James Harris

About age 27, a member of the Catawba Tribe in the York District, he enlisted as Private, Company H, 12th South Carolina Infantry in December 1861. He served, along with his brother John, as a Company cook prior to the Maryland Campaign.

He was slightly wounded in the foot in action at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

He was wounded again, at Ream's Station, VA in 1864 and was captured at Charlotte, NC on 16 May 1865 and paroled there.

He returned to York County and may have served for some period as Chief of the Catawba Tribe, but died in 1874 at about age 42.

His service from the Rolls,1 as Jim Harris (Indian). His Sharpsburg wound from a casualty list in the Yorkville Enquirer of 8 October 1862. His capture at Charlotte from Kirkland.2 Further details from Laurence M. Hauptman's Between Two Fires (1995), Speck & Schaffer's paper Catawba Kinship and Social Organization (1942, pdf), and Timothy Fenlon's master's thesis A Struggle for Survival and Recognition: the Catawba Nation, 1840-1860 (2007, pdf). His burial place and death date from York County Genealogy Society's The Quarterly for March & June 1990.

His name is among those of 17 (of the 19 known) Catawbas who fought in the Confederate Army on a memorial erected in a small park in Fort Mill, SC in 1900 [online from the HMDB].

For additional information, you can find selected parts of Ian Watson's Catawba Indian Genealogy (1995) online from Google Books.

The population of the Catawba tribe in South Carolina in 1860 was 55 persons; there were 60 at the 1890 US Census.

In addition to his brother John, two other Catawbas wounded in Maryland were Privates William Canty/Cantey and Jefferson Ayers of the 17th South Carolina Infantry.

c. 1832; York District, SC

05/23/1874; Catawba Reservation, Rock Hill, SC; burial in Catawba Indian Reservation Cemetery, York County, SC