Inside the Pardon Palace

  by Tom Goodman

Kathy Bates as Ma Ferguson in The Highwaymen

Why let your loved one languish in a Texas prison when you could seek a pardon from the governor?

For a price.

That was the accusation leveled at Miriam “Ma” Ferguson. You may remember her from The Highwaymen. Kathy Bates portrayed the woman who became Texas’s first female governor in 1924—less than a decade after women gained the right to vote.

No Texas governor before or since has come close to her record on pardons granted. But it was a record shadowed by persistent rumors that Ma and her husband, James “Pa” Ferguson, operated a mercenary “Pardon Palace.”

Ma ran for governor after Pa was impeached and banned from office. Once elected, she made headlines—and enemies—through her expansive use of executive clemency. By the end of her first year, she had granted more than 1,200 pardons and commutations. The figure is striking when set against a Texas prison population of roughly 3,700 inmates at the time. 

Many more would follow.

Ferguson insisted this flood of mercy sprang from compassion and a belief in second chances. She and Pa condemned the brutality of Texas prisons and styled themselves reformers. Ma described her pardons as acts of Christian charity and later called her mercy toward “poor and unfortunate convicts” her proudest achievement.

That posture earned her loyal support, especially in rural communities where she was seen as a maternal figure. But resentment grew whenever a pardoned inmate reoffended.

One notorious example was Marvin “Buck” Barrow, brother of Clyde. Within weeks of his release, Buck reunited with Clyde and Bonnie Parker, returning to violent crime before dying in a bloody shootout that summer.

Another case proved even more damaging. In 1927, two men pardoned by Ferguson—Marshall Ratliff and Henry Helms—joined the gang responsible for the Santa Claus Bank Robbery in Cisco. Both had served only two years of long sentences for armed robbery. The daytime heist left two officers dead. Prosecutors argued that without Ferguson’s pardons, the killings would not have occurred. Juries gave both men death sentences. (To learn more about this infamous event, get a copy of my book, The Last Man: A Novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery.)

In hindsight, Ferguson’s legacy cuts both ways. Her willingness to extend mercy, especially to nonviolent offenders, looks progressive for her era. Yet rumors of pay-for-pardons never faded. One popular Austin story had Pa offering to sell a desperate father a shabby horse—hinting that if purchased, the man’s son “might ride home on it from Huntsville.”

Ma denied the accusations, but later investigations and memoirs proved the rumors true.

By the end of her second term in 1935, she had pardoned nearly 4,000 inmates. The following year, Texans amended the constitution to create an independent pardons board.

Her pardon record is an outlier that has never been matched by any other Texas governor before or since. In fact, historians often cite her as one of the most mercy-giving (or, to critics, most abusive) chief executives in American history.

For more on the Fergusons, check out Carol O'Keefe Wilson’s excellent book, In the Governor's Shadow: The True Story of Ma and Pa Ferguson.

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A deadly train stunt. A pistol-packing preacher. A UFO crash in 1897. A town that outlawed dancing. In Ten Texas Tales, you'll find stories like this from turn-of-the-century Texas. I mine that seam of history for my novels and for anecdotes to put in my monthly newsletter. Each month, I’ll give you nuggets of history, recommended books and films, and behind-the-scenes looks at my novels.