Thomas Amos Rogers Nelson (19 March 1812-24 August 1873) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-TN 1) from 4 March 1859 to 3 March 1861, succeeding Albert Galiton Watkins and preceding Nathaniel Green Taylor.
Biography[]
Thomas Amos Rogers Nelson was born in Roane County, Tennessee in 1812, and he became a lawyer in Elizabethtown in 1832. He became an active Whig, and he moved to Jonesborough in 1840 and went on to serve in the US House of Representatives from 1859 to 1861. He criticized secessionists for invoking the US Constitution, arguing that the Union itself was a result of the Constitution. He was captured by the Confederates in Kentucky while en route to Washington DC to serve a second term in the US Congress, but President Jefferson Davis released him after he agreed not to oppose the Confederate government. He supported George B. McClellan at the 1864 presidential election, and he opposed his Radical Republican friend William Gannaway Brownlow. He was elected to the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1870, and he died in 1873.