Born near Lynchburg, Virginia. Reid married twice. By one of the Flournoy daughters, he had daughter Frances Flournoy Reid and sonsThomas Flournoy Reid and John H. Reid, and 1860 the motherless family lived with schoolteacher John C. Reid and his wife. The widower married Sally McGraw Cochrane Bullene, who bore William McGraw Reid. In the 1860 U.S. Federal Census, John W. Reid owned one slave, a 33 year old black woman.
Career
In 1840, Reid moved to Missouri, where he taught school and studied law. He was admitted to the Missouri bar and commenced practice in Jefferson City in 1844. A captain in the Mexican War, Reid led a company that served in Doniphan's Regiment and was wounded twice. He also participated in an expedition against the Navajo in New Mexico. Back in Missouri, Reid participated in raids against abolitionists in Kansas. He led 200 pro-slavery raiders in August 1856 in what became known as the Battle of Osawatomie, in which later-famous John Brown's son Frederick was among the 6 free-staters killed; two pro-slavery raiders also died. Reid led the pro-slavery forces that Governor John W. Geary ordered to disperse from Lawrence, Kansasin September 1856. Jackson County voters elected Reid to the Missouri House of Representatives, and he served from 1854–1856, as well as helped revise the state's statutes. He bought land near the junction of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers in what became Kansas City in 1856, and helped organize the frontier town's Chamber of Commerce in 1857. Reid was elected as a Democrat to the Thirty-seventh Congress and served less than a year, from March 4, 1861, to December 2, 1861. He was one of only two Congressmen to vote against the pro-slavery Crittenden-Johnson Resolution after the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, and like the other, fellow Democrat and slaveholder Henry C. Burnett of Kentucky, was expelled by the Thirty-seventh Congress on December 2, 1861, for having taken up arms against the Union, although Reid had actually withdrew from the U.S. Congress on August 3, 1861. During the Civil War, Reid volunteered in the Confederate States Army as volunteer aide to former Missouri Governor and Confederate General Sterling Price, as well as served as a commissioner adjusting claims against the Confederate Government. Pardoned after the war, Reid returned to Kansas City, and with Charles Kearney, Theodore Case and Congressman Robert Van Horn helped secure construction of the Hannibal Bridge, the first spanning the Missouri River. When it opened in 1869, it made Kansas City a boomtown, and turned the frontier town into a city, far ahead of railroad hubs Leavenworth, Kansas and Omaha, Nebraska. Reid made a fortune from his resumed legal practice as well as banking and real estate.
Death and legacy
Reid died at Lees Summit, Missouri, November 22, 1881, survived by his second wife and sons, and was interred in what became the family vault at Elmwood Cemetery.
