Biography of Absalom Fowler, Arkansas

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Submitted by: Joy Fisher < >
        Date: 18 Dec 2007
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BIOGRAPHICAL AND PICTORIAL HISTORY OF ARKANSAS.
BY JOHN HALLUM.
VOL. I.
ALBANY: WEED, PARSON'S AND COMPANY, PRINTERS.
1887.

Entered according to act of Congress in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-seven,
BY JOHN HALLUM, 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.


ABSALOM FOWLER.

  This great lawyer was born in middle Tennessee, of poor and obscure parentage, and was
of mixed Saxon and Jewish blood. It is much regretted that his early life is unknown to
his most intimate friends in Arkansas who now survive him. The year when he came to
Arkansas is not now easily established. Hon. Samuel W. Williams, one of his most intimate
friends, is of the opinion he came here in 1833, but several well-known facts in his
history clearly indicate that he came to the territory of Arkansas at an earlier date. In
1836 he was a leading spirit in the constitutional convention, the acknowledged leader of
the whig party, and its candidate for governor in that year, positions scarcely
compatible with so short a residence, when there were many able men in the whig party.
Colonel Fowler's adopted daughter, now Mrs. Mary A. Nobles of Arkansas county, in a
recent letter to the author, says: "Colonel Fowler came from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I
have often heard him say, when he was about twenty-two years of age. He died June the
4th, 1859, aged fifty-seven years." This, if true, fixes his birth in 1802, and his
advent in Arkansas in 1824 or 1825.

  Another circumstance strongly indicates a residence here earlier than 1833. Tradition
says he came on foot from Memphis over the old military road to Little Rock, with his
wardrobe in a pair of saddle-bags thrown over his shoulder; that he was poor, but, before
the great financial crisis of 1837, had accumulated much property with the proceeds of
his professional labors.

  His physical manhood looked the perfection of nature's works, and challenged the
admiration of all who beheld it; poor, but proud and imperious as Jove, he had no
following in the beginning, no lineage to commend, no friends to promote his advancement
but the unclouded splendor of a great intellect wedded to untiring energy, and one of the
best physical constitutions ever given to the children of men, supplied them all, and
conducted him to the front rank, at a bar boasting Ashley, Crittenden, William Cummins
and afterward Pike, Hempstead and many others. There was no legal question too
complicated or abstruse to appear simple and as clear as a sunbeam under the inspiration
of his cultivated genius. The first twenty volumes of our reports attest the accuracy and
depth of his legal attainments. Dauntless, he knew no fear, rigid in his exactions,
unbending in his resolve, harsh and imperious, austere and overbearing in his great
forensic conflicts, he had no devoted following like Crittenden, Ashley, Fulton, Sevier,
Bob Johnson, Pike and the Conways, but his talents and genius rivaled the cold splendor
of an arctic glacier throwing back the rays of a frozen sun.

  In the trial of a case in the Federal court prior to 1840, Fowler prosecuting, Ashley
defending, angry words and insults passed between them, and Fowler picked up a cut-glass
inkstand and hurled it at Ashley, cutting a severe gash over the eye, from which blood
spouted in great profusion over books, papers and the table between them. Some years
after this in the argument of an important land suit at Jacksonport, he boldly denounced
a combination of land-pirates and whipped them with a scorpion's lash. That night the
pirates rallied their clans and proceeded to the office occupied by Fowler to lynch him.
When the mob came surging up he sprang to his feet, seized a pistol in each hand, met
them at the door, and in the most imperious tones ever uttered by man, demanded a halt,
and with arms presented told them he would shoot down the first man who dared advance an
inch. The mob halted, reeled and was dumbfounded at the exalted, defiant spirit of one
great and fearless man. Then the eloquent denouncer of crime repeated the awful
castigation, and the mob slunk away as from an eruption of Vesuvius.

  Colonel Samuel W. Williams, in a recent letter to the author, says : "Fowler was beyond
question a great man; he was naturally a military genius - commanded and masterly handled
the State troops when the Cherokees were rising. If he had chosen arms instead of law, he
would have made a combination of Grant's daring, Lee's conservatism and Stonewall
Jackson's dash. I don't think America would have had a nobler military character, if our
civil war had broken out in 1840 instead of 1861. Beyond question he was an orator, and
in practice had no superior at the bar. There is a tender side to his faults."

  He made a brilliant canvass in 1836 against James S. Conway for governor, but, in a
total of seven thousand seven hundred and sixteen votes, was defeated by a majority of
one thousand one hundred and two. In 1838, and again in 1844-5, he was a member of the
legislature from Pulaski, after which he seems to have dropped out of politics and
devoted all his time to his profession. He wore out a splendid physical constitution in
the ceaseless drafts made on it by tremendous energies. In April, 1859, whilst engaged in
the earnest argument of a case in the Federal court at Little Rock, he was stricken with
paralysis, from which he never recovered. He lingered until the 4th of June, when one of
the greatest lawyers Arkansas ever had passed away.