William Leigh Brent

William Leigh Brent— (1784–1848) was a lawyer and plantation owner in Maryland and Louisiana, and three-term U.S. Representative representing Louisiana's 3rd congressional district.

Brent was born at Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, on February 20, 1784, the first child of Robert Brent (1759-1810) and Dorothy Leigh Brent. His father's family (including lawyer/nun Margaret Brent) had owned land in that area of Maryland since about 1640, but some had fled to Virginia before the American Revolutionary War. His maternal grandfather, William Leigh, owned St. Bernards, a plantation near the Port Tobacco River at Pomonkey, which he gave to Robert and Dorothy when they married.

Robert Brent built a house which he named Brentfield (the manor house which later burnt to the ground was about a mile from Bel Alton, Maryland). However, because William Leigh Brent married a local heiress, his father secured William's consent to leaving it to his younger brother, George Brent (1817-1881), who became a Judge of Maryland's Seventh Judicial District and of the Circuit Court of Appeals. Virginia congressman and Senator Richard Brent (1757-1814) was a paternal cousin. Another paternal cousin was Robert Brent (1764-1819), who became the first mayor of Washington, D.C. and freed his slaves in his will.

William Leigh Brent studied law and was admitted to the bar of Maryland. In 1809 he married his first cousin Maria Fenwick (daughter of Col. James Fenwick and Teresa Brent), with whom he would have nine children (as discussed in the Legacy section below).

William Leigh Brent and his new wife soon moved to Louisiana, where Brent began his legal career. President James Madison named him Deputy Attorney General for the western district of the Territory of Orleans. After the international slave trade became illegal, many Maryland and Virginia-born enslaved people were shipped through Port Tobacco to the sugar plantations of Louisiana; prosecuting fugitive slave cases was part of his job.

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