Severn Teackle Wallis
Severn Teackle Wallis was an American lawyer and politician.
Biography
Severn Teackle Wallis was born in Baltimore on September 8, 1816. He graduated from the secular St. Mary's College in northwest inner Baltimore in 1832, and later studied law with William Wirt, attorney general, and with noted lawyer John Glenn. At the age of 21, Wallis was admitted to the bar.Wallis early developed a taste for literature and contributed to periodicals many articles of literary and historical criticism, also occasional verses. He became a proficient in Spanish literature and history and was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of History of Madrid in 1843.
In 1846, he was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries of Copenhagen, in the Kingdom of Denmark. In 1847, he visited Spain and in 1849 the U. S. Government sent him on a special mission to that country to examine the title to the public lands in their former colony of East Florida, as affected by royal Spanish Crown grants during the negotiations for the treaty of 1819, which provided for the American annexation of Florida, and creation of the Territory of Florida.
In 1851, he was a speaker at the first commencement exercises held for the newly renamed Central High School of Baltimore, now Baltimore City College. Wallis maintained a frequent and constant interest in the premier local public school and in the public schools system as a whole.
From 1859 until 1861, Wallis contributed largely to the editorial columns of the local newspaper, the Baltimore "Exchange", and wrote for other journals as well.
He was a Whig until the organization of the American or "Know-Nothing" party, after which when it faded as a political and moral force, he was a Democrat.
In April 1861, Wallis was elected to the lower House of Delegates of Maryland in the General Assembly of Maryland, and took an active part in the special proceedings of the Maryland Legislature, called into special session that Spring by Gov. Thomas H. Hicks, as the authority of the Governor of Maryland at Frederick instead of the state capital at Annapolis which was then occupied by Massachusetts and New York militia under the command of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, deciding on the issue of secession and the state's relationship to the pending crisis and the forming war policies of President Abraham Lincoln. He was chairman of the committee on Federal relations, and made himself obnoxious to the Federal authorities by his reports, which were adopted by the Legislature, and which took strong ground against the possibilities of Civil War, as well as against the then prevailing "doctrine of military necessity".
In September 12 of that year, four months after Butler's occupation of the state's major city, Wallis was arrested with nine other secessionist members of the Maryland Legislature and imprisoned for more than fourteen months in Fort McHenry, Fort Lafayette, and Fort Warren. He was finally released by November 1862.
He then returned to the private practice of the law in Baltimore. In 1870, on the death of his friend John Pendleton Kennedy, Wallis was elected provost of the University of Maryland at Baltimore.
In December 1872, as chairman of the art committee of private citizens appointed by the Maryland Legislature, he delivered the address upon the unveiling in Annapolis of sculptor William Henry Rinehart's statue of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney of the United States Supreme Court.
Wallis died at his home in Baltimore on April 11, 1894.