Almon Case

Dr. Almon Case (January 6, 1819 – January 11, 1867) was an Ohio-born medical doctor and Southern Unionist in Tennessee during the American Civil War. At war's end, he was elected to be a Tennessee state senator, representing the West Tennessee district of Obion County, Henry County, and Weakley County. He was shot and killed in 1867 during the Reconstruction era of the United States. He was murdered by 21-year-old Frank Farris of Obion County.

Biography Case was born 1819 in the U.S. state of Ohio. He was one of seven children of Persis Seward (a cousin of eventual U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward), and Dr. Gideon Case, originally of Connecticut, who moved to Hudson, Ohio, in a three-horse wagon about 1818. Case was married to Clarissa Pease in 1844 in Portage County, Ohio. With their boy Alden they moved to Obion County, Tennessee, in the late 1840s, and Case worked as a physician in the county seat of Troy, Tennessee before the American Civil War. Farris was a veteran of Company K of the 2nd Tennessee Cavalry (Confederate), described as with dark hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion. Republican-aligned papers compared his brother Oliver Farris, who led Company K, to the guerrilla Champ Ferguson. The Nashville Daily Press and Times, a Unionist outlet, claimed "was aided by several other guerrillas in the commission of the crimes, and undoubtedly had the connivance or acquiescence of the local people." The rebel papers claimed Case was killed because he had played in a role in the death of a third brother, John Farris, but Confederate John Farris was "wounded at the battle of Harrisburg, Mississippi in mid-July of 1864," when the "apparently mild-mannered" Case was not even in Tennessee, much less involved in combat in Mississippi. A bill that post-Confederate gunmen reportedly hoped to derail was a State Guard bill, promoted by Reconstruction Governor and ferocious Unionist and Democrat hater Parson Brownlow, to sustainably fund and arm a state militia force that could potentially disrupt their use of violence.

Harassment of the family continued even after the assassination of Case and "even visitors to their home were subject to ambush." His widow and surviving children eventually relocated to Graves County, Kentucky, to escape. Farris was never arrested or charged with any crime.

Legacy

In March 1867, New York-based artist Thomas Nast included an image of Farris riding down Case in his political cartoon Southern Justice, which represented "the brutal treatment of Negroes, Unionists, and Republicans by unregenerate Southern whites" and the Northern expectation that after the harvest of death that "the ideals fought for would be translated into reality" during the Reconstruction Era.

Case's murder was rapidly effaced from the historical record. A four-volume history of Tennessee published in 1932 claimed, citing a "highly partisan source," that he was killed "to avenge a brutal wartime murder." Almon Case's cause of death was not mentioned at all in his entry in the 1975 Biographical Directory of the Tennessee General Assembly.