On this day in 1839 future Confederate commander and governor Daniel Webster Jones was born. Inaugurated in 1897, Jones, who was the last Civil War veteran to serve in the governor’s office, is important to Arkansas history due to his efforts to regulate the powerful railroads through a state railroad commission.
The son of a physician and landowner and member of the Congress of the Texas Republic, Daniel was one of nine children. The family moved to Washington, Ark., the prosperous seat of Hempstead County, when Daniel was an infant. As a son of an aristocratic family, he attended the local Washington Academy, followed by reading law. His study of law was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War.
Jones volunteered for the troops being raised by the state, the Third Arkansas Regiment under command of Col. John R. Gratiot. He survived the fierce baptism of fire that was the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in Missouri on Aug. 10, 1861. In October of the following year, Jones was wounded and captured at the Battle of Corinth in Mississippi, suffering a bullet wound just below the heart. Paroled, Jones returned to the battlefield and rose to the rank of colonel. He was captured again during the battle for Vicksburg.
Jones was freed a second time in a prisoner exchange, and he used his new freedom to court and marry Margaret P. Hadley of Hamburg in Ashley County. They would have two daughters and three sons.
Jones resumed his law studies after the war and was admitted to the bar in September 1865. He went into practice with James K. Jones, who was not related but with whom Daniel had grown up and been friends. It is easy to confuse the two men since Daniel W. went on to become governor while James K. became a U.S. senator. (Interestingly, these are but two of the major political players who lived in the small southwest Arkansas village of Washington. Another contemporary resident of Washington was August H. Garland, a successful Whig politician and lawyer before the Civil War, who later served as governor, U.S. senator, and attorney general of the United States during the Grover Cleveland presidency.)
Both law partners entered politics, with Daniel Jones being elected prosecuting attorney in 1874. He won election as attorney general in 1884 and 1886, and later served one term representing Pulaski County in the state House of Representatives. Jones was a strong opponent of the growing reform movement among farmers and laborers known as the populist revolt. He helped eviscerate the growing third party movement by supporting disfranchisement of large numbers of black and poor white voters. In 1895 Jones became a lobbyist for the Iron Mountain Railroad and successfully opposed the creation of a state railroad commission to regulate freight and passenger rates.
Daniel Webster Jones was one of those Arkansas political leaders who began his career as a conservative protector of the status quo but gradually warmed to the need to better protect the struggling farmers of the state. Matthew Hild, author of the entry on the Populist movement in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, described this phenomenon: “Even in the 1890s, as Arkansas Democrats were finishing their rather undemocratic conquest of Populism, they became supporters of ‘free silver’ and the regulation of railroads and other corporations that farmers had long decried as ‘trusts’ and ‘monopolies.’ ”The great silver-versus-gold debate of the late 1800s was the primary political issue of the day. As a candidate for governor in 1896, Jones became a leading proponent in Arkansas for basing the economy on both silver and gold, or “bimetallism” as it was called.That was the year the Democrats nominated silver proponent William Jennings Bryan for president, who set the tone for the race for both governor and president by attacking those who would sacrifice farmers and laborers on a “cross of Gold.”
Jones won the governor’s race and called on the legislature to adopt more fair election laws and create a railroad commission to regulate shipping rates. When the legislature refused to act, Jones called a special session, which was not much more cooperative. However, that legislature did adopt an act to build a state-owned railroad, but it never got off the ground.
Jones had more luck after his re-election in 1898. The legislature not only created a state railroad commission, but it also passed the Rector Antitrust Act, which outlawed business monopolies in the state. This new legislation facilitated the rise of rabble-rousing state attorney general Jeff Davis, who soon eclipsed Jones as the spokesman for the “wool-hat boys” of the agrarian movement.
Jones ran for the U.S. Senate in 1900 but lost to incumbent James H. Berry. He then practiced law in Little Rock and died in 1918. He was buried in his Confederate uniform at Oakland Cemetery in Little Rock.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in Pulaski County. Email him at Arktopia. [email protected].
Editorial, Pages 78 on 12/15/2013