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POTTER, Robert, a Representative from North Carolina; born in Granville County, near Williamsboro,
N.C., about 1800; attended the common schools; midshipman in the United States Navy 1815-1821;
studied law; was admitted to the bar and practiced in Halifax, Halifax County, N.C.; member of the
State house of commons in 1826 and 1828; moved to Oxford, Granville County, N.C., in 1827 and
continued the practice of law; elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-first and Twenty-second
Congresses and served from March 4, 1829, until his resignation in November 1831; again a member
of the State house of commons from 1834 until his expulsion in January 1835; moved to Harrison
County, Tex., in 1835 and settled on a farm overlooking Lake Soda, near Marshall; member of the
convention that declared the independence of Texas March 2, 1836; during the Texas Revolution was
secretary of the navy in the cabinet of the Provincial President, David G. Burnett; represented the Red
River District in the Texas Congress 1837-1841; participated in the Regulator-Moderator War in east
Texas as a leader of the Harrison County Moderators; his home being surrounded by the Regulators
on March 2, 1842, he ran to the edge of Lake Soda and dived in, his body sinking to the bottom
riddled with bullets; interred at Potters Point, a bluff near his home; reinterred in the Texas State
Cemetery, at Austin, in 1931.
BibliographyFisher, Ernest G. Robert Potter: Founder of
the Texas Navy. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1976; Shearer, Ernest Charles. Robert Potter,
Remarkable North Carolinian and Texan. Houston: University of Houston Press, 1951.
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