William W. Smith (1838–1888)

William W. Smith, a lawyer at Helena (Phillips County) who was elected an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1882, suffered at length from tuberculosis, and he died before his term on the court ended. He was an early friend and law partner of Simon P. Hughes, whose life and career closely tracked the younger Smith’s. Hughes, by then the governor, was at Smith’s side when he died. Hughes left the governor’s office a few weeks later and was elected to the state Supreme Court, although not to the seat his friend had just vacated.

William Wright Smith was born on October 12, 1838, at Cokesbury, South Carolina, to Charles Landon Smith and Sarah Anderson Smith. He moved to Clarendon (Monroe County) just as rebels fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. He joined a South Carolina regiment as a private but subsequently joined the Twenty-Third Arkansas Infantry Regiment and the infantry battalion of Colonel Simon Hughes and Colonel Charles Adams. He was captain of his company when he was captured in the crucial battle at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in 1863, which gave the Union control of the Mississippi River. Smith had married Emma Sophronia Conner of Cokesbury by this time.

After the war, both Smith and Hughes trained for the law and, in 1867, established a lucrative practice at Clarendon. Hughes had been an outspoken Whig and an opponent of secession, but both he and Smith became fervent Democrats. Hughes was elected attorney general in 1874 and moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). Smith then moved with his young family to Helena, where he practiced law until 1882, when Democrats nominated him for associate justice of the Supreme Court to succeed William M. Harrison, a Republican-turned-Democrat who had joined the court under the Unionist constitution of 1864. Smith was elected, moved to Little Rock, and took his seat on the three-member court in 1883.

The court’s caseload had increased heavily since the end of the Civil War, and the court had fallen behind in disposing of appeals. Justice Smith lobbied for increasing the court’s size to five justices, as the 1874 constitution allowed whenever the population of the state exceeded one million. His friend Hughes advanced the cause upon Smith’s death, and the Arkansas General Assembly promptly expanded the court to five, but the court still fell further behind for nearly two decades.

Some of the court’s expanding caseload was owing to disputes arising from the growth of industrialization and transportation, particularly railroads. The rising racial violence following the Civil War and Reconstruction was another cause.

Justice Smith was the author of one famous Supreme Court case: the conviction and execution of Charles Wright, a Black man who was accused of killing a white sharecropper who had attacked three African Americans, which set off what became known as the Howard County Race Riot of 1883. Thomas Wyatt, a white sharecropper for a white farmer, had attacked two Black farmers in an argument over a property line and then approached a Black woman who was plowing a field and hit her over the head with a fence rail when she resisted. Black family members demanded justice for the attacks and armed themselves to arrest Wyatt when the police would not. In the violence that followed, Wyatt and several African Americans were killed. White posses eventually arrested several Black men, among them Charles Wright. Governor James H. Berry sent the militia to the county to restore order.

Wright claimed he had killed no one and protested his innocence all the way to the gallows. The state had no evidence that Wright had killed Wyatt or anyone else. The Supreme Court first returned the case to the circuit court but eventually affirmed his guilt and his death sentence. Justice Smith, who wrote the opinion, dismissed Wright’s claims. He wrote a brief opinion affirming Wright’s conviction and death sentence that later generations would view as racist. Smith said it was immaterial that there was no direct evidence that Wyatt had killed anyone. “This is murder pure and simple,” he wrote. “It is none the less murder that it was done by a mob of ignorant negroes. It may not have been the defendant’s hand that fired the shot, but he was present and participating, aiding and abetting, and he is as guilty as if was the one who did kill him.” It is noteworthy that, in all the legal proceedings following these incidents, no white person was convicted of anything stemming from the riot.

Not long after he took office, Smith developed tuberculosis (commonly called consumption at the time). When Smith died, the Arkansas Gazette reported that he had sought relief in a “healthful climate”—Florida, and then Colorado—but when he concluded that he was dying he came back to Little Rock and died at his home on December 18, 1888. Governor Hughes reported that he was with Smith when he died.

Smith is buried in Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock near his friend Hughes, who died eighteen years later.

For additional information:
“Arkansas Mourns. Associate Justice W. W. Smith Called to His Long Rest.” Arkansas Gazette, December 19, 1888, p. 1.

Wright v. The State. Justice William W. Smith, Arkansas Supreme Court, Vol. 042, November 1, 1883.

“Wright’s Story.” Arkansas Gazette, April 25, 1884, p. 4.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas