“Mose” Littleton: A Life in Full Measure

                  

Working from the premise that every bottle “has a story,” the whiskey jug at left provides a pathway into the story of Moses Luna “Mose” Littleton, a man who began life without formal education in Tennessee, struggled in the whiskey trade in Texas, learned the law in New York City, and eventually became Assistant District Attorney of Dallas.

Mose was born in 1864 in one room log cabin in hardscabble mountainous Roane County, Tennessee, below.  At the time his father was serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, a lieutenant in the First Tennessee Voluntary Infantry.  Although much of the state was secessionist, Thomas Jefferson Littleton originally was from Indiana and did not own slaves.  Shown here, he served for four years and survived hot combat from the Battle of Mill Springs to the Siege of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea.

With the end of the fighting, Lt. Littleton returned to his Tennessee farm and began to raise hogs and father more children.  When Mose was seven, his mother, Hannah B. Ingram Littleton died at the age of 38.  His father married again within a year and in total sired nineteen children.  The family was desperately poor, unable to send the children to school.  In the 1880 federal census, Mose and three brothers, including an eleven year old, were listed working as farm laborers.   Their father and an older sister taught the others to read using the Bible and the few books the family owned.

In 1881 T. J. Littleton, seeking better opportunities, moved his family 870 miles west to Weatherford, Texas, a town not far from Fort Worth.  The Littletons came via the Texas & Pacific Railway that had arrived at Weatherford a year earlier and spurred the town’s economy as an agricultural, banking and commercial center.  The railroad also opened up national markets for local cotton and watermelons.

At the time of the move, Mose Littleton was 17 and, as shown here, growing into a handsome young man with wavy brown hair and regular features.  His first decade in Texas has gone unrecorded but his early years likely were spent in farming and later he appears to have gravitated to the liquor trade.  

In 1892 at the age of 27 Littleton married Eva Esther Smith in Weatherford, a woman five years younger than he. Eva was a native born Texan, whose father was a Texan married to a Mississippi woman.  The couple is shown here in one of the formal poses that photographers fancied in those days. The first of the couple's five children, a girl, would be born two years later.   

Family responsibilities appear to have set Littleton seeking more lucrative opportunities.  A 1894 Dallas business directory listed him as a traveling salesman for the M. T. Bruce & Co., located at 217 Elm Street.  Owned by Maynardier T. Bruce, this was a firm specializing in wholesale liquor, wine and cigars.   By 1900, however, Littleton had moved on to Waco, Texas, 95 miles south of Dallas, where he was running a saloon located at 322 Austin Street, the major commercial avenue shown below. The jug that opened this vignette was the product of that period.  Littleton was buying whiskey by the barrel and decanting it into jugs with his label promising a “full measure.” 

Mose’s attempt to run his own saloon were short-lived.  What happened to his enterprise and why he left Waco is unclear, but by 1901 he had moved his family 55 miles northeast to Corsicana, Texas.  There business directories listed him as the manager of the Benjamin H. Allen saloon and liquor store.  Not only was his life in the liquor trade seemingly going nowhere, he was watching his younger brother, Martin, carve out a spectacular career as a highly-paid, successful lawyer in New York City.

Martin Wiley Littleton, a man with a lengthy Wikipedia biography, shared the same upbringing as Mose but from childhood was attracted to the law.  Offered a job as both clerk and janitor at the Weatherford courthouse, Martin took it, studied law on his own time, passed the Texas bar exam at the age of 20, and then set his sights on New York City.  His success in the Big Apple was meteoric.

Shown here, Martin was retained by multi-millionaire Harry K. Thaw as chief defense counsel in Thaw's second trial for the high-profile murder of prominent architect Stanford White after Thaw learned of White's past relationship with Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit.  The transplanted Texan also defended controversial movie producer-director D. W. Griffith in Congressional hearings and industrialist Harry Ford Sinclair on charges related to the Teapot Dome Scandal.  Time magazine called Martin “one of the world’s richest lawyers.”

Seeing his brother’s struggles to make a living in Texas, Milton invited Mose to come to New York, study the law under his tutelage, and become an attorney.  Likely encouraged by Eva, Mose uprooted his family and moved to Brooklyn where Milton had his offices.  Despite the drastic change of venue, Mose learned the law, passed the New York bar exam, and by 1907 was listed in city directories in a practice with his brother.  In 1912, whether the Littleton brothers had a falling out or by agreement, Mose left his direct association with Martin and was in a solo law practice renting space in a skyscraper at 44 Court Street, Brooklyn, shown above. 

Perhaps because of his or Eva’s becoming homesick for Texas, by 1921 the family had returned to Dallas where they lived in a modest home at 718 South Story Street, shown above as it looks today.  Mose hung out his shingle at Rooms 217-218 of the Slaughter Building, shown right and conducted there what he called “a general practice.”  He subsequently was appointed to the prestigious post as the Assistant District Attorney of Dallas. Ironically, one of the former saloonkeeper’s duties in that post would have been prosecuting individuals caught violating the laws against selling alcohol.

As to Mose’s attitude on issues of the day, I have been able to glean only one public statement.  In the summer of 1920 Littleton was quoted in a national anti-women’s suffrage publication called “One Woman Patriot.”  It quoted him opposing the right of women to vote, writing:  “May your message awaken the old mountain patriots to a realization of the imperialism that threatens the rights of the States and the individual liberty of the citizens.”  Then he threw in a seeming non-sequitur:  “The National Government is now trying to regulate the price of ice in Dallas.”

Mose continued to practice law into his later years, dying in 1934 at the age of 69.  He was buried in Weatherford adjacent to other family members in a plot in the city’s Greenwood Cemetery.  His gravestone is shown below.  Eva would survive him by more than two decades, dying at 90 years of age in 1959. 

Beginning in utter poverty and having no formal education, floundering in the liquor business, attaining skills as a lawyer, and finally appointed Assistant District Attorney of a major city, Mose Littleton — reflecting the motto on his whiskey jug — had experienced a “full measure” of life.

Note:  The Littleton jug that opens this post likely was issued only during the short time that Mose operated his saloon in Waco, a matter of months. The jug sold at auction on eBay in May 2019 for $332.77.