Thomas Dickinson (Execution of)

Thomas Dickinson was hanged for murder at Arkansas Post (Arkansas County) in 1820 in the first legal public execution in the Arkansas Territory.

A man named Thomas Dickinson was charged with rape in 1820 in the first criminal indictment ever returned by a grand jury in Arkansas. Dickinson was tried on January 8, 1820, and after deliberating twenty minutes, a jury convicted him of raping and impregnating a woman named Sally Hall. Judge Andrew Scott ordered that Dickinson “be castrated according to the law in that behalf provided, by a skilful [sic] physician, under the direction of the sheriff of Arkansas county, on the 15th February, 1820, between ten o’clock, A. M., and three o’clock, P. M., of that day.” Governor James Miller then pardoned Dickinson, and the sentence was not carried out.

This may have been the same Thomas Dickinson who was executed later that year, though his hanging was not reported in the Arkansas Gazette. In his 1908 history of territorial Arkansas, Josiah H. Shinn refuted a claim that Jacob Strickland’s hanging at Arkansas Post on May 31, 1828, was the first legal execution in the state, writing that “Thomas Dickinson, a farmer owning 300 acres of land on Old River, made an unprovoked assault upon a neighbor and killed him. He was arrested, tried, convicted and hanged at Arkansas Post, Ark., in the year 1820.”

Shinn added: “This is the first duly authenticated ‘necktie party’ of the territory of Arkansas and a terrible warning to evil doers.” His source for the information is not cited.

For additional information:
“United States v. Dickinson, 1 Ark. Terr. Rep. 1 (1820).” Caselaw Access Project, Harvard Law School. https://cite.case.law/ark-terr-rep/1/1/ (accessed January 23, 2024).

Moore, Waddy M. “Some Aspects of Crime and Punishment on the Arkansas Frontier.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 25 (Spring 1964): 50–64.

Shinn, Josiah H. Pioneers and Makers of Arkansas. Little Rock: Genealogical and Historical Publishing Co., 1908.

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System