The time has come to reflect on the life and times — especially the times — of William Claude Jones.
Jones was a “prevaricator, a poet, a politician and the pursuer of nubile young females,” according to a 1990 article published in the Journal of Arizona History, which appears to be the most comprehensive biographical report published on the life of the 19th-century rogue.
His pursuit of such nubility began with a marriage to Sarah Freeman, who bore him two children in the 1840s, when Jones would have been in his 20s or early 30s. He was a sitting member of the Missouri state legislature at the time, but his family followed him to Arkansas and then Texas as he searched for more prominent government appointments. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce eventually named him U.S. attorney for the New Mexico territory, and it was hereabout that Jones’s first wife filed for divorce.
His next wife was a girl whose name was believed to be Maria v. del Refugio, writes L. Boyd Finch, the author of the journal article. New Mexico’s delegate to Washington, Miguel Otero, was bothered by the union. He “declared that the bride was twelve years old,” Finch writes, “and that Jones had ‘abducted’ her.” Otero petitioned President James Buchanan to fire Jones for the moral failing, but Jones resigned instead.
No matter! The mid-19th century was, by any standard you or I would recognize, a hideous place for women. The predatory relationship did not end Jones’s political career; he merely moved farther west, to the Arizona territory. There, Jones supported secession from the Southern states in the impending Civil War. He also landed upon his third wife, Caroline Stephens, who was 15 years old. Claude, by this time, was around 50.
Ah, well. They were married for only a year, anyway, because in 1865, Finch writes, Jones “left Caroline. She never saw or heard from him again.”
He had boarded a train for California, and then a boat for Hawaii, where he again entered local politics, winning a seat in the kingdom’s lower house. By 1868, a local girl named MaeMae Kailihao — “reportedly a princess from a noble family” — was pregnant with his child. She was 14.
Jones and Kailihao married and had several children together until she died at the age of 28 in 1881. Then Jones wed for a fifth time, a woman named Mary Akina — age unknown — only to file for divorce two years later. Shortly after that, Jones died on the island of Maui.
Finch, Jones’s biographer, is careful to say that there is a lot about W. Claude Jones’s life that has been lost to time. We know very little about his early upbringing, or how much he might have exaggerated some of the military exploits he was known to boast about. We also, it almost goes without saying, know very little about his wives, their inner lives, and what they thought of their unions and the times they lived in.
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By now you are probably wondering why in God’s name I am writing about this lecherous caricature of a man — a man whose compatriots in the 19th century recognized that he was problematic.
Here’s why:
While Jones lived in Arizona, he was elected to represent Tucson in the 1st Arizona Territorial Legislative Assembly. And then, when that legislature convened in 1864, he was elected speaker of the House.
And it was that legislature — the one Jones presided over in 1864, after he had already abandoned his first wife, and married a 12-year-old and was just weeks away from marrying a 15-year-old, though still a few years away from marrying a 14-year-old — it was that legislature that passed a law reading, “Every person who shall administer or cause to be administered or taken, any medicinal substances, or shall use or cause to be used any instruments whatever, with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two years nor more than five years.”
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And it was that piece of legislation that, earlier this week, was reinstated as law of the land in Arizona. It represents a near-total ban on abortion in the state. The state’s Supreme Court voted 4-2 that the 160-year-old law, put into place nearly five decades before Arizona was a state, should supersede the previous rule, which guarded the right to an abortion up to 15 weeks’ gestation. The new — and by new, I mean very old — law is scheduled to go into effect in two weeks’ time.
William Claude Jones sauntered into the wide expanse of a Southwestern territory more than 150 years ago, and this man’s morals are now the benchmark for the reproductive rights of the 7 million people who live in Arizona. Good night.
