• Born in Virginia
• Admitted to practice law in Kentucky, 1799
• Moved to Natchez, Mississippi and then to New Orleans
• Admitted to Practice before Louisiana Supreme Court, April 5, 1813
• Private, Captain Thomas Beale’s Company of Orleans Riflemen, Night Battle of December 23, 1814. Turner narrowly escaped capture by the British.
• Private, Captain Peter V. Ogden’s Company of Orleans Dragoons, Battle of New Orleans, 1814-1815
• Married Caroline Augusta Sargent, daughter of Governor Winthrop Sargent, the first governor of the Mississippi Territory, 1817
• Judge of the Criminal Court of the City of New Orleans, 1821-1828
• Alderman of the Sixth Ward, New Orleans, 1826
• Owner of a large private library
• Moved to Kentucky, 1828
• Died in Lexington, Kentucky, October 1843
• Judge Turner had left his wife no slaves in his will, stating: “I have some slaves. I give them to my children, none of them are to go to the said Caroline, for it would be to doom them to misery in life, & a speedy death.” Will of F.L. Turner, November 4, 1841. Courtesy of Donald W. Blevins, Clerk of Court of Fayette County, Lexington, Kentucky.
• Turner’s widow Caroline was strangled to death by her enslaved coachman, 1844. This murder was described by Robert Penn Warren in his 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men.
• Turner’s descendants donated what remained of his library to the University of the South in 1989, almost 150 years after Turner’s death
Left image: Daily National Intelligencer, Washington, District Of Columbia, February 04, 1815.
Right image: Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. New York, 1953: 195
