Thomas Goode Jones

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American judge

Thomas Goode Jones (November 26, 1844 – April 28, 1914) was an Alabama lawyer, politician, and military officer. He served in the Alabama legislature and as the 28th governor of Alabama . He later became United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama .

Family and early life

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He was born on November 26, 1844, in Vineville (now Macon, Georgia ) to Martha Goode (1821–1861) and her husband, railroad builder Samuel Jones (1815–1886), who had moved to Georgia in 1839 to become an assistant engineer on the Monroe Railroad, which soon declared bankruptcy. Despite financial problems around Thomas's birth, Samuel Goode would become an engineer on various other railroads in Alabama and Florida, one of Alabama's early industrialists, and briefly, an Alabama legislator representing Lee County, Alabama .

He also remarried during the Civil War to Aurora Serena Elmore, who was descended from Representative Joseph Brevard of South Carolina and would bear seven boys (Thomas's half-brothers) during their marriage.

Shortly before the war began, Samuel Jones completed the Alabama and Florida Railroad , which supplied the Confederate Navy Yard in Pensacola, Florida . He also helped establish the Chewacla Lime Works, the Montgomery and Talladega Sulphur Mines, and the Muscogee Lumber Company and completed a railroad line connecting Montgomery and Selma, Alabama , shortly before the Civil War ended, and then the Savannah and Memphis Railroad .

Even more than the Jones family, the Goodes were among the First Families of Virginia . John Goode had arrived in Virginia via Barbados before 1661 and established a tobacco plantation in Henrico County . His descendant Samuel Goode , of Chesterfield County , served as a lieutenant during the American Revolutionary War and as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the US House of Representatives. His son Thomas Goode (1787–1858), Martha's father, helped establish the Homestead European-style spa in Wythe County, Virginia .

The Jones traced their descent from Captain Roger Jones, who commanded a British naval vessel in Chesapeake Bay in 1680 and whose youngest son, Thomas, settled near Fortress Monroe in what became Brunswick County, Virginia . Thomas's descendant John Jones represented Brunswick County in the Virginia House of Burgesses and became a captain in a Virginia regiment during the American Revolutionary War. His son Dr. Thomas Williamson Jones (1788–1824), graduated from the University of North Carolina before he married Mary Armistead Goode. Their eldest son, Samuel Goode Jones, studied at Williams College in Massachusetts and at Newark College (now the University of Delaware ) before he married Martha Goode. In 1849, Samuel Jones moved his young family to Montgomery, Alabama, while he was the Montgomery and West Point Railroad engineer.

Thomas had a sister, Mary, who had been born in Atlanta in 1847 and would have five more siblings who survived infancy before the Civil War began and seven half-brothers from his father's second marriage. In any event, he was not educated at home but was sent to Charlottesville, Virginia , to study at a preparatory academy by Charles Minor and Gessner Harrison. In the summer of 1860, he began to attend the Virginia Military Institute , and fellow cadets elected him as a sergeant.

During the Civil War, in winter quarters in Petersburg, Virginia, Jones had begun studying William Blackstone 's _Commentaries on the Laws of England _. After the war, he failed as a planter. He clerked for the Alabama and Florida Railroad, and thanks to his father, Jones read law with John A. Elmore and then in a night class with Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Abram J. Walker .

Military career

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Jones as Confederate officer

South Carolina declared secession from the United States before Jones's first semester ended. On May 1, 1861, after Virginia's secession vote, about 200 cadets (including Jones) joined Professor and Major General Stonewall Jackson in fighting for the Confederate States Army . Jones later recalled that his first duty was burying the dead after the Battle of McDowell . The cadets marched with Jackson's men until May 16, 1861, when the school summoned them back and later awarded them honorary degrees. Meanwhile, Jones returned to Montgomery and enlisted as a private in the Partisan Rangers, Company K of the 53rd Alabama Regiment, but he was soon promoted to sergeant. The unit fought at the Battle of Thompson's Station , in Tennessee , and Jones received a lieutenant's commission after he had led the unit despite his battle wound; both the company's captain and lieutenant had been wounded and abandoned the field.

Jones was appointed aide de camp to General John Brown Gordon and accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg campaign , including as a messenger when Gordon requested permission to attack Cemetery Ridge but was denied during the Battle of Gettysburg . Jones also fought in the Siege of Petersburg , the Battle of the Wilderness , and the [Battle of Spotsylvania Court House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Spotsylvania

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