George Higinbotham was the sixth son (and youngest of eight) of Henry Higinbotham, a merchant in Dublin, and Sarah Wilson, daughter of Joseph Wilson, a man of Scottish ancestry who had gone to America and became an American citizen after the War of Independence and returned to Dublin as American consul.

George Higinbotham was educated at the Royal School Dungannon, and having gained a Queen's scholarship of £50 a year, entered at Trinity College, Dublin.

Higinbotham, by his eloquence and earnestness, obtained great influence amongst the members of the legislative assembly, but his colleagues were not prepared to follow him as far as he desired to go.

Sir Charles Darling the governor had, however, in a dispatch forwarded in the previous December, used a phrase which suggested that he was allying himself with one of the parties to the dispute and was recalled.

[3] In January 1865, the visit of the U.S. confederate cruiser CSS Shenandoah placed the government in a difficult position, and it has sometimes been assumed that the advice of Higinbotham (to not support the U.S. consul's request that the ship be seized as a pirate) as attorney-general must have been faulty in view of the subsequent arbitration proceedings going in favour of the United States.

Unfortunately one religious body had refused to be represented on the commission, and the feeling that arose caused the work that had been done to be nullified for the time being.

[1] In 1880 Higinbotham was appointed a puisne judge of the Supreme Court, and in 1886, on the retirement of Sir William Stawell, he was promoted to the office of chief justice.

He is mentioned as an exception to typical men of the nineteenth century as a "legislator of unusual wisdom for that era" in Henrietta Dugdale's utopian novel "A Few Hours In A Far Off Age".