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Submitted: 10/27/08 • Approved: 10/13/09 • Last Updated: 10/29/14 • R87606-G0-S3
November 3, 1817 – September 23, 1874
Arkansas House of Representatives
1842 – 1844
Arkansas State Senator
1848 – 1850
Colonel, Company E, Arkansas Second Mounted Rifles
Confederate States Army
1861 – 1862
Governor of Arkansas
November 15, 1862 – April 20, 1864
Harris Flanagin was born in Roadstown, New Jersey to James Flanagin, an Irish cabinet maker and merchant, and Mary Harris. Little is known of his early life other than he was educated in a Society of Friends (Quaker) school and was a mathematics professor at Clermont Seminary in Frankfort, Pennsylvania, at the age of eighteen. He later moved to Paoli, Illinois where he began to study law. He was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1837 at the age of twenty. He moved to Arkansas in 1839 settling first in Greenville, Clark County and then Arkadelphia, Clark County where he established his law office on the town square. Flanagin, politically, was a Whig and was elected to the Arkansas General Assembly serving only one term. He volunteered for the Mexican War, but his company apparently never completed its organization. He was elected as state senator in 1848 and again served only one term. On July 31, 1851 he married Martha Elizabeth Nash of Hempstead County and the former Baptist began attending the Presbyterian Church and became known as a “trunk Baptist.” He was a reluctant secessionist when he was elected to attend the secessionist convention, but he left the convention to accept a position of captain in the Second Arkansas Mounted Rifles. He saw action at Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge and when Colonel James McQueen McIntosh was killed, he was elected Colonel. Colonel Flanagin was serving in the Army of Tennessee when friends nominated him for governor in a special election to unseat Governor Henry Massie Rector who was threatening to secede from the Confederacy. Rector tried to raise an anti-Irish sentiment by publishing a paper reporting that the Colonel’s real name was O’Flanagin. Flanagin won by a two-to-one margin. He was sworn in on November 15, 1862 and was able to get some laws through the legislature but failed to provide effective leadership. He made desperate attempts to raise the necessary troops to defend Arkansas from the Union, but in September of 1863 he was forced to flee Little Rock and set up a temporary capital in Washington, Hempstead County, Arkansas. While Flanagin remained in Confederate held territory a new Union government was established under Isaac Murphy. Flanagin returned to his law practice in Arkadelphia where he remained until his death.
References Consulted:
Ref:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Flanagin (Accessed 11/20/2008)
Ref:http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=104 (Accessed 11/20/2008)
Ref:http://www.nga.org/portal/site/nga/menuitem.29fab9fb4add37305ddcbeeb501010a0/?vgnextoid=b889224971c81010VgnVCM1000001a01010aRCRD (Accessed 11/20/2008)
Contributed on 10/27/08 by tomtodd
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Record #: 87606