Ashbel Smith
Even though militarily the Texas Revolution was over, Smith set up an efficient system of medical operations and established the first hospital in the area that would become Houston.
[2][failed verification] As President of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston called on Smith to negotiate a treaty with the Comanches in 1838.
The Texas Congress failed to ratify the treaty, which would have recognized a Comanche homeland, the Comancheria, thus leading to the Council House Fight and Great Raid of 1840.
A supporter of public education, Smith was a charter member and first vice president of the Philosophical Society of Texas.
[1] He purchased land near Galveston Bay and built his plantation, Evergreen, in southeast Harris County in what is now Baytown, Texas.
[4][page needed] In President Sam Houston's second term (1841–1844), Dr. Smith was Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Texas to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and France, residing in London and Paris, respectively.
In Europe, Smith secured ratification of a treaty of amity and commerce between England and Texas and improved the Republic's relations with France, which had been ruffled by the so-called Pig War.
[1] Alleging that England was conspiring with the Republic of Mexico against Texas, Smith filed a formal diplomatic protest to Lord Aberdeen.
Andrew J. Torget wrote, "Smith feared an alliance of Mexican nationalists and British anti-abolitionists, would, left unchecked, guaranteed future invasions of Texas.
Smith carefully tracked these communications between English diplomats and Texas abolitionists, and made defense of slavery and the cotton trade as his two preoccupations.
The following year he accepted the role as manager of the first Lone Star Fair in Corpus Christi, lending a measure of credibility to that event.
On this occasion I expressed my utter dissent from and opposition to all operations then carrying on in London, having for their object the abolition of Slavery in Texas.
In his first term, Smith supported measures to aid railroad construction, validate land titles, improve the common schools.
When it was clear that war was inevitable, he organized the Bayland Guards, also known as Company C of the 2nd Texas Volunteer Infantry Regiment to fight for the Confederacy.
[1] In 1866, Smith and his cousin Henry Gillette founded the Bayland Orphanage to care for the children of deceased Confederate veterans.
[13] Smith was also elected again as a Democratic Party state representative from Houston to the Eleventh Texas Legislature, serving for one term in 1866.
[15] Smith was appointed by the United States Centennial Commission in 1876 to act as a judge on the Jury of Awards at the Great International Exhibition in Philadelphia.
Smith's goals were to recruit the best professors available for the faculty and to establish a curriculum that would make the university, which in the 1880s was still on the western frontier, a distinctive national institution of higher learning.
