Henry S . Foote Henry Stuart Foote ( February 28 , 1804May 20 , 1880 ) was a United States Senator from Mississippi from 1847 to 1852 and elected on a Unionist ticket as Governor of Mississippi from 1852 to 1854 . His strong leadership on the Senate floor helped secure passage of the Compromise of 1850 , which for a time averted a civil war in the United States . A practicing attorney , he published two memoirs related to the Civil War years , as well as a book on Texas prior to its annexation , and a postwar book on the legal profession and courts in the South . Biography . Henry S . Foote , the son of Richard Helm Foote and Catherine ( Stuart ) Foote , was born in Fauquier County , Virginia . He pursued classical studies in 1819 and graduated from Washington College ( now Washington and Lee University ) . He later " read the law " and was admitted to the bar in 1823 . In 1825 he moved to the developing territory of Alabama , where he began his law practice in Tuscumbia in the northern part of the present - day state . Foote established a newspaper , and frequently lent books from his personal library . He was one of 21 local trustees who in 1830 founded LaGrange College , now the University of North Alabama . LaGrange was the first college founded in Alabama to gain a charter from the state legislature . Foote moved to Mississippi , where he practiced law in the state capital , Jackson , and in the river towns of Natchez , Vicksburg , and Raymond , which were centers of business associated with the cotton and slave trades . After visiting Texas , Foote wrote the two - volume " Texas and the Texans ; or , Advance of the Anglo - Americans to the South - west ; Including a History of Leading Events in Mexico , from the Conquest by Fernando Cortes to the Termination of the Texan Revolution " ( 1841 ) . United States Senate . Foote was elected by the Mississippi legislature as a Democrat to the United States Senate , where he played a key role in securing the Compromise of 1850 . During Senate debates over the projected compromise resolutions , Thomas Hart Benton refused to support the compromise and became enraged by Foote ' s verbal attacks . According to the historian James Coleman , during heated Senate debates over the projected compromise resolutions , Foote drew a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton after Benton charged him . Other members wrestled Foote to the floor ; they took the gun away and locked it in a drawer . The incident created a brouhaha that prompted an investigation by a Senate committee . Foote served in the Senate from March 4 , 1847 , until January 8 , 1852 , when he resigned to become governor after defeating Jefferson Davis in the election of 1851 . Foote was elected on a Unionist platform at a time of increasing sectional tension . It was the last Unionist ticket in Mississippi . Because of Foote ' s distress with rising anti - Union fervor in Mississippi , in 1854 after his term as governor , he moved to California . Civil War . On the eve of the Civil War , Foote returned to Vicksburg . In 1859 he was a member of the Southern convention held at Knoxville . He moved to Tennessee and settled at Nashville , where he was elected to the First and Second Confederate Congress es . As a member of the Confederate House of Representatives , he criticized the war policies of the Confederate President Davis . In one debate , he verbally attacked the Confederate Secretary of State Judah P . Benjamin , and expressed virulent antisemitism . Early in 1865 , Foote attempted to cross to Union lines and travel to Washington , D . C . , but was arrested by Confederates before he could do so . The Confederate House of Representatives voted on January 24 , 1865 , to expel him , but the vote failed to garner the necessary two - thirds majority . Later , he was appointed a Mississippi Commissioner for Confederate POWs being held by the North ( his own son among them ) . He resigned from office in 1865 and moved to Washington , where he sought a meeting with President Lincoln but was refused . Given the choice of leaving the United States or being sent back to the Confederacy , Foote fled to Canada and later to London . There he started writing a memoir of the war years . Vanderbilt University . The only building on the Vanderbilt University campus that pre - dates the school is Old Central , the residential structure attached to what is now Benson Hall . Old Central used to be Henry Foote ' s home . In the late 1850s , Foote moved to Tennessee and married a widow named Rachel Douglas Boyd Smiley . Smiley had inherited land west of Nashville from her grandfather John Boyd , property that is currently the part of the Vanderbilt campus north and east of where Sarratt Student Center now sits . Around 1859 , Foote and his new wife built a home on the property . However , Foote and his bride didn ' t live there long . Two years after the house was built , war broke out and Foote was elected to be one of Tennessee ' s representatives in the Confederate Congress . By the time Bishop Holland McTyeire picked the West End site for the Vanderbilt campus , Foote and his wife no longer owned it . After Vanderbilt University was organized , the house Foote had built became a home first for Bishop and Mrs . McTyeire , then for Vanderbilt faculty members . Later life . After Robert E . Lee ' s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1865 , Foote returned to the US and settled in Washington , D . C . He practiced law and joined the Republican Party . He published two memoirs , " War of the Rebellion " ( 1866 ) , written mostly during his time in London , and the later " Casket of Reminiscences " ( 1874 ) . He also compiled and published " The Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest " ( 1876 ) , a history of the law in the region . Appointed by President Rutherford B . Hayes as superintendent of the New Orleans Mint , Foote served there from 1878 to 1880 . He returned to Nashville , where he died that year . He was interred in his wife ' s Mt . Olivet Cemetery plot in an unmarked grave .