Background
Harris, Ira was born on May 31, 1802 in Charleston, New York, United States. Son of Frederic Waterman and Lucy (Hamilton) Harris.
lawyer politician United States senator member of the New York State Senate
Harris, Ira was born on May 31, 1802 in Charleston, New York, United States. Son of Frederic Waterman and Lucy (Hamilton) Harris.
Then he studied law in Albany, and in 1828 was admitted to the bar.
He was also a friend of Abraham Lincoln's. He was a delegate to the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1846. He was a justice of the New York Supreme Court (3rd D) from 1847 to 1859, and was ex officio a judge of the New York Court of Appeals in 1850 and 1858.
In February 1861, Harris was elected a U.S. Senator from New York to succeed William H. Seward who did not seek re-election, but would be appointed U.S. Secretary of State by Abraham Lincoln. In the , Harris served on the Committees on Foreign Relations, and the Judiciary, and the Select Joint Committee on the Southern States. Although he supported the administration in the main, he did not fear to express his opposition to all measures, however popular at the time, that did not appear to him either wise or just.
He visited Lincoln at the White House often and grew a friendship with him. Booth stabbed Rathbone in the arm when he tried to stop the assassin from escaping. Clara and Henry were married in 1867, but were also step siblings, Harris having remarried to Pauline Rathbone, Henry's mother.
Judge Harris was for more than twenty years a professor of equity, jurisprudence and practice in the Albany Law School and during his senatorial term delivered a course of lectures at the law school of Columbian University (now George Washington University), Washington, D.C. In the Senate, he also served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Whig Party, Republican Party.
Member of New York Assembly, 1844-1847. Member of New York Senate, 1847. Member of faculty Albany Law School, 1851-1875.
Member United States Senate (Republican) from New York, 1861-1867.
Married Louisa Tubbs, before 1845. Married second, Mistress.