Elhanan J. Searle (1835–1906)

Elhanan J. Searle came to Arkansas as a Union soldier during the Civil War and served as a politician and judge before he returned to his native Great Lakes region. He was appointed justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1871 by Governor Powell Clayton and played a role in the Brooks-Baxter War. His nearly two years on the court were unusually adventurous and resulted in the modern depiction of his judicial role in the so-called war as an attempted coup d’etat. The short battle was fought to determine which of two Republicans, Joseph Brooks or Elisha Baxter, was the real elected governor of Arkansas. During the melee, political foes kidnapped Justice Searle and another justice. President Ulysses S. Grant eventually had to settle the quandary that Searle’s political and judicial associates had created.

Elhanan John Searle was born on January 18, 1835, at Royalton, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, the son of James Searle and Elizabeth Ann Quinn Searle. His father, a native of Virginia, was a farmer, apparently prosperous enough to see that Elhanan received a selective education—first at the Rock River Seminary, a preparatory school. He eventually studied law at the offices of Abraham Lincoln and William H. Herndon at Springfield. A biography said Searle’s “daily association with a character such as Abraham Lincoln’s and the intimacy naturally arising from their relation as student and mentor, must have made a deep impression upon the young man, and doubtless exerted a formative influence upon the whole course of his after life.” It said Searle and Lincoln corresponded until Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865. Searle graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1859 and later received a master’s degree. He later moved back briefly to Rock Island, Illinois, where he had spent much of his youth.

When war broke out, he enlisted in the Federal army as a private with the Tenth Illinois Infantry Regiment and eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In the winter of 1862–63, he was assigned to help recruit volunteers for the First Arkansas Infantry (US) from northern Arkansas, where Union sentiment was higher among whites than in the agricultural flatlands. He became second in command of the unit. His unit participated in General Frederick Steele’s disastrous Camden Expedition in 1864, including the losing battles at Poison Spring and Marks’ Mills. But he spent most of his battlefield career around Fort Smith (Sebastian County), where he helped recruit the Second and Fourth Arkansas Cavalries. The Fourth was commanded by Lafayette Gregg, another future state Supreme Court justice. Accounts differ about whether Searle was wounded, although he once said that horses were shot from under him three times. The obituary in a Rock Island newspaper forty years later said he died of complications from a Civil War injury.

After the war, he and his wife, Casarilla “Kassie” Pierce Searle, settled at Fort Smith, and he opened a law practice. He was appointed prosecuting attorney for the Ninth Judicial District, a United States commissioner for the Western District of Arkansas, an assistant United States district attorney for the Western District, and later circuit judge of the Ninth Judicial Circuit—several of the jobs either simultaneously or very briefly. He was appointed to the State Board of Education and was instrumental, with his wartime colleague Lafayette Gregg, in the formation of the University of Arkansas (then the Arkansas Industrial University), which opened in 1872 in Fayetteville (Washington County). He was a member of the university’s original board of trustees. He later lived for a period in Arkadelphia (Clark County).

In February 1871, Governor Clayton appointed Searle to the Arkansas Supreme Court. The five-member court became highly politicized during the Reconstruction era. Opposing factions of the ruling Republican Party went to war, politically and literally, over which faction—Joseph Brooks and his radical faction of “Brindletails” or Elisha Baxter and his moderate and conciliatory “Minstrels”—had won the 1872 race for governor. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John “Poker Jack” McClure and ultimately including Searle, joined the long and often confusing political melee to declare Brooks the duly elected governor over Baxter, who had settled into the office in January after the election. A maelstrom of judicial decrees and legislative actions ended in a rush to see which side and which department of government—the legislative or judicial—could render the first official opinion on the victor.

During the rush by the Supreme Court and the legislature to issue the first decision about the election winner, Searle and a fellow justice, John E. Bennett, were kidnapped by more than a dozen of Baxter’s militiamen when the justices’ train from Memphis arrived in what is now North Little Rock (Pulaski County) in May 1874 to assemble the court and render a ruling. The militiamen held Searle and Bennett captive in hideouts in Pulaski and Saline counties over a weekend. Bennett managed to send a letter to Governor Baxter demanding his and Searle’s release, and an infantry detachment arrived and freed them. The two weary men trudged back into Little Rock (Pulaski County) for the court to assemble and render its decision.

Justice Searle was singled out in the newspapers for ridicule. After days of puzzlement about what had happened to the two justices, the Arkansas Gazette wrote sneeringly: “The lost is found. Bennett and Searle have turned up. They have been on a trip to the country for the benefit of their health.”

A majority of the assembled justices, including Searle, upheld a decision by a Pulaski Circuit Court opining that Brooks had won the race (Brooks v. Page, 1874). In a comprehensive law-review article on the judicial meanderings during Reconstruction and the Brooks-Baxter War, judicial scholar L. Scott Stafford called the Supreme Court’s unusual effort to proclaim Supreme Court jurisdiction a “judicial coup d’etat.”

But President Grant had become disgusted with Brooks’s and his Brindletails’ efforts to stall a decision. Notwithstanding the state Supreme Court decision and armed with an opinion from his own attorney general that Baxter was the duly elected governor of Arkansas, the president issued a proclamation affirming Baxter as the governor and ordering Brooks’s assembled forces to disperse. Baxter was officially certified as the elected governor, 41,808 votes to Brooks’s 38,909.

The Arkansas House of Representatives impeached McClure, Searle, and Bennett, and the Senate convicted them and removed them from office. When the new constitution was ratified in the fall, it reduced the Supreme Court from five to three members, and Democrats were restored to power.

Searle picked up and moved back to the Midwest. He practiced law in St. Louis, Missouri, and nearby in Illinois at Pana, Chicago, and finally Rock Island, where he became owner of the farm on which he had spent much of his childhood. One biography said he was a campaign speaker for Rutherford B. Hayes in the campaign against Samuel J. Tilden in 1876.

Searle died on August 18, 1906, at Rock Island. He is buried in Chippiannock Cemetery.

For additional information:
“Biography of Colonel Elhanan John Searle.” Access Genealogy, A Free Genealogy Weekly. https://accessgenealogy.com/arkansas/biography-of-colonel-elhanan-john-searle.htm (accessed December 8, 2023).

Spears, Circuit Judge Jim. “Elhanan J. Searle.” Arkansas Lawyer 43, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 28.

Stafford, Logan Scott. “Judicial Coup D’état: Mandamus, Quo Warranto and the Original Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Arkansas.” University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 20, no. 4 (1998): 891–984. Online at https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview/vol20/iss4/3/ (accessed December 8, 2023).

Vindex. “Another Earthquake in Pike.” Arkansas Gazette, June 19, 1870, p. 2.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas