His father, William Hale, was a Union Baptist minister, a South Carolinian, who married a Miss Elizabeth Manahan of the same state.

[2] A decade earlier, Hale similarly owned a dozen slaves, which ranged from a 90-year-old woman and 65-year-old man to a six-year-old girl and three younger boys.

After serving his term, he concentrated on his legal practice and private life until the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, when Hele volunteered and was elected lieutenant of a company.

In it, he voiced support for the Dred Scott decision, condemned the Republican Party, and stated that the state's secession, which would perpetuate slavery, was the only way to prevent prospective freedmen, whom Hale referred to as "half-civilized Africans", from raping southern "wives and daughters": [I]n the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or the other, would be inevitable.

[...] [T]he election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions - nothing less than an open declaration of war - for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.

Appears on a Report of casualties, of the 4th Brigade, Longstreet's Division, in the action at Gaines' Mill, Va., June 27, 1862, Remarks: Dangerously wounded".

His tombstone bears the epitaph "Statesman, Jurist, Patriot, Soldier & Christian Gentleman"[11] Hale County, Alabama (established 1867), is named after him.