William A. Harris (politician, 1841)

William A. Harris

William Alexander Harris (born October 29, 1841 in Luray , Page County , Virginia , †  December 20, 1909 in Chicago ) was an American politician of the Populist Party who represented the state of Kansas in both chambers of the US Congress .

Life

At the time Harris was born, his father, who was also named William Alexander Harris , was a member of the US House of Representatives in Washington for Virginia . It was in this city that the young William graduated from Columbian College , later George Washington University , in 1859 ; two years later he completed his training at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington .

When the Civil War broke out , Harris joined the Confederate Army . He served there for three years, initially with the rank of Adjutant General , and later as an orderly officer in the Army of Northern Virginia . After the war ended, he settled in Kansas in 1865, where he worked as a civil engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad until 1868 . That year he moved to Lawrence , where he acted as the advocate of several railroad companies that wanted to acquire the land of the Delaware Indians . From 1884 he lived in Linwood , where he worked in agriculture and ranching.

politics

William Harris was a member of the short-lived Populist Party , which had great support, especially among farmers in the Great Plains , and which later became predominantly part of the Democratic Party . He sat in the House of Representatives in Washington from March 4, 1893 to March 3, 1895. After trying in vain for re-election, he spent the following two years in the Kansas Senate before returning to Congress as a US Senator on March 4, 1897 .

This time, too, his re-election attempt was unsuccessful, so that he had to leave the Senate on March 3, 1903. In 1906 Harris lost the election to governor of Kansas, whereupon he withdrew from politics. He took a job with the National Livestock Association in Chicago and died there in 1909.

Web links

• William A. Harris in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• William A. Harris in the database of Find a Grave (English)