Arkansas’ HANGING judge
Judge Isaac Parker, who held the bench of the U.S. Court for the Western District of Arkansas from 1875 to 1896, presided over 200 Deputy U.S. Marshals bringing in outlaws, 79 of whom were hanged in Fort Smith. His legacy will be part of the narrative at the U.S. Marshals Museum, opening July 1.
Judge Isaac Parker disliked varying his habits … His pleasure was to take a leisurely stroll by the river on his way to work … Once in his office, the Judge invariably took a small tumbler of whiskey, to limber his brain. Then he read a few lines of Milton from a small volume of poetry he kept in a drawer with his six shooter.
— “Zeke and Ned” by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana
The Hanging Judge read Milton? That got me interested in Isaac Parker. As for hangings, in their modern expression I have opposed them. In 2017, when a string of executions here attracted national attention, I wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “In Arkansas, eight executions have been scheduled in April, starting with two on Easter Monday. I hope the governor will stop them.”
“Zeke and Ned” is a novel loosely based on actual events. Ezekiel Proctor and Ned Christie were Cherokee men, esteemed leaders in the tribe, who found themselves in trouble with the law, which put them crossways with the judge. In the book, Zeke says, “I had expected to despise” him.
Parker was from Ohio, born in 1838. He grew up a strict Methodist and serious reader. According to historian Michael Brodhead, Parker’s belief in a “stern but just and merciful God” shone through his judgments from the bench. Although it is a stretch, I will take that for evidence that he did indeed read Milton.
Having read for law, he started his career in St. Joseph’s, Mo., two years before the Civil War. As a border state, Missouri was ferociously divided. Parker, solid for the Union, enrolled with the militia. Corporal Parker courted Mary O’Toole, a devout Catholic. Though religiously divided, theirs would be a happy union.
After the war, Parker was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, as a Republican, and he was strict in that too. When Southerners refused to sign an oath renouncing the Confederacy, some Republicans were lenient. Parker was not.
Rebel soldiers, he demanded, must denounce secession as an “extremely wicked” crime. He was strong for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and against the Ku Klux Klan.
After two terms in Congress, President Grant appointed Parker judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas in Fort
Smith. The Indian Territory to the west was included in this jurisdiction. The Parkers journeyed by river to Fort Smith, arriving May 2, 1875.
Fort Smith was established in 1817 to cope with conflict between the Osage and the Cherokee. This chapter in American history is told well in “Arkansas: A Narrative History.”
In 1803, President Jefferson almost doubled our country’s footprint with the Louisiana Purchase. He did that with Indians in mind, reasoning the government could transplant tribes from eastern states to the Louisiana territory, granting the tribes new ground, while opening lands they left behind for settlement by whites. As “Arkansas: A Narrative History” remarks, this supposed solution “reflected a lack of appreciation for the Indians already living in the area” such as the Quapaw, Caddo, and Osage tribes indigenous to Arkansas.
By 1817, one-third of all Cherokee had moved to Arkansas. ‘‘Arkansas: A Narrative History’’ asks us to consider that for two centuries, Cherokee had interacted with the English and their American descendants. By necessity, they adapted to American ideals in law, education, and religion. Some of those, they took to heart. Thus the Cherokee became an English-style civilizing force in Arkansas.
It was they who started Arkansas’ first school: Dwight Mission, near Russellville, was built and run by Presbyterians who had come in answer to an invitation from the tribe.
White settlers continued pushing west, forcing tribes to move again. The Cherokee were removed to Indian Territory west of Fort Smith in 1828. The Dwight Mission Presbyterians moved with them. It was 50 years later, in Charles Portis’ “True Grit,” that Mattie Ross and Marshal Rooster Cogburn crossed from Arkansas into the Territory, tracking down Tom Chaney.
Stopping at a store for provisions, Mattie was impressed by the proprietress: “The Indian woman spoke good English and I learned to my surprise she was a Presbyterian. She had been schooled by a missionary. What preachers we had in those days!”
The Territory was home to five Nations: Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, who hoped in vain they now were done with white migration. In their neighbor Isaac Parker, familiarity bred respect. Parker appreciated Indians as law-abiding, spiritually inclined, and mindful of authority, in contrast to border-crossers generating turmoil on the tribes’ domain.
This statistic is telling. From 1873 to 1896, of the 87 men (no women) condemned and hanged from the Western District Court, only 36 were Indian. What that number might suggest, Arkansas Law Professor Morton Gitelman confirms: “Indians were a minority in their own territory.”
How did that happen? A prime cause was the Treaty of 1866, by which the tribes granted railroads access to their territories. At a pen stroke, the track building business boomed across the region attracting, as Gitelman reports, “a motley flotsam of laborers, suppliers, and assorted camp followers, with much disorder and a ready market for liquor.”
Railroad towns became notorious for violence. In the countryside, timber theft was epidemic. Gitelman tells us that one mile of track needed 2,600 wooden crossties, of which one forest acre could supply 200. Doing the math, the cut was 13 acres of wood per mile of track. For wood thieves, the tribe-owned forests were a gold mine.
In “True Grit,” a horse trader tells Mattie her father’s killer had fled into the Territory. His appraisal echoes Parker’s:
He will find plenty of his own stamp there … It is a sink of crime. Not a day goes by but that there come some new report of a farmer bludgeoned, a wife outraged, or a blameless traveler set upon … The brave marshals do their best but they are few in number … The marshal travels about friendless and alone in that criminal nation. Every man’s hand is against him there save in large part for that of the Indian who has been cruelly imposed upon by felonious intruders from the United States.
An indignant Parker told an interviewer: “The Territory was set apart for the Indians in 1828. The government of that time promised them protection.” Except by courts, he said, “that promise has been ignored.”
On Sept. 3, 1875, with 5,000 people watching, six men were hanged on the Fort Smith Courthouse lawn. News reporters from across the United States were in the crowd. From their stories, an image of Judge Parker was printed in the public mind that still remains.
Parker did not like that he was called the Hanging Judge. By federal law, the penalty for rape or murder was, with no exceptions: death. To critics or admirers he explained: “I never hanged a man. It is the law.”
As for those brave marshals, on some days Parker would have 200 of them working on assignment. On his watch, 65 of them were killed. Between criminal and lawman, the status line was porous. The renowned Black Marshal Bass Reeves had been recruited from the courthouse jail. The famous Dalton brothers began their careers as marshals before, for better pay, they started robbing trains.
Murder, then as now, was a growing problem nationwide. In 1896, Parker spoke to it in North American Review, asking whether “the man who destroys human life shall be the despotic ruler” or, instead, shall the law of the land protectively “exert its peaceful sway.” He didn’t like the answer as it stood. Homicides were sharply up: from under 5,000 in 1890 to over 10,000 in 1895.
Murders had doubled. Why? Parker found fault with judges, juries, and, hitting close to home, misguided Christians. Judges were distracted, by procedure, from concentrating on the crime alleged and actual guilt, or not, of the accused. Juries were sensitive to threats, bribes, and social pressure.
But Parker also blames a “diseased public sentiment, which begets undue sympathy for the criminal,” and shows not enough for victims.
‘‘The good ladies who carry flowers and jellies to criminals mean well … but what mistaken goodness! Back of the sentimentality are the motives of sincere piety and charity, sadly misdirected. They see the convict alone, perhaps chained in a cell; they forget the crime he perpetrated, and the family he made thus husbandless and fatherless.’’
On March 20, 2017, in this newspaper, I wrote, “I don’t think we ought to execute these men.” Would Parker have read mine as misdirected piety? One might think so.
But consider this. We want justice from the law, but rape and murder are indelibly destructive crimes. Killing the offender cannot touch the victim’s loss or heal their family’s wound. No human court can offer that.
My hope our Easter season executions would be stopped was embedded in that season’s larger hope where victims’ pleas are fully heard and more than satisfied. Isaac Parker knew as well as I that hope for perfect justice points to God.
For the meantime, he measured justice to the challenges of life on Earth. His was still a high standard, established by the U.S. Constitution, as amended by the Civil War, but humanly attainable. And, though it seems incredible, he did not want or need the gallows to attain it.
We know this because he said it, when interviewed by Ada Patterson for The St. Louis Republic. She asked for his view of capital punishment. “I favor its abolition,” he said, because it was the certainty of punishment, more than its severity, that discouraged crime. Patterson reported her surprise on meeting “this alleged cruel judge,” and finding him to be “the gentlest of men.”
This was late summer 1896, and Parker’s health was failing. Dropsy was the diagnosis. Come November, a coroner’s report would say he died from overwork. That October he turned 58 years old. On Nov. 16, he sank into a coma. The family gathered. He surprised the room by waking up; then surprised it again by asking for a Catholic priest. When the priest came, Parker asked to be baptized.
Mattie Ross’ take on that was this: “If you had sentenced 160 men to death and seen around 80 of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.”
The priest administered the sacrament, and then last rites. The next day, Nov. 17, 1896, Isaac Charles Parker died. When word reached the jail, prisoners banged cups and plates in celebration. There, the opinion of him never changed.
National Cemetery, Fort Smith, sits on a bluff above the Poteau River at its junction with the Arkansas, whose waters and critters Parker so liked to watch on his walk to work early of a morning.
For the funeral, Chief Pleasant Porter of the Creek Nation had wildflowers from the Territory made into a garland. The chief placed the garland by the grave, with obvious respect, as several thousand Arkansawyers watched, heads bowed.
When Grant first appointed Parker—northern judge for Southern town—the townsfolk thought they knew just what to make of it. “Carpetbagger” was their word. It didn’t take long before they saw that label didn’t fit this judge. Graveside, they felt a great good man, and one of us, was gone.
That’s how it is with Isaac Parker. On closer look, we who thought we knew him, know we had him wrong.
Historical Sources: Michael J. Brodhead, ‘‘Isaac C. Parker’’; Morton Gitelman, “Isaac Charles Parker,” in Frances M. Ross, ed., ‘‘United States District Courts and Judges of Arkansas, 1836– 1960’’; Jeannie M. Whayne, Thomas A. Deblack, George Sabo III, and Morris S. Arnold, ‘‘Arkansas: A Narrative History’’; Fort Smith National Historic Site.