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ACON, AUGUSTUS OCTAVIUS, lawyer, legislator, United States senator, is the son of Reverend Augustus 0. Bacon, a Baptist minister and a native of Georgia. His ancestors were of a colony of Puritans who settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1630 — upon this stock was engrafted a Virginia branch, of Cavalier ancestry. He was born in Bryan county, that state, October 20, 1839. On the maternal side, he is a grandson of Samuel Jones and a grandnephew of Judge William Law, of Savannah, Georgia, one of the most distinguished jurists of his time in the South. His parents were residents of Liberty county, and here and in Troup county he spent his boyhood in a typical Georgian environment, save for the fact of his early bereavement through the untimely death of both parents, his father having died at the early age of twenty-three, before the birth of the son, and his mother at twenty years of age, before he was a year old. Under the fostering oversight of his paternal grandmother he received careful training and a good elementary education, and at the age of sixteen he entered the University of Georgia, at Athens. He was graduated from the collegiate department of that institution in 1859, and immediately thereafter entered the law school and received a degree therefrom in the following year.

He selected Atlanta as the place in which to begin his professional career; but scarcely six months elapsed before he joined the Confederate forces as an adjutant of the 9th Georgia regiment, with which he served during the campaigns of 1861 and 1862. Subsequently he was commissioned as captain in the provisional army of the Confederate States and assigned to general staff duty, being mustered out of service at the close of hostilities with the rank of captain. Returning to the law, he began practice at Macon in 1866, from which date he has been actively identified with the bar of Georgia. His success in his profession was immediate, and he quickly assumed a ranking place as a trial lawyer in both the state and federal courts. He possessed oratorical talents of a high order,