THOMPSON, James M., (1st Sergeant, Company G, 6th Alabama Volunteer Infantry Regiment) James Monroe Thompson, author of Reminiscences of the Autauga Rifles, was born in Kingston. Autauga County. Alabama on November 9. 1836. He was the seventh of eight children of William Norton and Cynthia Antoinette (Manning) Thompson.
As a boy Thompson attended school in Kingston and in Selma, Alabama, but after the deaths of his mother and father in 1847 and 1851, respectively, he settled in nearby Independence where he remained, unmarried and employed as a plantation overseer, until the outbreak of the Confederate War.
In April 1861 Thompson joined a local militia company known as the Autauga Rifles, which within a month was inducted into the Confederate Army on June 2, 1861 at Corinth. Mississippi as Co. G, 6th Alabama Volunteer Infantry Regiment, captained by a physician named Thomas A. Davis. .
During the course of the war Thompson was thrice wounded, once during the Seven Days’ Battles (June 26-July 7, 1862), at Cold Harbor (June 1-3, 1863), and near Petersburg (March 24, 1865). Meanwhile, he was promoted from private to 1st Sergeant March 12, 1862 to 1st lieutenant, the last-named rank having been personally approved by Gen. Robert E. Lee because of ‘gallantry displayed in the engagements of the 5th, 6th, 10th, 12th and 29th May and 2 June, 1864, as well as for his general good conduct and fitness for the position.’
After the war Thompson purchased a 320-acre farm near Autaugaville and on February 20, 1866, at the age of thirty, married Virginia C. Pou, daughter of John Wesley and Rachel A. (Golson) Pou, formerly of South Carolina. On November 21, 1866 their first child was born, hut the little girl lived only three weeks. And in less than two years Virginia also died and was buried beside her daughter in Asbury Cemetery in Autaugaville.
Thompson married again on October 16. 1869, this time to Emma Cora Shackleford, daughter of Robert Eudony Linton and Cordelia Ann (Quigley) Shackleford, direct descendants of Roger Shackleford of Old Aresford, Hampton, England, who had migrated to America in 1649. To this couple were born three children, Lide, William N. and Robert S. Thompson.
On December 19, 1879, when Thompson was forty-three years old, a respected Confederate veteran and a successful farmer, he delivered an address before the Merrill E. Pratt Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy in Autaugaville. Later, as he states in his preface, he added a roster of the company and published the whole as Reminiscences of the Autauga Rifles in hopes that it ‘would preserve some record’ of the soldiers of the county who had served in the Confederate Army.
Copies of
Thompson’s Reminiscences are
extremely rare, and it has never before been reprinted. (However,
there are four other published essays touching upon the 6th
Alabama, making it one of the best documented of all Alabama Confederate
regiments.)
In 1888
Thompson was elected sheriff of Autauga County, a post he held four years. He
was a prominent member of the Alabama
Farmers’ Alliance, the Masonic Order, and the local Methodist Church, of which he was superintendent of Sunday School from 1901 to 1904.
Thompson died on January 19, 1910 at the age of sixty-four, only four months after the death of his wife. Both are buried in Rocky Hill Cemetery in Autaugaville. In his obituary, published in the Prattville Progress, January 27, 1910, the editor stated that ‘Thompson was one of the best and most prominent citizens of this county, a gallant Confederate soldier. He was one of the three living members of the Autauga Rifles of Civil War fame.” "Reminiscences of Autauga Rifles"