which he advocated for increased U.S. control over the island and often clashed with Gov. Arthur Yager on matters of political status and citizenship. His push for federal authority over Puerto Rico sparked debate among local leaders. In 1921, Pres. Warren G. Harding declined to reappoint him for a third term, and Hamilton was succeeded by Arthur Odlin.

After leaving the bench, Hamilton remained in Puerto Rico to teach law at the University of Puerto Rico. During this time, he published scholarly articles on legal systems and Puerto Rican folklore in journals such as the Harvard Law Review, the American Historical Magazine, the Mobile Daily Register, and the New Orleans Times-Democrat. His major legal synthesis, The Origin and Growth of the Common Law in England and America, was published in 1922.

Suffering from the autoimmune blood disorder pernicious anemia, believed to have been contracted from many years in the tropics, Hamilton returned to the mainland. He accepted a position at Southern Methodist University, where he served as a professor and later as dean of the law school. He continued to promote Gulf Coast history, helping to found the Iberville Historical Society and serving on the Alabama Historical Commission. In his later years, he and his wife relocated to Anniston, Calhoun County, because of declining health.

Hamilton died on July 13, 1927. He donated copies of his manuscripts to the Mobile Public Library, and many of his works are available through the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Colonial Mobile has been digitized by the Library of Congress. A memoir of his Civil War childhood, A Little Boy in Confederate Mobile, was published posthumously in 1947. Peter Joe Hamilton Elementary School in Mobile County is named in his honor.

Selected Works by Peter Joseph Hamilton

Art Work of Mobile and Vicinity (1894)

Colonial Mobile: An Historical Study (1897)

Early Southern Institutions (1898)

The Colonization of the South (1904)

The Reconstruction Period (1910)

Mobile of the Five Flags (1913)

A Little Boy in Confederate Mobile (1947)