Isaiah Addison Paschal: Life and Legacy of a Texas Jurist (1808–1868)


By: Claude Elliott

Published: 1952

Updated: May 1, 1995

Isaiah Addison Paschal, lawyer, jurist, and legislator, was born in Lexington, Georgia, in 1808. In Georgia he read law under Col. Frank Hardeman. He was admitted to the bar in 1830 and in 1833 moved to Louisiana, where he later served in the legislature and on the bench of a circuit court. He moved to San Antonio, Texas, in 1845 and practiced law there until 1857, when he was elected to the Texas legislature. He was a Unionist member of the Constitutional Convention of 1866, where he caused factional lines to be drawn very closely by introducing a resolution to require each member of the convention to take the constitutional oath, a requirement that would have disqualified most of the members of the convention. Paschal was a Presbyterian. He died at his home in San Antonio on February 21, 1868.

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Lewis E. Daniell, Texas-The Country and Its Men (Austin?, 1924?).

The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.

Claude Elliott, “Paschal, Isaiah Addison,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed April 11, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/paschal-isaiah-addison.

TID: FPA47

1952
May 1, 1995