The year of his birth was identical with that of the admission of Alabama into the Union--1819. He came from hardy North Carolina stock, and was brought by his father to Alabama when he was only four years old. At eleven he was an orphan boy, a most precarious condition for one so young in a frontier state. A bare-footed boy, left largely to shift for himself, he afforded an index of his future worth and greatness, by engaging to ride the country mail on Saturdays in order to provide means for the payment of his tuition during the remainder of the week. Later, while yet a youth, he became a clerk in a dry goods establishment in Eufaula, where he obtained frugally hoarded means with which to prosecute his studies, meanwhile looking forward to the law as a profession. After a severe taxation of strength during the day as a clerk, he would study late at night, and by such studious application, qualified himself for entrance on his legal studies. He studied law in the office of John Gill Shorter, who afterward became governor of Alabama. After the entrance of Mr. Pugh on the practice of law for a number of years, he was chosen an elector on the Taylor ticket, and later still, was a Buchanan elector. Thus, before the people, his way to congress was opened, and as a member of the house of representatives he was chosen in 1858. The outbreak of the war occurring two years later, like all other southern members, he withdrew from congress, shared in the secession sentiment of the state, and was among the first to enlist as a volunteer from Alabama in the service of the Confederacy. He was enrolled as a private soldier in the first Alabama regiment of infantry. He shouldered his musket and went with his command to Pensacola, where he underwent all the fortunes of a soldier in the ranks, declining any consideration because of the position which he had held as a member of the national congress. Numerous were the offers made him by his comrades to assume his duties, and thus relieve him of hardship, but all this he politely declined, and met the exactions of military duty with cheerful alacrity. His position was one that tested his mettle, for often beneath the blazing sun he was engaged in common with his comrades in throwing up earthworks. The regiment of which he was a member, was ordered to Paducah, Kentucky, where he served for a year, when his constituents recalled him by electing him a member of the Confederate congress. In his first race he had no opposition, but in the second campaign, in 1863, he had three opponents, but was a second time elected, and served the state in the congress of the Confederacy till the downfall of the government. No one was more loyal to the young government than Mr. Pugh, for there was not a month, of the four years of its career, that he was not engaged in its service. After the capitulation of the armies, he returned to Eufaula, and resumed the practice of law.