Harney Re-Examined, Part I: The Early Years of William Harney

William Harney near the end of his career.

William Selby Harney was born in a small town on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. In his day he mattered enough that Americans named a lake, a county, a school, streets, a channel, a mountain, a park and hot springs after him; today he is little known. A fresh look shows a leader who disobeyed orders, committed racist violence, and used political connections to escape the consequences — a record worth facing for a truer picture of the past.

Jackson's protégé

• Connections: his family was close to Andrew Jackson, who arranged a Navy place for him at 17. Harney wanted to serve under Jackson himself and joined the Army as a lieutenant in Jackson's command.
• Presence: Jefferson Davis, later president of the Confederacy, called the 6-foot-3, broad-chested, blue-eyed Harney "physically, the finest specimen of a man I ever saw."
• Varied duty: within weeks of his commission he led an anti-piracy task force against Jean Lafitte's Louisiana buccaneers. He built frontier forts, recruited, sat on courts-martial, commanded military lumberjacks and led campaigns into Indigenous territory — and served as Jackson's aide at the handover of Spanish Florida.

Temper and ambition

Through Jackson, Harney won a command on a major expedition to map the upper Midwest and make treaties with Indigenous nations. On it he:

• won one of two races against the Crow nation's fastest runner;
• fathered a child with a Native American woman, whom he later abandoned;
• argued so fiercely with his commanding officer that he was court-martialed for disobeying orders.

At Fort Winnebago he savagely beat a fellow soldier's dog for digging up the fort's vegetable garden, and lashed an iron miner who sold alcohol to his men. Once he set out to flog a Native American man for breaking a minor rule and, remembering the Crow race, offered to let him go if he could win a race across a frozen river. Harney gave him a head start and chased him, rawhide strap in hand; the man crossed thin ice that would not hold the much heavier Harney, who fell through, and escaped. These incidents foreshadowed what came next.

St. Louis, 1833–1834

• In January 1833 Harney married Mary Mullanphy, daughter of the reputedly wealthiest man in St. Louis.
• He asked Jackson, by then President, for promotion to major as paymaster at Jefferson Barracks, near his wife. When a St. Louis auctioneer mocked Jackson in public, Harney threw him to the ground.
• In 1834 the couple moved into the mansion of his wife's sister while her family was in France.

The killing of Hannah

On April 26, 1834, 33-year-old Major Harney attacked a young enslaved woman named Hannah. Unable to find the keys to his in-laws' house, he blamed her and beat her with a rawhide strap to make her say where they were. The torture went on for three days, until Hannah died. A coroner's inquest ruled on June 28, 1834 that Hannah "came to her death by wounds inflicted by William S. Harney."

Hannah was a young mother. Her 8-year-old child, Fannie, was almost certainly the result of rape by her enslaver, John Mullanphy — Harney's father-in-law.

Even in slaveholding St. Louis the killing shocked people. Harney fled east; soon after, "a mob…assembled to pull down [his] house," and it took great effort by his best friend to stop it. A Cincinnati newspaper wrote:

"A MONSTER! A fellow by the name of HARNEY, a few days since, MURDERED a Negro woman, by whipping her to death in St. Louis.! … It is hoped and believed there is virtue and firmness enough in the army to declare non-intercourse with SUCH A MURDERER."

No consequences

• Transfer: the Army moved him away from St. Louis because of public feeling against him.
• Acquittal: indicted for murder, he won a change of venue to the circuit court of Judge Lawless, a well-known pro-slavery politician, who acquitted him.
• Promotion: he kept rising, and as general in charge of the Pacific Northwest his actions led to the Pig War.

Later parts of the series cover a still deadlier atrocity and how his temper provoked and worsened the Pig War crisis. Next: Part II, Harney's treatment of Native Americans.

Sources

Based on "Harney Re-Examined: The Early Years of General William Harney," part of the series Harney Re-Examined: A New Look at a Forgotten Figure, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.