Howry was born on May 14, 1844 in Oxford, Mississippi. He was the son of Judge James M. and Narcissa (Bowen) Howry and was descended, through both parents, from Revolutionary families of Virginia and South Carolina. His father was a prosperous lawyer and a founder of the University of Mississippi.
Howry at the outbreak of the Civil War was a student at the University of Mississippi. In March 1862 he put aside his studies to enlist as a private in the Confederate army. Later he completed his academic and legal education at the University (LL. B. , 1867).
He participated in nine battles (Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, New Hope Church, Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Jonesboro, and Franklin) and many skirmishes; by 1864 he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant of Company A of the 29th Mississippi Infantry and had fought without injury until the battle of Franklin, when he was severely wounded.
After he comleted his study he settled in Oxford, where he practised law and assisted in the reconstruction of his state. Elected to the lower house of the state legislature in the autumn of 1880, he served four years, then in April 1886 he was appointed United States district attorney for the northern district of Mississippi, a post which he held through the first administration of President Cleveland. As a reward for his services as Democratic national committeeman during the presidential campaign of 1892, Cleveland offered to appoint him to a mission to South America but he declined the offer.
He was then offered, in August 1893, an appointment as assistant attorney general of the United States in charge of the defense of the Indian depredation claims. Howry accepted this post and removed to Washington where he was to remain for the rest of his life. Four years later, on January 28, 1897, Cleveland appointed him an associate justice of the Court of Claims. Howry's work as an associate justice of the Court of Claims, which extended over a period of eighteen years, was marked throughout his tenure of office by his detailed learning in the general field of Anglo-American law and in the special jurisprudence of the Court, which his earliest opinions displayed.
His decisions are frequently monographs on points of special knowledge sometimes remote from the law. He delivered many notable decisions, of which perhaps the most important are those rendered in the French spoliation claims, the Chickasaw land case, and the concurring opinion in Lincoln vs. United States in which the wide extent of his knowledge of the Civil War is evident. President Wilson twice offered Howry the chief justiceship of the Court of Claims, but Howry each time refused to accept it because of an attached condition requiring him to retire on attaining an eligible age.
He voluntarily retired, however, on March 15, 1915. The remainder of his life was devoted to a general practice of a consulting and advisory nature. All of his life he remained a stanch Presbyterian and Democrat, a conservative and an advocate of sound money. He was of small stature and had a delicate constitution. He died of heart failure in Washington, in the early morning of July 20, 1928, and was buried at Oxford, Miss.
By temperament he was naturally industrious.
He was married three times: to Edmonia Beverley Carter, on January 14, 1869; to Harriet Holt Harris, on July 21, 1880; and to Sallie Behethaland (Bird) Smith, on July 25, 1900. He had seven children by his first two marriages.
