Richard H. Powell (1827–1917)

Richard H. Powell was born in Virginia and reared in Tennessee but spent the last fifty-seven years of his life in Arkansas, as a farmer, merchant, lawyer, politician, and judge. During the Civil War, he joined the Confederate cause as a soldier in 1863 but spent much of his two-year military career as a prisoner of war. Later, he was a circuit judge in northeastern Arkansas for fourteen years, competed for a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court and lost, but then was appointed to the court for a few months in 1893. Powell’s tombstone identified his proudest moments: as a captain in Freeman’s Regiment of the First Missouri Cavalry for the Confederate States of America, which engaged in several skirmishes in northeastern Arkansas near his home, although mostly without him.

Richard Henry Powell was born on April 8, 1827, to Thomas Parnam Powell, who was of Welsh descent, and Jane P. Roland Powell. The couple started farming in Sussex County, Virginia, and moved to Bedford County, Tennessee, south of Nashville, in 1832. The couple owned thirty slaves and had about twenty white field hands, according to family genealogy. Powell’s father was an avid partisan, first a Democrat and then a Whig of the Henry Clay faction. Powell worked on the farm and attended private schools—known then as subscription schools, where parents paid teachers directly. At twenty-one, he attended the Salem Academy, a private school in the nearby town of Bell Buckle. He attended Cumberland Law School, which was then in Lebanon, Tennessee, and was licensed to practice law. He started a practice in the town of Lewisburg (Conway County) in 1855 and, in 1860, moved to Batesville (Independence County), where he joined the law office of Elisha Baxter, the future Republican governor best known as a central figure in the Brooks-Baxter War of 1874.

In 1861, Powell gave up the law, moved north to Izard County, started farming, and entered politics. A Democrat, he ran for state representative from Izard County in 1862 and won but served only a single term; by 1864, Union forces controlled most of the state, and the state government effectively vanished.

After the 1863 legislative session, Powell enlisted as a private but was promoted to captain in Colonel Thomas R. Freeman’s Missouri cavalry, which fought several skirmishes in the region with marginal success, although mostly without Powell’s participation, as he was captured in December at the home of a Confederate officer in Batesville.

At the time of his capture, he had $1,500 in Confederate currency in his pocket, which he slipped to the Confederate officer’s daughter, who passed the money on to Colonel Freeman, according to a family genealogy sketch. Powell was taken to Little Rock (Pulaski County) as a prisoner, then to St. Louis, and finally to Johnson’s Island in Ohio, which housed rebel officers. In February 1865, he was given a sixty-day furlough and returned home. He intended to rejoin Freeman’s cavalry but learned of the Confederate surrender and the war’s end. He surrendered at Jacksonport (Jackson County) and was paroled.

His judicial career began when he ran for judge of the Seventh Circuit in 1866 and was elected, but after two years and the adoption of a Unionist constitution he was disfranchised and declared ineligible for public office owing to his Confederate loyalties. He turned to “mercantile pursuits,” according to the genealogy, in towns in Independence and Izard counties. In 1874, he opened a law practice again, in Batesville, and in 1878 he was elected circuit judge. He would preside in the court until 1890, when he was defeated for judge of the altered judicial district.

In 1893, he entered the sweepstakes for two new justice positions on the state Supreme Court, which was expanded by law that year from three to five seats. He was nominated for one of the seats at a special state Democratic judicial convention but was defeated by James E. Riddick, who was chosen by voters at the general election. In May, Governor William Fishback appointed him as an interim justice for one of the new seats—for six months—until Carroll D. Wood, who was nominated and then elected for a term that began in January 1894, took office.

The genealogy, composed shortly after his death, said, “Judge Powell lacked much of what we call polish, but there was always a cordiality and patent sincerity, which won him friends and held them.” His family life was beset by tragedies. In 1849, he married Jane Taylor Temple, who bore nine children, three of whom died in infancy. She died in 1870, and in 1873 he married Harriet T. Herbert in Izard County; she bore two children, both of whom died in infancy. She died three years later, and in 1878 he married a widow, Susannah Gardner Davidson of North Carolina, who bore two children.

He moved to Fort Smith (Sebastian County) in 1908 and died on April 12, 1917, “of senility,” according to the death certificate. He is buried in Oaklawn Cemetery in Batesville, alongside a son who drowned in the nearby White River at Buffalo Shoals.

For additional information:
“R. H. Powell.” From Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Izard County, Arkansas. Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1889. Online at http://genealogytrails.com/ark/izard/bios2.html (accessed August 3, 2024).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas