Notes on John S. Thomas, by Neil Allen Bristow

John S. Thomas was born somewhere in Miss. about 1833. He is listed in War Department documents as having served as a private in Company D of the 44th Miss. Infantry Regiment, CSA. The only surviving records show John enlisting for three years on April 1, 1864 at Dalton, Ga., twenty-five miles south of Chattanooga, Tenn., where Confederate forces under Gen. Joseph E. Johnston had been regrouping in winter quarters after their defeat by Ulysses S. Grant the previous fall. Both the location of his enlistment and the tenor of the times strongly suggest that he had prior service, either in the 44th or in its predecessor, Blythe's Mississippi Regiment, which had three companies raised from De Soto county, where John had been living for several years. His commanding officer, Capt. T. W. Maxwell, who swore him in at Dalton, was later the Clerk of the De Soto County Court in Hernando. It does seem unlikely that a young, single man like John would have joined the war only three full years after it began. Even more unlikely is his traveling across two-and-a-half war-strained states to enlist.

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Although not as well known as Gettysburg, the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, 30 November 1864, was one of the bloodiest engagements of the Civil War, with over 6,000 casualties in four hours. It was also the turning point of John Bell Hood's ill-fated expedition which the Confederate strategists hoped would force Sherman to call off his March to the Sea.

Among the casualties was John Thomas. According to US Army records, John suffered a "gunshot fracture of right ankle" from a cannon ball. ... He probably walked with a limp, especially in cold weather, and he may have used a cane, but family tradition is silent on any severe disability. In any case, he was hale enough to run a farm for almost thirty years.

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John returned to a community in bad shape. Although De Soto Co. had not been the site of any major battles, it fell into what was a no man's land between the armies, and suffered raids by both sides. Following the war, the area was slow to heal, not only because of the social upheaval brought about by Emancipation and Reconstruction, but also from the people's stubborn reliance on raising cotton and their inability to find alternatives to that crop. Those who lived through the time remembered the hardships decades later. ...

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Three-and-a-half years after his return, in the closing days of 1868, John married Miss Amanda Laughter, the twenty-five year-old daughter of John J. Laughter and Harriet Brown.

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Notes on John Thomas of Mississippi

[Excerpted with permission from Notes on John Thomas of Mississippi by Neil Allen Bristow.]
© 2001, Neil Allen Bristow -- edited by F.L.

NOTE: John S. Thomas' wife, Amanda Laughter, is the daughter of Harriet Brown Laughter. See The Mysterious Life of Hukey Brown below.

By Neil Allen Bristow:
Hukey Brown was born about 1767 near the Chesapeake, and he was much traveled, moving from Maryland to Virginia to northeastern Georgia to the middle Tennessee Valley to Fayette County, Tennessee near Memphis and finally to De Soto County in northwestern Mississippi, where he died in his eighties. His antecedents are unknown, but he may have been accompanied on his wanderings by some close relatives, such as Bedford, Stephen, and Abraham Brown, and later by Robert Brown, all of whose names occur in connection with Hukey's.

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Hukey's daughter, Harriet Brown Laughter (1814-1884), was the mother of Amanda Laughter who married John Thomas 30 Dec 1868 in De Soto County, Mississippi. ...

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The Long and Mysterious Life of Hukey Brown