Attorney General

Southern by Choice.

Amos T. Akerman typified the Northerners who adopted the South as their home long before such crosssectional transplants became stigmatized as "carpetbaggers." Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1842. He took his first job as a teacher near Augusta, Georgia, and soon moved to Savannah as a tutor for the children of Judge John McPherson Berrien, who had been Andrew Jackson's attorney general and was now a prominent Whig politician. After preparing under Berrien for admission to the bar, Akerman practiced briefly in Peoria, Illinois, where his sister lived, before returning to Georgia, where he established himself in the combined roles of lawyer, farmer, and ultimately, owner of eleven slaves. A Whig in politics, he opposed secession as an unwise strategy but followed his adopted home into the Confederacy...