Bartee Haile
Midshipman Robert Potter resigned from the U.S. Navy on Mar. 20, 1821 and headed home to North Carolina to raise a little hell.
When the ex-sailor was not studying the law, he was raking the Tar Heel elite over the coals. A sharp-tongued critic of the privileged planter class, he wrote sarcastic poems publicly humiliating cowardly aristocrats who declined his invitation to a duel.
Potter’s soaring popularity with the common man won him a seat in the North Carolina legislature, the House of Commons. His tell-it-like-it-is appeal soon earned him a promotion to the U.S. Congress, where everyone predicted big things for ambitious Bobby Potter.
All that changed on a violent afternoon in August 1831 in the North Carolina community of Oxford. Tipped off to his wife’s infidelities during his long absences, Potter took a pocketknife to two of the alleged home-wreckers. The victims of the sadistic castrations were a middle-aged preacher and a boy still in his teens.
Potter gave up his congressional seat before serving a six-month sentence for the vicious and evidently unprovoked attacks. But the scandal only served to strengthen his standing among his constituents, who returned their hero to the state legislature in the fall of 1834. Neither a messy divorce nor an attempt on his life by a brother-in-law had an adverse effect on the election.
Potter’s fellow lawmakers were not happy, however, to see him and came up with an excuse to ban the hot-tempered outcast. He was expelled from the House of Commons in January 1835 for the unpardonable sin of cheating at cards, a shocking violation of the chivalrous code of southern conduct.
Facing the fact he had no future in North Carolina politics, 35 year old Potter packed his bags for Texas. Arriving on the eve of the Lone Star Revolution, he made the most of the golden opportunity. As the Nacogdoches delegate to the colonists’ convention in March 1836, he signed the Declaration of Independence and accepted an appointment as acting secretary of the navy.
When President Sam Houston chose his cabinet that October, Potter was nowhere to be found. For months the good-looking gadabout had ignored his official duties to concentrate on chasing other men’s wives, a dangerous pastime that kept him in hot water.
Mrs. Harriet Page fell for the Carolina Casanova with an indiscreet thud that offended even broad-minded frontiersmen. She later claimed the smooth talker convinced her that Mr. Page was among the handful of Texans killed at the Battle of San Jacinto. In reality her husband was alive and kicking, an inconvenient technicality that made Harriet a bigamist when she tied the knot with Potter.
The couple set up housekeeping in East Texas on the shores of Caddo Lake. Potter had not lost his knack for wooing voters and spent two terms in the Republic Senate representing Fannin and Red River counties.
In the meantime, a feud of epic proportions transformed much of eastern Texas into a combat zone. Regulators fought Moderators in backwoods ambushes and full-scale pitched battles.
Potter locked horns with a leading Regulator named William Pinckney Rose, alias “The Lion of the Lakes,” who happened to hail from Oxford, North Carolina. The sly senator persuaded his pal, President Mirabeau Lamar, to bring three murder charges against Rose and to put a hefty price on his head. He set out in March 1842 to remove the troublesome thorn from his side and collect the reward.
Potter and a posse of 17 supporters swooped down on the Rose place. After searching high and low for his foe, he rode away unaware “The Lion” was hiding under a pile of burning brush.
The Regulators returned the compliment at dawn the next day. Ignoring Harriet’s hysterical warning, Potter panicked and ran for the lake where he propped his shotgun against a tree and tried to swim for it.
As Rose held Harriet back, his son-in-law shot Potter to death with his own weapon when he came up for air.
“Now what do you think of your pretty Bobby?” asked the triumphant Rose.
Pointing at an artillery piece just out of reach, Harriet retorted, “If only I had a match to touch off this cannon, I would shoot your tongue down your throat!”
Rose and seven other Regulators were detained briefly, but murder charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. The feud was finally winding down, and amnesty was the order of the day.
When Robert Potter’s will was probated the next year, Harriet got the surprise of her scandalous life. The bulk of the Carolina Casanova’s estate, including the house where his widow lived with her latest husband – the late senator’s handyman – was bequeathed to yet another woman.
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