Horace Harrison Harrison was born on August 7, 1829, in Lebanon, Tennessee, to Joshua and Judith Harrison. The family moved to McMinnville, Tennessee, around 1841, and his father died in the 1840s. In the early 1850s, he served as clerk of the Tennessee state senate. He married Ellen Trabue around 1853, and they apparently had no children. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, around 1859, and he worked as a lawyer. By 1860, he owned $14,000 of real estate and $4,900 of personal property.

 

He supported the Constitutional Union Party during the election of 1860. In a public letter, he denounced southern secessionists and northern abolitionists, and he clung to the political “middle ground.” He warned that the “Union is in imminent peril,” and he argued that Constitutional Unionists represented a “truce to sectional warfare.” He remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, and an early biographer wrote that he “went abroad to avoid the bloody strife which divided so many of his friends and neighbors.”

 

He apparently returned to Tennessee by 1863, and he served as district attorney for the next three years. He joined the Republican Party after the war, and he served on the Tennessee supreme court from 1867 until 1868. He supported Ulysses S. Grant in the presidential election of 1868. He served one term in Congress, from 1873 until 1875, and he attended the Republican National Convention in 1880. He died in Nashville on December 17, 1885.

 

Image: Horace H. Harrison (courtesy Wikicommons)

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