Harris, Isham Green, 1818-1897

Isham Green Harris was governor of Tennessee during the secession crisis and the Civil War, and later served as a U.S. senator from Tennessee.

Born on February 10, 1818, in Franklin County, Tennessee, Harris moved to Ripley, Mississippi, in 1838 to start a business and study law. In 1841, he sold his business and returned to Tennessee to begin practicing law. Within a few years he became one of the most successful criminal attorneys in the state. In 1847 he entered politics, winning a seat in the Tennessee Senate and then, in 1849, successfully running for a U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. In Congress, Harris was a strong advocate of slavery and argued against the Compromise of 1850, which tried to settle the dispute between pro-slavery and anti-slavery representatives in Congress over the status of slavery in territories acquired from the Mexican-American War.

Harris was elected governor of Tennessee in 1857. He gained a reputation as a fierce defender of pro-southern and pro-slavery interests, and warned against northern antislavery sentiments. In January 1861, during the secession crisis that followed Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860, Harris called for a statewide vote to determine the Tennessee’s fate in the Union. The state had a strong Unionist population, and a majority of voters rejected secession. However, following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina and Lincoln’s subsequent call for volunteers to put down the southern rebellion in April 1861, Harris denounced the federal government. He began raising troops for the Confederacy, and helped lead Tennessee to a formal declaration of secession in June 1861.

In 1862, Union forces captured Nashville and held much of Tennessee. Harris relocated to Memphis, but was forced to flee to Mississippi when federal soldiers secured that city as well. A refugee from his own state, Harris spent the next three years following Confederate armies, often serving as an aide-de-camp to various generals. He was with Albert Sidney Johnston at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, and helped carry that general off of the field when he was mortally wounded. Later he was an aid to Joseph E. Johnston, Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, and P.G.T. Beauregard.

At the end of the Civil War, Harris fled the Confederacy since Unionist authorities in Tennessee had issued a warrant for his arrest. In 1867, he learned that officials in the United States would no longer arrest him, so he returned to Tennessee and resumed practicing law in Memphis. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, and Democrats regained control of the Tennessee government, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate and won multiple reelections, ultimately spending twenty years there, championing low tariffs, bank reforms, currency expansion, and agrarian interests. He died on July 8, 1897, having rebuilt his reputation among many in the federal government and received a funeral in the U.S. Capitol. He was married to Martha Mariah Travis and had seven sons. Harris is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee.

(Wikipedia; Leonard Schlup, “Isham Green Harris,” Tennessee Encyclopedia)

Isham Green Harris belonged to the following social groups: