People from Pendleton, South Carolina - Samuel Maverick (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Samuel Augustus Maverick (July 23, 1803September 2, 1870) was a Texas lawyer, politician, land baron and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. His name is the source of the term "maverick," first cited in 1867, which means "independently minded." Various accounts of the origins of the term held that Maverick came to be considered independently minded by his fellow ranchers because he refused to brand his cattle. In fact, Maverick's failure to brand his cattle had little to do with independent mindedness, but reflected his lack of interest in ranching. He is the grandfather of U.S. Congressman Maury Maverick, who coined the term gobbledygook (1944). Samuel Augustus Maverick was the oldest son of Charleston businessman Samuel Maverick and his wife Elizabeth Anderson. His Maverick ancestors had arrived in the New World in 1624 before emigrating to Barbados and later to Charleston. After his paternal grandfather died, in 1793 his grandmother, Lydia, married Revolutionary War general Robert Anderson. In October 1802, his father married Anderson's daughter Elizabeth, and nine months later, on July 23, 1803 Maverick was born at his family's summer home in Pendleton District, South Carolina. To his family, Maverick was known as "Gus". Over the next four years the family lived in Charleston, and his mother bore four more children, one, of whom, Robert, lived less than a day. In September 1809, his sister Ann Caroline died of yellow fever. His father, having watched his ten siblings succumb to the same disease as children, moved his family permanently to Pendleton. For the rest of his life, the elder Samuel Maverick would caution his children to always live in a healthful climate so that they would not succumb to the same disease. While in C... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=314109