Thomas Ford (politician)

Thomas Ford (December 5, 1800 – November 3, 1850) was the eighth Governor of Illinois, and served in this capacity from 1842 to 1846. A Democrat, he is remembered largely for his involvement in the death of Joseph Smith, and the subsequent Illinois Mormon War. He is also the author of A History of Illinois (Chicago, 1854), published posthumously about the state from its founding in 1818 until 1847.

Life

Ford was born in Uniontown, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. He was the first governor to grow up in Illinois. His widowed mother took him and his siblings west in hopes of crossing the Mississippi River in 1804 to buy cheap land. At St. Louis she was told about the Louisiana Purchase and that land was no longer cheap there because it now belonged to America. So she settled in Illinois instead.

Ford was the half-brother to George Forquer, who later became the state's attorney general. The two would eventually share a law office together, and Forquer aided Ford in his early years as a lawyer and judge, but he took a brief time away from the law to become a spy against Black Hawk shortly before the Black Hawk War in 1832. He was the state's attorney in Western Illinois, then was elected as a state court judge in the north in 1836. He later served as a municipal judge in Chicago, before becoming a state court judge again. This led to his joining the Supreme Court of Illinois as an associate justice, 1841–42. He was very interested in politics and bragged that he attended every session of the state legislature from 1825–1847.