Stone Gardens: Illinois politician who was appointed to a federal judgeship in 1897 died during 1914 McAlester prison riot

Judge John Robert Thomas

The boy who would one day become Judge John Robert Thomas was born on October 11, 1846, in Mount Vernon, Illinois, into a line that already measured itself by wars.

His father, Major William Allen Thomas, had taken that rank in the Mexican War and died of wounds received at Cerro Gordo. His maternal grandfather, John I. Neely, had served on the staff of William Henry Harrison in the War of 1812.

 His great-grandfather, Major Joseph E. Neely, had fought in the Revolution. Family memory also claimed descent from Virginia’s Henry family and a Welsh strain that later biographers liked to mention.

After the major’s death, the child was taken to Indiana and raised by the Neelys. He went to common schools and then to the Hunter Collegiate Institute in Princeton, a small-town academy that finished what the household and the war dead had begun.

At seventeen he enlisted as a private in Company D of the 120th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, a late-war regiment organized in the winter of 1863 and 1864 and sent south with the Twenty-third Corps. He rose through the company to captain.

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On November 30, 1864, the regiment stood in the line at Franklin, Tennessee, where John Bell Hood flung the Army of Tennessee against entrenched Union works in one of the war’s most savage afternoon assaults. Thomas was wounded there. The injury never fully left him. He walked thereafter with a cane, a fact that would matter half a century later in a prison office in McAlester.

The war over, he read law and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1869. Metropolis, on the Ohio River, made him city attorney that year and the next. From 1871 to 1874 he served as state’s attorney. On December 28, 1870, he married Charlotte “Lottie” Culver of Metropolis.

They had five children. Only two lived to adulthood: Carolyn, born in 1872, and John Robert Jr., born in 1876. Lottie died about 1880. On November 20, 1884, while he sat in Congress, Thomas married Jessie Beattie.

.There were no children of the second marriage.

Republican voters in southern Illinois sent him to the House in 1878. He served five terms, from March 4, 1879, to March 3, 1889, first from the Eighteenth District and then from the Twentieth. He sat on the Naval Committee, chaired its subcommittee on naval construction, and in the Forty-seventh Congress chaired the Committee on Levees and Improvements of the Mississippi River.

 He pressed the 1882 appropriations that began replacing wooden ships with steel: the cruisers Chicago, Atlanta, and Boston, and the dispatch boat Dolphin. Colleagues later let him name an early armor-plated vessel. He spoke for the Naval War College at Newport. Local admirers in later years called him a father of the modern American Navy, a phrase that flattened committee work into legend but captured how he wanted the record to read.

 President William McKinley

He was Grand Master of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of Illinois in the mid-1880s, a Knight Templar, a member of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Loyal Legion, and a charter member of the Army and Navy Club in Washington. In 1883 he was one of a handful of House Republicans who voted against the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. He did not seek renomination in 1888.

Friendship with William McKinley outlasted the House. On June 30, 1897, President McKinley appointed him United States judge for the Northern District of Indian Territory. Thomas moved to Muskogee, then a raw town of a few thousand on the edge of the Creek Nation, and built a frame house on what was still prairie west of town. Federal courts in the Territory had jurisdiction over cases involving non-Indians.

 Tribal courts still handled their own citizens. Thomas’s docket was heavy. In ten months he was said to have disposed of more than seven hundred matters. He became the first judge in Indian Territory to impose a death sentence, hanging to be carried out on gallows in a stockade near the Muskogee jail.

The cases that defined the bench for the country were the Seminole trials of 1899. On the night of January 7 and 8, 1898, a mob of white men from Oklahoma Territory seized two Seminole youths, Lincoln McGeisey, eighteen, and Palmer Sampson, after the murder of Mary Leard near the territorial line. The pair were chained, tortured, and burned alive near Maud.

Whether they had killed Leard was never established in any court that mattered. Special prosecutor Horace Speed brought dozens of men before Thomas. Newspapers from New York and elsewhere packed the Muskogee courtroom. Thomas instructed juries that presence and consent could make a man a principal in kidnapping, that Oklahoma officers had no authority to drag prisoners out of the Indian Territory, and that the guilt or innocence of the burned boys was not the question.

Six men went to prison, among them Deputy United States Marshal Nelson M. Jones for twenty-one years. White settlers who had expected acquittals turned on the judge.

When his term expired in 1901, he campaigned hard for reappointment and lost it to Charles W. Raymond, a choice widely attributed to the patronage of Joseph Cannon of Illinois.

Thomas stayed in Muskogee and opened a private practice in the Turner Hardware Building.

In 1903 a young Michigan lawyer named Grant Foreman, lately of the Dawes Commission, joined the firm. In 1905 Foreman married Carolyn Thomas.

Much of the proposed constitution of the Sequoyah Convention, the 1905 effort to make Indian Territory a separate state, was drafted in that office. Thomas served as an alternate and then as a working delegate, vice chair of the constitution committee, chair of the judiciary subcommittee, and vice chair of the ratification campaign.

 He had first favored two states, Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory side by side. He changed his mind when he concluded that eastern and northern Republicans would never accept four Democratic senators from two new states. One state it would be.

After statehood in 1907 the first Republican state convention nominated him for the Oklahoma Supreme Court. He declined. From 1908 to 1910 he sat on the Oklahoma State Code Commission, charged with refining the patchwork of laws assembled in the rush to admission.

During the Spanish-American War the government had authorized him to raise two troops of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry at Muskogee. His son John Robert Jr. rode with the Rough Riders as a first lieutenant in Company L and later made a career in the Regular Army, rising to colonel of field artillery.

On January 19, 1914, Thomas, then sixty-seven, went to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester on legal business. Accounts of the client differ. One careful later narrative says he was there to see Abraham Collier, serving seven years for larceny. Another says the inmate was Frank Haikey, a Cherokee whose pre-statehood conviction had left jurisdiction tangled, and that Thomas was explaining the appeal.

He was in or near the warden’s office when three convicts, Charles Koontz, serving a long term after a bank robbery, Chiney Reed, and Tom Lane, produced smuggled pistols, took keys from a turnkey, and burst in. They ordered everyone to stand with hands up.

 Thomas, stout and dependent on the cane he had carried since Franklin, did not rise at once. He reached for the stick. The convicts shot him in the chest. Deputy warden D. C. Oates, sergeant F. C. Godfrey, and Bertillon photographer H. H. Drover were also killed.

Stenographer Mary Foster and others were wounded.

The three prisoners seized Warden R. W. Dick’s horse and buggy outside the gate and fled across open ground until pursuing guards shot them dead. Seven men died in the first escape from behind the walls of the new state prison.

Thomas was buried first in Greenhill Cemetery in Muskogee. He was later reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery, where his son would also lie after dying in 1933. Carolyn and Grant Foreman closed the law office after the judge’s death and gave the rest of their lives to the history of the tribes and the Territory.

 They stayed in the house he had built until their own deaths, Grant in 1953 and Carolyn in 1967.

The house passed into the keeping of the Oklahoma Historical Society as the Thomas-Foreman Home