Career
At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Berry joined the Confederate Army and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant with the 16th Arkansas Infantry Regiment. Berry lost his right leg during the Battle of Corinth in northern Mississippi. After recuperating from his wound he worked as a school teacher and started a private law practice.
Berry was elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1866. He was reelected in 1872 and in 1874. In his last term he was selected to be Speaker of the House. Berry was the chairman of the Democratic State Convention in 1876. In 1878 he became a judge for the Fourth Circuit Court and served in that post until 1882 when he was elected Governor of Arkansas.
The Berry administration focused on reducing the state debt and creating a State Mental Hospital. Berry did not run for reelection.
In March 1885, Berry was selected by the legislature to fill the unexpired term of Senator Augustus Hill Garland. Berry remained in the U.S. Senate for the next 22 years. In 1910, he accepted a position with the Arkansas History Commission to mark the graves of all Arkansas Confederate soldiers who had died in northern prisons.
Read more about this topic: James Henderson Berry
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)