Background
Thomas was born in Frederick County, Maryland, in 1799. He was the seventh child of John and Eleanor (McGill) Thomas, and the descendant of Hugh Thomas who emigrated from Wales to Pennsylvania about 1702.
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Thomas was born in Frederick County, Maryland, in 1799. He was the seventh child of John and Eleanor (McGill) Thomas, and the descendant of Hugh Thomas who emigrated from Wales to Pennsylvania about 1702.
He matriculated at St. John's College, Annapolis, but turned directly to the study of law, when classes closed temporarily at that institution.
Opening an office in Frederick after admission to the bar in 1820, he soon became one of the leading lawyers in western Maryland. His record before 1841 was a succession of triumphs. In 1822, as a stripling of twenty-three and a Democrat, he won election to the state assembly from a Federalist section on the issue of legislative reapportionment. He appeared as a successful candidate for the same position in 1827 and 1829, and even won the speakership of the house in his last term. The manner in which he handled the house led to his being made congressional candidate the next year. For ten years, 1831-41, he sat in Congress, where his eloquence and parliamentary skill made him an active participant in most of the important legislation.
As chairman of the judiciary commitee, he became a defender and friend of Jackson. For a brief period, 1839-40, he was president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company and also found time to lead a revolt for popular election of state senators in Maryland. Though temporarily unsuccessful, this ultimately brought reorganization of the legislative department. It was during his congressional campaign of 1840 that he became involved in a duel with William Price. His nomination and election for governor in 1841 ushered in the most tempestuous period of his life.
His chief contribution was to save the state from repudiation, although it was heavily involved in debt for internal improvements. After his governorship he led the life of a recluse until the Civil War, emerging only to fight, in the constitutional convention of 1850-51, the system of representation whereby the small slave-holding counties held power over the populous western counties, and to run unsuccessfully in 1853 as an independent candidate for Congress. At the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted a volunteer regiment of 3, 000, though he left the command to younger men, and inspired union sentiment in western Maryland with his eloquence. In 1861 he returned to Congress as a Unionist and served until 1869. During Reconstruction he whole-heartedly supported the extreme Radicals.
Upon his retirement from Congress, he was appointed in 1870 internal revenue collector for Maryland. He resigned to accept the post of minister to Peru, where he served from 1872 to 1875. The remaining year of his life he occupied with law practice and with sheep-raising on a large tract of land near Frankville. He was killed by an engine of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad.
His marriage to Sally Campbell McDowell, the daughter of Gov. James McDowell of Virginia on June 8, 1841, had united the forty-two-year-old bachelor to a twenty-year-old girl. Discord manifested itself in a few weeks. They were divorced after an unusually unsavory scandal during which he issued a pamphlet, Statement of Francis Thomas (1845), setting forth, entirely without reserve, the details of the courtship, marriage, and estrangement. Ten years later his wife married John Miller, 1819-1895, a Presbyterian clergyman. The quarrel and divorce involved Thomas in a libel suit and led him to wild charges against John Carroll Le Grand, whom he had just appointed judge. Ultimately, it cost him his possible opportunity of being president because of the bitterness of his father-in-law in the convention of 1844.
