Richard Clauselle Puryear was born on February 9, 1801, in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, to John and Sarah Puryear. The family moved to North Carolina around 1811, and his father died around the same time. He married Elizabeth Ann Clingman, and they had at least six children: Jane, born around 1831; Sarah, born around 1839; Henry, born around 1841; Elizabeth, born around 1845; Richard, born around 1848; and Thomas, born around 1849. His wife died in 1850. Puryear became a planter, eventually owning 700 acres of land and at least 22 enslaved laborers. By 1850, he owned $15,300 of real estate. A decade later, he owned $20,000 of real estate and $36,350 of personal property.

 

Puryear served as a colonel in the state militia and as a county magistrate. He supported the Whig Party, and he served several terms in the North Carolina legislature between 1838 and 1852. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1853 and won reelection two years later. In April 1855, one supporter praised his “sterling sense…incorruptible patriotism, and private virtues.”

 

He voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and the following year, he delivered speeches highlighting the “sanctity of compromise and the dangers of agitation.” When the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, he joined the American Party. In one speech, he reportedly “declaimed long and loudly against foreigners and Roman Catholics.” He ran for reelection again in 1857, but critics painted him as an abolitionist, and he ultimately lost the election. He later joined the state’s Opposition Party, and he served as president of the party’s state convention in February 1860. The convention denounced both Democrats and “Black Republicans” as “political opponents, upon whom it is their duty to war.”

 

In the election of 1860, he supported Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell. He remained loyal to the Union during the secession crisis, and he attended a Unionist meeting on December 29, 1860. The men “declare[d] their devotion to the present government of the Union, and their intense desire that it should be preserved according to the Constitution.” President Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops on April 15, 1861, however, prompted him to side with the Confederacy. He served as a delegate to the Provisional Confederate Congress in 1861. As one scholar noted, “in this capacity he did little but attend and vote regularly.” He “voted consistently for lower taxes and more exemptions,” but he was a “strong supporter of the other war measures coming before Congress.”

 

After the war, Puryear attended the National Union Convention in Philadelphia in August 1866. He died in Yadkin County on July 30, 1867.

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