Horatio F. Simrall

[1][2] He attended a select school at Shelbyville and, at the age of seventeen, entered Hanover College in Indiana.

In 1857 he accepted the chair of law in the University of Louisville and filled it until the beginning of the American Civil War.

[1][2] The Civil War "created a dilemma for Simrall, who was committed to the social order of the slaveholding South, but was a Unionist at heart".

[3] Some accounts indicate that Simrall was elected lieutenant governor of Kentucky's Confederate government at the Russellville Convention in 1861.

He defended many persons who were under prosecution in the court martial over which Gen. Adelbert Ames, afterwards governor of the State, was the presiding officer.