Background
Houk was born near Boyds Creek in Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1836. His father, a poor mechanic, died when Leonidas was only three years old and his mother married again in a few years without bettering herself financially. His early life, accordingly, was not an easy one.
Education
He went to school for only about three months in an old-field school. He learned the trade of cabinetmaking.
Career
He was for a time a Methodist preacher, and was admitted to the bar of Tennessee at the age of twenty-three. When the Civil War broke out two years later he was a leader in the group that held the East Tennessee union convention and later organized the 16t Tennessee Infantry, which was incorporated into the Federal army in the state of Kentucky. He, himself, enlisted as a private, soon became lieutenant and quartermaster of the regiment, and then became colonel of the 3rd Tennessee Volunteer Infantry.
After he was forced to resign in April 1863 on account of ill health, he began to write for the loyal press with the same vigor and force that had been so marked in all his other undertakings. In 1864 he was an elector for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket and the next year was a member of the state convention, whose radical reorganization of the state government he, however, disapproved. While he was judge of the 17th judicial circuit of Tennessee, from 1866 to 1870, he ordered that all treason cases be stricken from his docket as he held that the state of Tennessee ceased to exist on May 6, 1861, and he was probably the first Republican who publicly advocated equal rights for former Confederates. Yet in spite of such moderation he was emphatically a partisan. In the Republican National Convention in 1868 he supported Grant, and he was one of the "Stalwarts" who continued to support him in 1880.
After his resignation from the bench Houk moved to Knoxville, where he took up again the practice of law, but was soon drawn into political life. He served as a member of the Southern claims commission in 1873 and was elected to the Tennessee legislature. In 1879 he began his long term in Congress, which ended only with his death.
When he died of an accidental dose of poison the mountain people traveled on horseback and on foot for long distances to be present at his funeral, and the district that he had made his own Republican stronghold showed its loyalty to his memory by sending his son to sit in his seat in Congress.
Politics
His opinions and his expression of opinions were strongly and often bitterly Republican.