[2] A lifelong Democrat, Ford is also remembered for anti-Mormon sentiments and vacillation which led to the death of Joseph Smith, and the subsequent Illinois Mormon War of 1844-1845.

His twice widowed Irish mother, the former Elizabeth Logue Ford Delaney, took him and his siblings west in 1804, hoping to cross the Mississippi River and homestead on free or cheap land.

Forquer was initially a merchant, and then a partner of Daniel Pope Cook, with whom he platted the town of Waterloo, Illinois (also in Monroe County).

However, his legal practice still failed to prosper (his retiring demeanor and high voice perhaps contributing factors), and Ford lost an election to become the local justice of the peace.

[14] Ford joined the Supreme Court of Illinois as an associate justice in February 1841, as the Democratic-majority legislature increased that bench to nine members (from four).

Ford worried this would scare eastern financiers, whose loans were needed to finish various internal improvements, as well as buy mundane items such as postage stamps.

Whereas early settlers had arrived from Virginia and Kentucky on via the Ohio River, or from New York and other northern states via the National Road (which ended in Vandalia, and which the Army Corps of Engineers had rebuilt in the 1830s but congress stopped funding before 1840),[18] construction of the canal had also encouraged immigration from Europe and further immigrants would arrive via the Great Lakes and newly organized railroads.

He called Smith "the most successful impostor in modern times," and said he hoped that the increasingly popular Mormonism would not replace traditional Christianity.

At one point, Ford encouraged Joseph and his brother, Hyrum Smith, to go to Carthage, the county seat, to face criminal charges in the destruction of the newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor.

Dan Jones, a riverboat captain and one of the few eyewitnesses to both sides of the event, repeatedly warned Ford throughout the day of comments he heard from the guards and jailkeepers concerning their plot to assassinate the restored Church leaders.

Jones records that while the assassination was taking place in Carthage, Ford addressed the citizens of Nauvoo saying that a, "severe atonement must be made, so prepare your minds for the emergency."

[citation needed] In the aftermath of the assassinations, Ford ordered the arrest and trial of Thomas C. Sharp, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, Illinois who had often printed disparaging and derogatory remarks against Smith and the Latter-day Saints.

Sharp, who had printed calls for violence leading up to Smith's murder and celebratory remarks shortly after the killing, had briefly fled to Missouri to avoid trial.

In later correspondences, Governor Ford would try to defend his meek actions during the crisis, saying hated minorities are never safe from hostile majorities.

He believed that a politicized militia and court system, as well as weak powers granted him by state law, prevented him from doing more to stop the Illinois Mormon War.

Writing in the third person, Ford declared "there was no way to punish {the guilty parties}, as former trials had shown, except by martial law; and this course was utterly illegal.

The governor believed that he could not declare martial law for the punishment of citizens without admitting that free government had failed; and assuming despotism was necessary in its place.

There, he wrote his magnum opus of early Illinois history, as well as attempted to care for his wife (who died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1850; aged 38) and young children, as well as his own tuberculosis.

Because the career civil servant was destitute, the local citizenry raised money to pay for his interment at Springdale Cemetery, Peoria, as well as fostered out his children among various neighbors.