CHATHAM COUNTY BIOGRAPHIES

ROBERT MILLEDGE CHARLTON was born in Savannah, Ga., on January 19, 1807, and died there on January 18, 1854. In his forty-seven years of life he compressed an amount of splendid work, both in private life and in public service, which has left his name high up on the roster of distinguished citizens of Georgia. He was a son of Judge Thomas Usher Pulaski Charlton and his first wife, Emily Walter. His grandfather, Thomas Walter, of South Carolina, was the author of "Flora Caroliniana," one of the early and most valuable contributions to Southern botany. Robert M. Charlton, in addition to receiving the most liberal education obtainable, had the very great advantage of association with a father who was one of the foremost men of his day. Admitted to the bar before he was of legal age, at the age of twenty-one (like his father before him), he was elected to the State Legislature. At twenty-three he was appointed United States district attorney by President Jackson,and at twenty-eight became judge of the Eastern Judicial Circuit. His father had served six terms as mayor of Savannah, and perhaps no honor which came to the younger Charlton during his life was so highly appreciated by him as his first election to the office of mayor of Savannah, at the age of thirty-two, and he subsequently served two other terms. He thus tracked along in the way that his father had traveled before him. Charlton street in Savannah was named in honor of his father shortly after his death, and Charlton county in South Georgia also perpetuates the family name. At the age of forty-four, in the year 1852, he succeeded his distinguished townsman, John McPherson Berrien, in the United States Senate, and while holding that position was honored with the appointment as a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution, at Washington. He was among the incorporators of the Georgia Historical Society, and to him is chiefly due the existence of the Episcopal Orphans' Home.

Judge Charlton did an enormous amount of work in his comparatively short life. His reputation at the bar was second to that of no lawyer of his day, and his legal work will bear the tests of the most exacting criticisms. The legal firm with which he was associated and of which he was the head built up a very large practice. In addition to his legal work and his public service he was a man of fine literary tastes, with strong poetic tendencies, and rested himself in the intervals of his labor by literary work, such as contributions to the Knickerbocker, the leading magazine of that day, and by the publication of poems, which he finally gathered together into a volume, including a few written by his brother, Dr. Thomas Jackson Charlton, who died at the early age of thirty, a mail of the most brilliant promise. Judge Charlton's "Sketches of Court and Circuit Life" give full play to that kindly humor which was the delight of his friends. In 1838 he published a volume of Georgia Reports, and his son, himself a distinguished lawyer, in quoting some brief extracts from that work, draws out that sense of humor, strong common sense, and exact equity, which distinguished his father and has a strong likeness to the work of that distinguished jurist, Chief Justice Joseph Henry Lumpkin.

Judge Charlton was a man of strong religious spirit, and his kindliness of disposition was a proverb among those who knew him. At the age of twenty-two, he married Miss Margaret Shick, of Savannah, daughter of Peter Shick, and granddaughter of John Shick, one of the famous colony of Salzburgers, in Effingham county, and a veteran of the Revolution, who lost an arm at the siege of Savannah in 1779, while a soldier in the Continental line. Ten children were born of this marriage. Five of them died in childhood. Of the other five, Mary Marshall married Julien Hartridge; Thomas Marshall died unmarried ; Robert Milledge, Jr., after serving as a faithful soldier of the Confederacy during the entire period of the Civil War, died unmarried one year after the close of the war. Margaret married Charles P. Hansell, of Georgia; and Walter Glasco Charlton, the present male representative of the family and a leading citizen and lawyer of Savannah, married Mary Walton Johnston, a daughter of that famous Georgian, Richard Malcolm Johnston. Thomas U. Charlton and his no less distinguished son, Judge Robert M. Charlton, contributed faithful and valuable work in the days when the commonwealth of Georgia was beginning to be an important unit in this great republic, and the memory of them is a precious possession to the present citizenship of the Empire State of the South.
[Source: "Men of Mark in Georgia: a complete and elaborate history..." Volume 2 By William J. Northen - Submitted by a Friend of Free Genealogy]