John Thomas (1833-1894)
John is listed in War Department documents as having served as a private in Company D of the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment, CSA. The only surviving records show John enlisting for three years on April 1, 1864 at Dalton, Georgia, which is twenty-five miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the 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.

Excerpted with permission from Notes on John Thomas of Mississippi
by Neil Allen Bristow
© 2001, Neil Allen Bristow

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