Harmon Runnels

Harmon Runnels (July 1839) was a planter and politician of Georgia and Mississippi in the United States. A soldier in the American Revolutionary War, he was also involved in battles with indigenous people "on the frontier," and the Indians apparently called him Bloody Shoe. Runnels lived in Georgia before moving to the vicinity of Pearl River in southern Mississippi. He founded the town of Monticello, and represented Laurence County, Mississippi at the state constitutional convention of 1817. He served multiple terms in the Georgia and Mississippi state legislatures.

Biography Little is known of his early life, but a Runnels genealogist publishing in 1873 believed he was descended from the unnamed "older brother" of a 17th-century immigrant named Samuel Runnels. Said to be of Scotch ancestry, the brothers first settled in Nova Scotia. The older brother is believed to have settled somewhere in the Southern Colonies.

According to Dunbar Rowland, "He had been a fighting captain in the Continental Army and was a ready, forceful, strong character." Other accounts rank him as a colonel. Historian and partisan Jacksonian Democrat J. F. H. Claiborne, writing in the Natchez Free Trader in 1841 stated that Runnels was "engaged in several battles, and in two or three desperate affairs with the Tories. After the revolution and until his immigration to this Territory, he took a leading part in the border difficulties with the Indians and received from them, as the late Gen. Dale informed us, the title of Bloody-shoe."

His wife was Hannah Hubert, daughter of Benjamin Hubert, who was also a Continental soldier in the American Revolutionary War. Another account has him marrying a Miss Howell in 1785.

Runnels represented Clarke County, Georgia in the Georgia General Assembly in 1802, 1803, and 1804. They may have lived in Elbert County at one time because one of their sons was born there. Runnels and either Shadrack King or George W. King represented Lawrence County at the first Mississippi state constitutional convention in 1817. He was politically aligned with the Jeffersonian Democrats.

Following his death at home in or around July 1839, at the age of 86, he was buried with military honors. Runnels was a Baptist by religion. The residue of his estate consisted of "30 Negroes, one wagon, and three yokes of oxen."