Howell was born in Warsaw, Georgia on December 10, 1839. He traced his ancestry back to John Howell, who received a land grant in Virginia in 1639 and whose descendants moved to North Carolina not later than 1743. Clark Howell's father, Evan, settled in Georgia when Clark was about nine years old. Until 1851 young Evan lived on a farm, and then moved with the family to Atlanta.
He went to school, learned telegraphy, and at sixteen entered the Georgia Military Institute in Marietta. After two years he went to Sandersville, Ga. , and read law. Then for a year he attended the Lumpkin Law School, which in 1867 became the law department of the University of Georgia. He graduated in 1859.
Graduating, he returned to Sandersville and began to practise. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted for a year in the 16t Georgia Regiment. At the expiration of his term he helped organize a battery, of which, September 7, 1863, he became captain; and until the war's end he served in that capacity, participating in engagements from Virginia to Tennessee and Mississippi.
It was a considerable time after the war before the courts were reëstablished, and during that interval Howell engaged in cutting timber on his father's lands. In 1867, he became reporter on the Atlanta Intelligencer, but in 1869 he again took up his law practice. He was soon made solicitor-general, and from 1875 to 1879 he served in the state Senate.
In 1876 he bought an interest in the Atlanta Constitution, which he was to retain till 1897, and, forsaking law, he became editor of his paper. Since its establishment in 1868 the Constitution had shown remarkable vitality, but under the new management it soon became the most important paper in the South, and among the most important in America. Its editor was honest and bold; he had shrewdness and imagination; and he wrote trenchantly. He knew how to surround himself with able assistants, employing, among others, Henry W. Grady and Joel Chandler Harris; and he knew how to fuse his assistants into harmonious unity. Perhaps the most notable specific activity of the paper was its successful advocacy of a new state constitution (1877), and of the inauguration of a railroad commission; but its influence against defeatism and in behalf of integrity and courage, though less tangible, was in the long run more valuable.
For many years, Howell was among the leaders of every large public movement undertaken in Atlanta. From 1878 to 1892 he was a delegate to most of the national conventions of the Democratic party, and during the Spanish-American War he was appointed by President McKinley on an important war commission. From 1903 to 1905 he was mayor of Atlanta.
He was married, June 5, 1861, to Julia A. Erwin, of Erwinton, S. C.
1811–1882
1817–1850
1842–1906
1877–1970
1870–1943
1879–1957
1873–1943
1866–1933
1863–1936
1879–1957
