Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South

THOMAS GOODE JONES

THOMAS GOODE JONES

Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South

BRENT J. AUCOIN

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Governor Thomas Goode Jones, ca 1890; courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Aucoin, Brent J. (Brent Jude), author.

Title: Thomas Goode Jones : race, politics, and justice in the new South / Brent J. Aucoin.

Description: Tuscaloosa : University Alabama Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015046806| ISBN 9780817319137 (hardback) | ISBN 9780817389888 (e book)

Subjects: LCSH: Jones, Thomas Goode, 1844–1914 | Judges—Alabama—Biography. | Lawyers—Alabama—Biography. | Governors—Alabama—Biography. | Alabama—Politics and government—19th century. | Alabama—Politics and government—20th century. | Southern States—Politics and government—19th century. | United States—Race relations—History—19th century. | United States—Race relations—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV). | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Lawyers & Judges.

Classification: LCC KF373.J665 A93 2016 | DDC 976.1/091092—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046806

For my wife, Amanda

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Little Tommie

2. Apostle of Unity

3. Colonel Jones

4. Governor Jones

5. The De-Facto Governor Jones, the Little

6. Poor Tommie

7. Plain Tom Jones

8. A Patriotic and Courageous Citizen

9. As Good a Friend to the Negro as Any White Man in This Country

10. The Whole Country Is Your Debtor

11. The Best Hated Man in Alabama

12. Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book dates back to 1993 when as a student in Dr. W. Sherman Jackson’s Race and Constitutional Law class at Miami University I came across five sentences in Michal Belknap’s book Federal Law and Southern Order, in which he indicated that a southern federal judge named Thomas Goode Jones urged the US government to prosecute whites who assaulted blacks. Intrigued, I decided to find out more about Jones. That initial effort, commenced over two decades ago, eventually produced this book. During that time I conducted research on Jones at numerous institutions, including the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the National Archives, the Alabama Supreme Court and State Law Library, the University of Alabama and Auburn University archives, Tuskegee University Library, Faulkner University, Samford University Library, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I received generous assistance from staff members at each location. I owe them my sincerest appreciation and wish I could list them each by name. However, some of the most important things I learned about Jones and his context came not from books or archives but individuals. Paul Pruitt Jr. and R. Volney Riser, in particular, were extremely generous in sharing with me both their intimate knowledge of Jones’s life and career, and resources related to Jones and the history of Alabama. Likewise, Pete Daniel, Robert J. Norrell, Tony Freyer, Willard B. Gatewood Jr., Jeannie Whayne, David L. Chappell, Jack Temple Kirby, James Tice Moore, Peter Cochlanis, and John Eidsmoe each took time to discuss this project with me. To these individuals and others belong the credit for any notable insights that appear in this book.

Tyler Bursick, Jim Snider, James Alexander, Peggy Loafman, Kristen Bell, Wesley Davey, Justin Clark, and all of my graders at Southeastern contributed to this book by gathering and organizing research materials for me. I wish to thank Hugh Maddox, Dan Waterman, Donna Cox Baker, Blanche Surratt, Joanna Jacobs, Jennifer Manley Rogers, and the entire staff at the University of Alabama Press for their assistance. I would also like to thank some of Jones’s descendants, Joseph and Helen Jones, and Betty Theroux, for their interest and support.

The trustees and administration at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary kindly provided me with a sabbatical to put the finishing touches on this book. Bruce Ashford and Jamie Dew facilitated my writing efforts. Daniel Akin, Nathan Finn, Matt Mullins, Keith Harper, David Lanier, Joshua Waggener, Andrew Davis, and John Hammett, among other colleagues, greatly encouraged me along the way.

Finally, it is my joy to acknowledge the support of my family. I am especially grateful for my parents, Richard and Kay Aucoin, my in-laws, Henry and Melba Wood, my wife, Amanda, and my sons, Addison, Andrew, Aaron, and Alex.

Introduction

To-day even the attitude of the Southern whites towards the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the moneymakers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

The years immediately preceding and following the dawn of the twentieth century proved to be a pivotal period in the history of the American South. By 1890 white southern Democrats had controlled the region for over a decade and were confident that the federal government would make no serious attempt to revive the Reconstruction process that had ended in 1877 and sought to transform the South into a region with a competitive two-party political system where blacks could vote, hold office, and enjoy the rights of equal citizenship. Finally free to manage their own affairs, white southern Democrats eagerly did so and set the region on the path it would take for the next century. During this crucial juncture the white leaders of the South successfully pursued a fiscal policy of retrenchment, enshrined segregation and disenfranchisement into law, facilitated the virtual reenslavement of many blacks through the convict leasing and debt peonage systems, and either ignored or promoted the lynching of African Americans. In short, they successfully carried out a counterrevolution that reversed many of the revolutionary changes instituted during Reconstruction. As a result, the New South of the 1880s and beyond greatly resembled its antebellum counterpart. Like the South before the Civil War, the Solid South—the South under Democratic control—could also be characterized as a society based in large part on white supremacy, fiscal conservatism, and the utilization of relatively cheap, immobile black laborers.

However, not every white southern Democratic leader fully supported this counterrevolution. A very small number of them opposed important elements of this attempt to model the New South on the antebellum South. One of those few white southern Democratic leaders was Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama. Although a former slave owner, a proud Confederate veteran, and a self-described conservative Democrat, Jones, both as a two-term governor of Alabama in the 1890s and as a federal district judge in the early 1900s, made an extraordinary attempt to get Democrats to abandon retrenchment and to provide African Americans with racial justice. In particular, he urged his fellow white southerners to aid African Americans, promote their education, and refrain from oppressing and disenfranchising them. Furthermore, he sought to use the power of the state, and at times the federal, government to stop the lynching of blacks and to dismantle the quasi-slavery systems of debt peonage and convict leasing. While he distinguished himself in a significant way on these particular matters, he also, at times, acted like a stereotypical white southern Democrat. He contributed to the successful effort to redeem Alabama from Republican rule during Reconstruction, and as governor he presided over a discriminatory public education system, and ultimately helped to establish de jure segregation and disenfranchisement in the state. He worked diligently at times to protect the interests of big businesses at the expense of farmers and laborers. And though he championed good government and the rule of law, he also directly benefited from election fraud. In some respects, he was a typical Democratic leader of the New South, and in others, quite atypical. He was, at times, both a Redeemer and a Liberal. This is particularly true in the area of race relations, where in some instances Jones echoed those Redeemers who promoted white supremacy, but in others advocated views of African Americans and of racial justice that corresponded with (and even exceeded) those of his contemporaries who are commonly identified as liberals by scholars.¹

As an enigmatic yet significant figure in the history of both Alabama and the South during the crucial turn-of-the-twentieth-century decades, it is imperative that historians better understand Jones’s life and career. While just about every major chapter in his public life has received attention from scholars, the picture of Jones that emerges from these works tends to be shaped by the particular phase or aspect of his career being investigated. For instance, works examining the Populist Revolt in Alabama tend to portray Jones as a Bourbon Democrat who sometimes charted his own path, but who nevertheless stole elections, advanced white supremacy, and favored industrial interests over those of laborers and small farmers.² Likewise, works of legal history that touch on Jones’s time on the federal bench typically chronicle his estimable, though flawed, quest to eradicate peonage, but generally neglect other aspects of his career.³ While some of these works provide a relatively textured analysis of Jones, and others simply mischaracterize him, they are all incomplete. They don’t tell the entire story. To better comprehend Jones and his historical significance it is necessary to view him holistically. It is for this reason that this first full critical biography of Jones has been written.

Thomas Goode Jones was raised in the home of a slave-owning industrialist, fought in the Confederate army, helped to overthrow Republican rule in Alabama, rose to the top leadership position of the state’s Democratic Party and tried unsuccessfully to lead that party in a different direction in the areas of race relations and economics. He continued this effort even after leaving the governorship and as a result was appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president. His attempt to alter the course that his party and region traversed during most of the twentieth century was not only a failure but in retrospect can even be viewed as flawed, conventional, and even racist. Yet one cannot escape concluding that if the South (not to mention the Supreme Court) had adopted Jones’s proposals regarding racial justice in the early twentieth century (rather than waiting until near the end of the century to do so), the history of the region and of race relations in America would have been dramatically different.

1

Little Tommie

As the sun drove away the Sunday morning mist, a gray-clad figure mounted a handsome bay horse and surveyed the scene before him. The young rider, who was not quite twenty-one years of age yet, then galloped across two hundred yards of hilly, smoke-enveloped Virginia countryside as minié balls flew by him from almost every direction. He urged his mount forward and raised his sword skyward, causing the large white napkin attached to it to flutter in the wind. A moment after the firing all around him came to a halt, a colonel from General George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry rode out to escort him to General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Union’s hero of the Battle of Gettysburg. Before the rider even had a chance to speak, the colonel from Custer’s cavalry shouted to General Chamberlain: This is unconditional surrender! This is the end! The young Confederate carrying a flag of truce on that Palm Sunday in 1865, Major Thomas Goode Jones, was then led to a series of Union generals, ending with General Philip H. Sheridan, to deliver the news of the South’s capitulation. Once the deed was done, Major Jones rode back into the Rebel lines to where General Robert E. Lee sat on some rails near an apple orchard, about a mile from Appomattox Court House, and waited nearby until word arrived from General Ulysses S. Grant.¹

After spending his most formative years fighting for the Confederacy, Thomas Goode Jones mounted the same horse that had carried him to the Union lines on that momentous day and began the month-long journey back home to Montgomery, Alabama. The Virginia soil from which he was departing, and on which he had lived and fought for four years, had been the home of his ancestors for over one hundred and fifty years. Roger Jones, a captain in the British navy arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1680 to command a war vessel stationed in the Chesapeake Bay. His youngest son, Thomas, settled near Fortress Monroe. One of Thomas’s descendants, John Jones, represented Brunswick County in the Virginia House of Burgesses before serving as a colonel in a Virginia regiment during the American Revolution. He suffered a severe wound at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and later served a term as Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. One of his sons, Thomas Williamson Jones (1788–1824), graduated from the University of North Carolina, returned to Brunswick County to practice medicine, and then married Mary Armistead Goode, the fifth daughter of Samuel Goode (1756–1822). Their eldest son, Samuel Goode Jones, became one of the pioneers of railroad building in the South and the father of Thomas Goode Jones, the subject of this biography.²

Samuel Goode Jones was born on September 20, 1815, at his maternal grandfather’s residence in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. In 1837, he graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts. Desiring to be a civil engineer, Jones studied for an additional year at Newark College (now the University of Delaware) before returning home to Virginia, where he gained employment as the superintendent in charge of constructing a dam across the James River. The next year, 1839, he moved to Georgia to take a job as assistant engineer on the Monroe Railroad.³ After being promoted to chief engineer of the railroad in 1841, Samuel married his first cousin, Martha Ward Goode, on November 8, 1842. The Goodes, more so than the Joneses, were a prominent Virginia family, tracing their ancestry back to John Goode, who arrived in Virginia, via Barbados, sometime before 1661 and established a tobacco plantation in Henrico County. One of his direct descendants, Samuel Goode (the maternal grandfather of Samuel Goode Jones) of Chesterfield County, Virginia, fought as a lieutenant in the American Revolution and served in both the Virginia House of Delegates (1778–1785) and the United States House of Representatives (1799–1801). His son, Thomas Goode (1780s–1858), a trained physician, married Mary Ann Knox and together they purchased the hot springs in Bath County, Virginia, in 1832 and developed it into a resort known as the Homestead. The marriage of their daughter, Martha Ward Goode, to Samuel Goode Jones took place there.⁴

Soon after their wedding Samuel and Martha moved to Griffin, Georgia, where in addition to his engineering duties for the Monroe Railroad, Samuel started a stagecoach line connecting Griffin, Georgia, to Franklin, Alabama. This venture soon proved unsuccessful and the young couple was forced to sell their home to pay the creditors. The agent hired to handle this matter absconded with the money rather than using it to pay Jones’s debts. In addition, the Monroe Railroad, Jones’s employer, soon thereafter declared bankruptcy. The Jones family quickly found itself in debt and without sufficient income. It was under these circumstances that the couple’s first son, Thomas Goode Jones, was born on November 26, 1844, in Vineville (now Macon), Georgia. Just a few weeks later, Samuel, Martha, and their infant son moved to Leaksville, Georgia. There, Samuel Jones directed the rebuilding of the Monroe Railroad, which had been sold under a decree of the courts and renamed the Macon and Western Railroad. While there, he also found the time to properly lay out the town. In response, the inhabitants of Leaksville renamed their humble village Jonesboro in his honor.⁵

The Jones family moved quite often as Samuel surveyed and directed the construction of tracks for various railroads in Georgia and Tennessee. But in 1849, after being offered the position of engineer of the Montgomery and West Point Railroad, Jones and his family made Montgomery, Alabama, their home.⁶ Samuel Jones quickly established himself as one of the leading industrialists in the state. He helped to establish the Chewacla Lime Works, the Montgomery and Talladega Sulphur Mines, and the Muscogee Lumber Company. In the mid-1850s he became the chief engineer of the Alabama and Florida Railroad, which was completed just in time for it to become the primary supply line for the Confederate Navy Yard in Pensacola. Even in the midst of the Civil War, Samuel Jones, who by this point was a well-respected engineer of national stature, continued to build railroads, completing a line connecting Montgomery to Selma, Alabama, just as the war drew to a close.⁷

Although the Civil War hurt him financially, the revenue from Samuel Jones’s job and business ventures provided a comfortable existence for the Jones family, both before and after the war. Census records for 1860 show that Jones owned $52,000 of real estate and thirty-two slaves. His overall wealth at the time was estimated to be nearly $120,000. The Jones family resided in a large home near the Alabama River on the northwest edge of town, next door to the first Episcopalian bishop of Alabama, R. H. Cobbs. During the war, a portion of the residence served as a hospital, while after the war the congregation of St. John’s Episcopal Church used it as a place of worship after federal authorities prohibited them from meeting in their sanctuary due to the fact that their pastor, Bishop Richard Wilmer, refused to instruct the Episcopal churches in Alabama to pray for President Andrew Johnson. A devout Episcopalian, Samuel Jones served as a vestryman at St. John’s from 1852 to 1862. In addition to contributing significantly to the construction of a new sanctuary for the church in 1855, he also donated fourteen acres of land for the creation of Hamner Hall, a school established under the auspices of the Episcopal Church of Alabama.⁸

After settling down in Montgomery, Samuel and Martha Jones gave their son, Thomas, and their daughter, Mary, who had been born in Atlanta in 1847, seven more siblings, although two of them did not survive beyond infancy. Thomas, who was five when the family moved to Alabama, only spent eight years with his three brothers and three sisters before being sent to Charlottesville, Virginia, to study at the preparatory academies of University of Virginia professors Charles Minor and Gessner Harrison. In the summer of 1860, Jones left Charlottesville to enroll at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where his eighty peers immediately selected him to serve as a sergeant of the cadets.⁹

Before Jones had even donned a VMI uniform of red and gray for a full semester, the state of South Carolina had seceded from the Union. A few months later in 1861, Virginia followed suit. On the first day of May 1862, Jones and about two hundred of his classmates left Lexington to join forces with their former professor, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, whose army of seventeen thousand Confederates was about to commence its famous Shenandoah Valley campaign, in which they prevented the sixty-two thousand Union soldiers in the area from linking with Gen. George B. McClellan on the outskirts of the Confederate capital. Although the cadets were anxious to get a shot at the enemy when the first major action of the campaign (the Battle of McDowell) occurred just a week after their arrival, they were not only kept away from the fighting but were also assigned the gruesome duty of burying the dead.¹⁰ Years later, in a Memorial Day address given at the tomb of General Ulysses S. Grant, Jones reflected upon the experience:

I was once a member of a burial party on a field left in the hands of Jackson’s men. . . . We had not yet become accustomed to the sights of war, and the memory of that day will be with me always. Among the dead was an Ohio boy, hardly old enough to carry a musket. . . . Near him was a Bible and a letter. . . . The letter from the Ohio grandmother startled me. It was almost word for word the letter which had come to me by the last army mail from my grandmother in Virginia. . . . Both breathed in every line, trust in God and love of country, and the righteousness of the cause the absent ones were serving. I could not sleep that night. As I lay upon my blanket . . . thought after thought came to me. Why was the dead boy there? Why was I there? What enmity did we bear against each other? How was it possible that men of the same race, who worshiped the same God, read the same Bible, spoke the same language, and lived under the same institutions, which their forefathers, under the same flag in the past, had made such fearful sacrifice to create and sustain, could become embroiled, in a day as it were, in the deadliest struggle of modern times? Then and there the conviction came to me, to abide forever, that the dead boy was actuated by motives as pure and high as mine, loved his country as well, and sacrificed himself to as noble ideas of truth and manhood as animated those who gave him a soldier’s burial; that he and I were but types of all the rest, and behind us in the hostile lands were millions good and true as the grandmothers who wrote the letters.¹¹

After wrestling with these weighty matters throughout the night, the next morning Jones, Jackson, and the cadets resumed their effort to defeat the dead Ohioan’s compatriots who had escaped the day before. Jones and the VMI cadets marched with Jackson through the Shenandoah Valley until May 16, when the Board of Visitors summoned them back to Lexington.¹²

Awarded an honorary degree from VMI, Jones returned to his hometown of Montgomery where he signed up as a private in a company known as the Partisan Rangers, which was officially classified as Company K of the Fifty-Third Alabama Regiment. The men of Company K called Jones Little Tommie, because he was the youngest member of the group. Despite his age, Jones quickly demonstrated his competency and skill in military matters and was promoted after just a few weeks of service to the rank of orderly sergeant. Although a strict disciplinarian, Little Tommie soon won . . . the love of the company for the boys had found that he was kind-hearted, impartial and never ordered them to go where he would not go himself.¹³

Jones and the Fifty-Third Alabama Regiment engaged in their first real battle at Thompson’s Station, Tennessee, on March 5, 1863. The twenty-four men from Company K who were able to fight that day had been positioned near the center of the battle line behind a stone wall. The fighting was fierce and in the course of being pushed away from the wall and up the hill behind them, the company lost two men and suffered six wounded. Although Jones was one of the wounded, the command of Company K devolved upon him after both the captain and the lieutenant of the company were compelled to abandon the field due to illness and exhaustion, respectively. In commenting on Jones’s performance as a company commander in his first-ever battle, Captain Whetstone wrote that he proved a fit successor to Lieutenant [A. M.] Brown and though wounded, refused to leave the field. Although not serious enough to force him out of the battle, by April 3 Jones’s wound had become infected, bringing on an attack of erysipelas which nearly killed him. It was while Little Tommie was in the hospital recuperating from his wound and illness that he was notified by the Confederate War Department that he had been promoted to first lieutenant and aide-de-camp to General John B. Gordon of the Army of Northern Virginia. His appointment resulted from the fact that Thomas Watts, who happened to not only be Samuel Goode Jones’s neighbor in Montgomery but also attorney general of the Confederate States of America, secured a letter of recommendation for Jones from Stonewall Jackson and forwarded it, along with a letter of his own, to General Gordon.¹⁴

In his Reminiscences of the Civil War, Gordon recalls that when Jones arrived at his headquarters in May 1863, just days after the Battle of Chancellorsville, that he was a very young soldier, a mere stripling who was at that awkward, gawky age through which all boys seem to pass. After experiencing a few minor engagements, in mid-June Jones and Gordon’s brigade accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. When General Lee learned on June 28 that the Army of the Potomac had also crossed into Maryland, he ordered Gordon to move south—toward Gettysburg.¹⁵

After marching fourteen miles on the first of July, Gordon’s men arrived at Gettysburg around mid-afternoon and joined their compatriots who had already engaged Union troops in the area. Gordon’s men attacked the right flank of the Federals, and in a matter of hours his twelve hundred men had captured about eighteen hundred Union soldiers (at the cost of 380 casualties) and had pushed the right flank through the town and up Cemetery Hill. Gordon sent aide-de-camp Jones to get permission from Gen. Richard S. Ewell to attack Cemetery Hill, but the request was denied. That night Gordon’s tired men were sent to the rear to rest and were never again seriously engaged in the three-day battle of Gettysburg. After attacking the Federals’ left flank on July 2, and its center on July 3, Lee failed to push the Yankees from the heights south of the town—the hills Gordon wished to attack on the first day—and was compelled to retreat back into Virginia. Gordon’s men served as the rear guard on the long march back to the Old Dominion.¹⁶

With the turning of the calendar to May 1864, the two titanic armies of the eastern theater awoke from their winter slumber and began the maneuvering that would eventually lead to the siege of Petersburg. At the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, Jones barely avoided being killed by a Union sharpshooter and participated in Gordon’s flanking maneuver that completely surprised the Federals and compelled Grant to retreat under cover of darkness. At Spotsylvania Court House, the next major engagement, Jones and Gordon were positioned in the center of a salient known as the Mule Shoe, where the fighting was so terrible in one place that it became known as the Bloody Angle. Gordon received a promotion to major general for holding the salient, and both armies moved again. After the next engagement, Cold Harbor, General Lee sent Gordon’s brigade to the Shenandoah Valley to deal with the Union threat there. In the valley that summer, Jones witnessed the fierce fighting that took place at Monocacy, an aborted effort by Confederates to capture Washington, DC, and the despair that came with defeat at the Battle of Winchester (September 19, 1864). But the climax of the fighting that fall for Jones and Gordon’s brigade came with the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864.¹⁷

Union General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Federal infantry in the Shenandoah Valley, had encamped just north of Cedar Creek, Virginia. Gordon decided to attack and had men march single-file throughout the night along a precarious mountain path to get into their appointed position by morning. The suddenness of the attack and ensuing retreat by Union forces made it so that some families living in the area found themselves unexpectedly caught in the crossfire. Allegedly, at this point in the battle, Jones noticed a young child in night clothes, cowering in terror behind a wooden building and exposed to shots from both lines. He galloped toward her, grabbed her and lifted her to his saddle and then rode back to the safety of the Rebel lines. A Confederate observer of this incident commented that when the enemy saw what he was doing, they ceased to shoot at him, giving him cheer instead of bullets, which were joined in by our own men.¹⁸

After Cedar Creek, Gordon’s brigade endured seven more weeks of skirmishes with Federal cavalry in the valley before being ordered to join the Army of Northern Virginia in the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia. According to Jones misery sought the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia by every avenue through which the heart of man can be reached during that winter in Petersburg.¹⁹ By March 1865, the situation had become desperate for the Confederates, so Lee approved General Gordon’s plan to break through Grant’s left wing. At 5 A.M. on March 25, 1865, an assault party of three hundred handpicked men, including Jones, breached the fortifications of the sleeping Federals and occupied a portion of Fort Stedman. A massive Union counterattack repelled the Confederates. At one point during the Confederate retreat Jones dragged a wounded soldier from New York out of the crossfire and to the safety of a Rebel-held trench. The New Yorker survived and after the war located Jones to express his gratitude to him.²⁰ No sooner had Jones safely reached Confederate breastworks than he returned to the fighting to inform an unaware Confederate regiment that a withdrawal had been ordered. Generals Gordon and Lee witnessed his heroics, with the former recalling that a portion of the trip was through a literal furnace of fire, but he passed through it, both going and returning, without a scratch.²¹ General Lee personally thanked Jones for his act of bravery.²²

Two weeks later Jones, who by this point had been promoted to the rank of major, once again embarked on a dangerous journey by horseback for Gordon in the presence of General Lee. This time the setting was Appomattox Courthouse and the message to be delivered was not to Confederate soldiers but to Union generals. Grant’s army had surrounded Lee’s, and when General Gordon’s last desperate attempt to break through the lines failed on the morning of April 9, General Lee sent Jones and others, under flags of truce, to deliver the news of the South’s surrender. Jones, who had entered the war as a boy and had spent the last two years of it witnessing firsthand the words and deeds of two of the most famous and revered southern generals of the war, mounted his horse and headed home to Alabama.²³

2

Apostle of Unity

The household that Thomas Goode Jones knew in 1858 when he departed