Thomas Lewis Nugent
Thomas Lewis Nugent was a prominent lawyer, judge, and Populist politician born in Opelousas, Louisiana. Coming from a background of a slaveholding planter, Nugent was educated at Centenary College, where he developed strong debating skills and studied for the Methodist ministry. After moving to Texas for health reasons, he served in the Confederate Army, taught school, and eventually practiced law after being admitted to the bar in 1870. Nugent became involved in politics during a time of significant change, participating in the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1875 and serving as a district judge before shifting towards radical politics influenced by his religious beliefs and the socio-political landscape of the era.
As a member of the Farmers' Alliance and later the People's Party, Nugent advocated for significant reforms, including land ownership policies and government control of banks. He ran for governor twice, focusing on educating the public rather than engaging in personal attacks, establishing a reputation for dignified discourse in politics. Despite facing health challenges, Nugent remained committed to his political ideals until his death in 1896. His legacy is preserved in his speeches and writings, which reflect his high-minded approach to populism and continue to influence discussions around social justice and economic equity.
Thomas Lewis Nugent
- Thomas Lewis Nugent
- Born: July 6, 1841
- Died: December 14, 1895
Lawyer, judge, and Populist politician, was born in Opelousas, Louisiana, one of several children of Thomas Nugent, a slaveholding planter and native of Ireland, and Anne Lavinia (Lewis) Nugent, daughter of a Louisiana district judge. Nugent was reared in a cultivated and pious atmosphere and was graduated with highest honors from Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he became a skilled debater and studied briefly for the Methodist ministry.
Nugent’s studies apparently undermined his health, and he moved to Texas in search of a more congenial climate. He enlisted in the Confederate army and served in Texas throughout the war. He then taught school and read law until 1870, when he was admitted to the Texas bar. In 1871 he moved to Meridian, Bosque County, which was then a frontier region, and in 1873 he settled in Stephenville, Erath County, his home for many years. During this period he married and fathered at least four children: William, Clarence, and two daughters, one of whom, Emma, died in her twenties. In 1880 he married a second time, to Catherine Nugent. They had at least one child, a son.
Nugent was a member of the Texas Constitutional Convention in 1875, and when a new judicial district was created in his area he was appointed judge. Reelected twice, he resigned in 1888. Shortly before his resignation he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination to the Court of Appeals, and opponents later said that he defected to the Populists because of his disappointment. The reasons for Nugent’s shift to radical politics were in fact much more complex, and they did not, by all accounts, include personal ambition.
One of the sources of Nugent’s radicalism was his religious beliefs. He did not attend church services, and partly for this reason his opponents charged him with being irreligious. But he had long been a student of religion as well as of the classics, and along with his wife Catherine he became a devout Swedenborgian. His voluminous letters on the subject to his brother, a Methodist minister, and the many testimonials of colleagues and friends leave little doubt that he was an almost saintlike figure. Essentially a radical humanist, he was one of those who regarded Jesus as the founder of socialism.
Another source of Nugent’s radicalism was his wide reading in Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, and other nineteenth-century political and economic philosophers; and yet another was his life among the farmers of Erath County, a Farmers’ Alliance stronghold in which an independent political movement wrested local political control from the Democrats in the 1880s.
By that time Nugent’s political philosophy was fully developed. He was convinced that the wealth of the United States was being absorbed, under the forms of legality, by corporations whose insatiable greed, if not checked, would reduce the country to a nation of paupers. He considered land monopoly the paramount issue and advocated that not the land itself, but merely its fruits and the improvements made on it, should be privately owned. He believed that banks should be owned by the government, not by private interests.
Although he favored monetary reform, Nugent, like many other Populist intellectuals, feared the growing tendency to regard free silver as a panacea. Silver coinage, he said, would “leave undisturbed all the conditions which give rise to the undue concentration of wealth. The so-called silver party may prove a veritable trojan horse if we are not careful.”
The Farmers’ Alliance had been formed in part to educate the rural masses in economic and political affairs, and it was clearly this aspect of the organization and its political offshoot, the People’s party, that accounted for Nugent’s entrance into politics. In 1892, now a resident of Fort Worth, he accepted the unanimous nomination of the People’s party convention for the office of governor, knowing that the campaign was hopeless and that it would entail an inordinate expenditure of health and fortune, but also believing that it would give him an opportunity to educate the people.
Nugent’s campaign speeches were a combination of university lecture and sermon, devoid of invective or personal attack and delivered in a dignified, undramatic fashion. Thus was born the “Nugent tradition” in Texas politics, as remote from the conventional caricature of the Populist hayseed crank as could be imagined.
In 1894 Nugent ran for governor again, and the Populists, who had waged a vigorous campaign, registered heavy gains in many sections of Texas. They were officially counted out, however, in each of the congressional districts where they had apparently won, and their lawsuits were unavailing.
In both 1892 and 1894 the Populists in the Texas state legislature nominated Nugent for the U.S. Senate, but the nominations did not require him to stump the state. Although his associates were astonished at the vigor he displayed in his gubernatorial campaigns, Nugent along with many others felt that his ill health diminished his effectiveness as a politician and he knew that it was getting worse. He made it clear that he would not run again in 1896.
Months before that climactic Populist campaign began, Nugent died at his home after saying to his wife and sons, “I have tried to do my duty.” Shortly afterward Catherine Nugent edited and published The Life Work of Thomas L. Nugent (1896), a collection of his speeches and letters together with the reminiscences of colleagues and friends. The book constitutes a portrait of one of the most high-minded politicians in American history and provides an outstanding example of the style and thought of the intellectual wing of populism.
In addition to the work cited above, see R. Martin, The People’s Party in Texas (1933), and L. Goodwyn,Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976).