John E. Bennett (1833–1893)

Born and educated in western New York state, John Emory Bennett moved to Arkansas after the Civil War and had a brief judicial career, including a stint on the Arkansas Supreme Court, during which he was kidnapped when he and another justice prepared to deliver a crucial decision during the tumult known as the Brooks-Baxter War. Expelled by the Arkansas General Assembly after three years on the court, he practiced law at Helena (Phillips County) and then moved to South Dakota, where he led the new state’s Supreme Court for four years until his sudden death.

John Emory Bennett was born on March 18, 1833, in East Bethany, New York, a tiny community between the Great Lakes cities of Buffalo and Rochester, to farmer James Bennett and Abigail Bennett. The village’s chief institution was the Genesee Poor Farm, a stagecoach tavern that the community turned into a sort of penal farm for the mentally ill and disabled, low-grade criminals, orphans, and widows and their children. Bennett went to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary at Lima, New York, which was both a seminary and a college, and graduated in 1852. He married Marium Kendall, and they moved to Morrison, Illinois, a hamlet a few miles from the Mississippi River, where he became the town’s first postmaster.

In September 1862, Bennett, by then a salesman in a dry goods store in Cleveland, joined the Union army and helped raise three regiments of Illinois volunteers. He was elected lieutenant colonel and promoted to full colonel and finally to brigadier general. He commanded the Third Brigade of the First Division of the Army of the Cumberland and participated in twenty-two engagements, including Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Prairieville, and Atlanta.

After the war, Bennett returned home to Illinois and was appointed a judge advocate for the Federal army and was assigned under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 to a military district encompassing Mississippi and Arkansas under General Edward Ord. He and his wife moved to Helena, where he opened a law practice and then, in the summer of 1868, was appointed judge of the First Judicial District by Governor Powell Clayton. He also ran for the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from the First District that year but lost the Republican nomination to Logan H. Roots, who went on to win the seat in the general election.

Bennett firmly aligned with Powell Clayton in the factionalized Republican Party. As circuit judge, he presided over hearings on the mysterious assassination of former Arkansas congressman and Confederate general Thomas C. Hindman in 1868. In 1871, he was appointed to the first board of trustees of the Arkansas Industrial University (later the University of Arkansas) and made the motion to locate the school in Fayetteville (Washington County). When President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Associate Justice Thomas M. Bowen to be governor of the new Idaho territory in February 1871, Governor Clayton appointed Bennett to his seat on the Supreme Court.

Bennett’s three years on the court proved to be the most tempestuous in the court’s history. The justices became embroiled in the intraparty Republican conflict between two factions, the “Brindletails” led by Joseph Brooks and the “Minstrels” loyal to Elisha Baxter. Baxter seemed to win the close 1872 election and took office, but the other faction contended that the arch-liberal Brooks was the actual winner. The dispute raged through the courts and the Arkansas General Assembly before President Grant resolved the conflict by recognizing Baxter’s election, thus ending the armed conflict around the capitol at Little Rock (Pulaski County) that became known as the Brooks-Baxter War.

Bennett became involved in the conflict when he, Justice Elhanan J. Searle, and Chief Justice John “Poker Jack” McClure sided with Brooks and his faction. When the dispute eventually devolved into a race to see which one could hand down the first ruling on the election count, Bennett and Searle arrived in Argenta—now North Little Rock (Pulaski County)—on a train in May 1874 and were taken into custody by a group of militiamen supposedly loyal to Governor Baxter. The two men were held incommunicado over a weekend in secret spots between Little Rock and Benton (Saline County), including one night in a wooded gulch west of Little Rock.

As speculation about their whereabouts circulated, including in the newspapers, Justice Bennett managed to get a letter to the governor demanding to be set free. Baxter sent an infantry detachment to free them, and they walked back into Little Rock.

The three justices—the court had been expanded, briefly, to five justices—delivered the opinion in a suit styled Brooks v. Page affirming a trial judge’s decision that Brooks had won the election. It would later be characterized as a “judicial coup d’etat.” But President Grant, fed up with the Brooks faction’s antics and relying upon an opinion by the attorney general of the United States, issued a proclamation declaring Baxter the properly elected governor and ordered the Brooks militia to disband and leave the capital. Grant appeased Brooks by appointing him postmaster at Little Rock.

The legislature impeached the three justices who rendered the Brooks decision. Bennett left the capital and returned to Helena to practice law. In 1883, he and his wife and son moved to the town of Clark in the territory of South Dakota, where Bennett again practiced law. He became a district attorney and a member of the territorial board of agriculture. In November 1889, when South Dakota became a state, he was elected an associate justice of the new state Supreme Court and was reelected to a six-year term in November 1893.

Bennett died on December 31, 1893, three days before he was to take the oath for his new term. He is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Clark, South Dakota.

For additional information:
“Judge Bennett. The Eminent South Dakota Jurist Dies of Heart Disease.” Herald-Advance (Milbank, South Dakota), January 5, 1894, p. 4.

Stafford, Logan Scott. “Judicial Coup D’état: Mandamus, Quo Warranto and the Original Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Arkansas.” University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 20, no. 4 (1998): 891–984. Online at https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview/vol20/iss4/3/ (accessed March 5, 2024).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas