Hughes

sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has his bust
of Chief Justice John Marshall; the Yale Art
Gallery, his bust of John Trumbull, considered
his best work of this kind. Other titles men-
tioned are a "Mary Magdalen," a bust and a
statuette of Washington Irving, and a small
model for an equestrian statue of General Wash-
ington. After a few years in New York Hughes
moved to Dorchester, Mass., which was his home
for the rest of his life. He made interesting
sketches in burnt wood, and for a season lec-
tured on art. He died in Boston, without hav-
ing accomplished as much as was expected from
a man of his facility. In a recent monograph on
American Wax Portraits, Ethel Stanwood Bol-
ton brings to light twenty-three titles of wax
portraits by him, including those of Chief Jus-
tice Marshall, President William Henry Harri-
son, and Robert Charles Winthrop. The New
York Historical Society has a white wax bust of
a man, signed "Ball Hughes, sculpt. 1830." This
variety of activities may account for the meager-
ness of his output in monumental work.

[Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts
(1906), IV, 1905; W. D. Orcutt, Good Old Dorchester
(1893); L N. P. Stokes, The Iconography of Manhat-
tan Island, V (1926), 1690, I73SJ T. H. Bartlett,
"Early Settler Memorials," Am* Arch, and Building
News, Aug. 6, 1887; Lorado Taft, The Hist, of Am.
Sculpture (enl. ed., 1924); E. S. Bolton, Am. Wax
Portraits (1929); Sun (N. Y.), Mar. 7, 1868; Diet.
Nat. Biog.; Art-Journal (London), July i, 1868, copied
from N. Y. Tribune.] A. A.

HUGHES, ROBERT WILLIAM (Jan. 16,
i82i-Dec. 10, 1901), editor, jurist, was born on
Muddy Creek Plantation, Powhatan County, Va.,
the son of Jesse and Elizabeth Woodson (Mor-
ton) Hughes. He was a descendant of Jesse
Hughes, a Huguenot refugee who came to Vir-
ginia some time between 1695 and 1700 and
settled on the south side of the James in what is
now Powhatan County (Frank Munsell, Ameri-
can Ancestry, vol. IV, 1889, p. 77). Robert's
parents both died In 1822 and he was reared by
Gen. Edward C. Carrington, of Halifax County.
When he was twelve years old, "he was put to
the carpenter's trade in Princeton, N. J., where
he remained for rather more than four years"
(Papers, post, p. 24). Later he attended the
Caldwell Institute, Greensboro, N. C., for eigh-
teen months, and then became tutor of mathe-
matics in the Bingham high school, Hillsboro,
N. C In 1843 ke entered upon the study of law
at Fincastle, Va., and began to practise in Rich-
mond in 1846. On June 4,1850, he married Eliza
M, Johnston, niece of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston
and adopted daughter of Gov. John B. Floyd
[q.vJ]. Already distaste for office work and a
flair for literature had set him to writing edi-

Hughes

torials for the Richmond Examiner, with the
young editor of which, John M. Daniel [q.i\],
he had established in the Patrick Henry Literary
Society a friendship that was to prove enduring;
and from 1853 to 1857, while Daniel was in Eu-
rope, he was the Examiner's editor. He vigor-
ously advocated state's rights and believed in the
right of secession as an abstract doctrine, but was
opposed to it as a measure, though he uttered
the warning that, logically, slavery agitation
would bring it about From November 1857 to
February 1861 he was an editor of the Wash-
ington Union (from Jan. I, 1859, States and
Union), residing in Secretary of War Floyd's
house and advocating "the old State Rights doc-
trines of the National Democratic party, under
the eye of President Buchanan, with General
Cass ... as my much consulted personal friend
and mentor" (A Chapter of Personal and Po-
liticd History). Chronic disease now caused his
retirement to his farm near Abingdon in Wash-
ington County, where he lived until 1874, in-
terested in horses and, occasionally, in the Cum-
berland Gap railroad, but always watching
politics. When Virginia seceded, unable to join
General Floyd's command, he at once resumed
connection with the Examiner> and until the sum-
mer of 1864 he wrote many of its leading edi-
torials, for the most of the time from his some-
what distant home in the country. He then, like
the editor, Daniel, lost hope in the Confederate
cause and felt unequal to the task of further in-
spiriting soldiers, which the paper had made one
of its chief undertakings. Hostile to the Davis
administration from the beginning, he later
printed guarded suggestions of peace through
separate state action, and also the extraordinary
attack of March 1865 on the secret preparations
for the evacuation of Richmond (Editors of the
Past, post, pp. 29, 30). In the confused politics
of Reconstruction days his course was deemed
"nimble" by some: he edited the Richmond Re-
public, the first Republican paper published in
Richmond after the war, 1865-66; he attended
the National Democratic Convention in 1868;
and from 1869 to 1870 he was editor of the Rich-
mond State Journal. An editorial in the Journal
which virtually charged prominent white people
with inciting the murder of negroes led to a dud
with William E. Cameron [q.v.]t in which Cam-
eron was wounded. The Grant administration,
anxious to improve the quality of the Republican
party in Virginia, made Hughes federal district
attorney (1872); nominated him for Congress
(1872), and for governor (1873), but failed to
elect him to either office; and then made him
judge of the federal court for the eastern district

357