Jesse Turner (1805–1894)

Jesse Turner, a North Carolina native, was a lawyer and politician who played a major but fickle role in Arkansas’s long odyssey through slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. He finally turned to economic development, principally railroads. He was a leader of the Whig Party in Arkansas until its disintegration during the Civil War, and he then took a respite from politics; during Reconstruction, he returned as a Democrat. Turner was elected to both houses of the Arkansas General Assembly, was the federal prosecuting attorney in the new United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, and served briefly as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He spent most of his life in Van Buren (Crawford County), where he became a revered figure. When the United States established a military camp on Pickett Hill on the east side of Van Buren during World War II to train soldiers to operate railroads in captured enemy territory in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and southern France, it was named Camp Jesse Turner.

Turner’s forebears were Scotch-Irish who migrated from Scotland to County Downs in northern Ireland, then, in 1750, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and finally to Orange County, North Carolina, where he was born on October 3, 1805, to James Turner and Rebecca Clendenin Turner. He was educated there and, at the age of eighteen, began teaching school. At nineteen, he read law under a local attorney, William McCauley, and was admitted to the bar in 1825. In 1830, he migrated westward, first across the border to Bellefonte—now a ghost town in northern Alabama—and then the next year to Van Buren in Arkansas Territory.

An ardent admirer of Henry Clay, the celebrated statesman of the pre–Civil War era and three-time candidate for president who earned the appellation “The Great Compromiser,” Turner was soon a state leader of the Whig Party. The party never elected a governor or a congressman in Arkansas but was influential in state affairs until its breakup on the eve of the Civil War.

Turner quickly got into territorial politics after settling at Van Buren and starting a law practice. He was an almost instant celebrity. In 1831, his practice took him forty-five miles north of town to Fayetteville (Washington County), where he ran afoul of a prominent Democrat, Mathew Leeper, a receiver in the territorial land office appointed by President Andrew Jackson. Turner was offended by some remarks attributed to Leeper and challenged him to a duel. Leeper accepted the challenge, and the two men and their seconds and friends gathered across the line in the Cherokee Nation, where duels were not illegal. As they were about to fire their weapons, Leeper apologized for his remarks about Turner, and they left the field, “much to the disgust of the many Indians that had gathered to witness the affair,” according to an 1889 history of northwestern Arkansas. Leeper moved to Texas. The incident became regional lore.

Northwestern Arkansas was a stronghold for Whigs, and Turner developed friendships with Whig leaders like Albert Pike, who published Turner’s screeds about President Andrew Jackson and bank policy in Pike’s newspaper, the Arkansas Advocate. In 1838, Turner was elected to the state House of Representatives from Crawford County, and in 1840 he was chairman of the Whigs’ state convention. Turner’s candidate for president, William Henry Harrison, won the election but lost Arkansas to Martin Van Buren, 6,679 to 5,160. The Harrison administration in 1841 appointed Turner to the board of visitors of the West Point Military Academy.

In 1842, he married Violet P. Drennen of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, but she died later in the year. In 1855, he married Rebecca J. Allen, a native of Warwickshire, England, who was reared in Pittsburgh. They had a son, Jesse Turner Jr., who later would practice law with his father at Van Buren.

After five years of delays, Congress in 1851 passed a bill dividing Arkansas into two federal judicial districts, creating a Western District of Arkansas. President Millard Fillmore appointed Turner as the federal prosecutor for the district and Daniel Ringo as the judge. They brought swift justice to the region. According to one account, Turner prosecuted and Ringo sentenced “an eclectic group consisting of one white, one Native American, one half-blood Cherokee, and one African American person” to public hangings.

As the dilemma of disunion arose after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Turner and most other Whigs opposed secession. He was a delegate to the secession convention in 1861 and was the temporary chairman. Turner strenuously opposed secession early in the convention. However, Turner, like most other Whigs, went along with secession following Fort Sumter, although he would maintain that he had supported an “act of revolution” rather than secession. He seemed to abandon politics entirely during the ensuing war while becoming a silent Democrat. When the Union army established control of Arkansas, he came to terms with Unionists, announcing in a public letter that the Confederacy had lost the war and that slavery had to be abandoned.

Turner ran for the legislature successfully again twice, as a Democrat for the state Senate in 1866 and 1874. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1876, which nominated Samuel J. Tilden for president. Tilden carried the popular vote both nationally and in Arkansas, but the electoral college gave the presidency to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes.

When Justice David Walker—once the chief justice during Reconstruction—resigned from the Arkansas Supreme Court owing to bad health at the end of his second stint on the court in 1878, Governor William R. Miller appointed Turner to the seat for the last several months of the term. He wrote no notable opinions during the short span.

After the Civil War, Turner’s main interest was not politics but industrial development, mainly his beloved Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad. Turner’s goal was to extend the railroad all the way to the Atlantic Coast. Financial problems eventually overwhelmed the company after the Panic of 1857, and the bankrupt railroad was taken over by northern capitalists, some of whom, like the future presidential candidate James G. Blaine, Turner had pursued. Turner took a seat as a vice president of the company, but he had little role in its subsequent development.

Turner was reputed to have a library of 1,500 books at his estate at Van Buren. He died on November 22, 1894. He is buried in Fairview Cemetery in Van Buren.

For additional information:
Dougan, Michael. “Jesse Turner.” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979–1996.

Gramlich, Leisa. “Jesse Turner: Lawyer, Politician, Public Servant.” Journal of the Fort Smith Historical Society 32 (April 2008): 8–15.

History of Benton, Washington, Carroll, Madison, Crawford, Franklin, and Sebastian Counties, Arkansas. Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1889.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas