John Beauchamp Jones

John Beauchamp Jones (March 6, 1810 – February 4, 1866) was a writer whose books enjoyed popularity during the mid-19th century. Jones was a popular novelist (particularly of the American West and the American South) and a well-connected literary editor and political journalist in the two decades leading up to the American Civil War. During the war, he served in the Confederate War Department, and is today, above all, remembered for his published diary from the war period.

John Beauchamp Jones
BornJohn Beauchamp Jones
(1810-03-06)March 6, 1810
Baltimore, Maryland
DiedFebruary 4, 1866(1866-02-04) (aged 55)
Burlington, New Jersey
Pen nameJ. B. Jones
OccupationWriter, editor, publisher, U.S. consul, C.S. government clerk
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
SpouseFrances T. Custis

Antebellum life

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Jones spent his childhood in Kentucky and Missouri. He settled in Arrow Rock, Missouri in 1835 as a storekeeper. Jones left Arrow Rock about the same time he was married, in 1840. The following year, he became editor of the Baltimore Sunday Visitor. His first novel, Wild Western Scenes, was serialized in the Visitor. Jones became editor of the pro-Tyler the Madisonian, later being rewarded for his efforts with the U.S. consulship at Naples. In 1857 he founded and edited the proslavery paper the Southern Monitor, in Philadelphia. After the outbreak of the American Civil War, he abandoned the paper, left his family behind, and fled to Montgomery, Alabama.[1][2]

Civil War

In Montgomery, Jones was employed as a high-ranking government clerk in the Confederate States War Department. When the Confederate government moved to Richmond, Virginia, his family joined him. From the first day of his flight from the North, Jones kept a diary, with the expressed objective of preserving the details of these eventful times for future publication. After the war, Jones and family returned to his farm at Burlington, New Jersey, and prepared his manuscript for publication. In 1866, the year of his death, it was published as A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, although he would never see it in print. The published diary is one of the best sources of everyday life in Richmond during the war; also with details concerning the inner workings of the War Department.[2][3] James I. Robertson, Jr. has called him "The Civil War's Most Valuable Diarist."[4]

Literary activities

Jones's fiction and activities as an editor attracted the attention of other literary notables of the period, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. Jones' early novels, Wild Western Scenes: A Narrative of Adventures in the Western Wilderness, Forty Years Ago (1841), The Western Merchant: A Narrative . . . (1849), and Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of His Exploits at Home, during His Travels, and in the Cities; Designed to Amuse and Instruct (1854), capture the picturesque and generally Edenic qualities of the West, where he spent his early years. Jones' novels commend the honesty of "the People" and predict their abiding success, based on the democratic republicanism of Thomas Jefferson[5][6]

Jones appears as a humorous supporting character in Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, a science fiction novel set in the 1860s.

Works

Novels

Diary

References

Citations

  1. Cates 1999, pp. 399-440.
  2. Eicher 1997, p. 58.
  3. Pierpauli 2013, p. 1038.
  4. "The Civil War's Most Valuable Diarist." Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Retrieved 2019-02-10.
  5. Lapides 1970, passim.
  6. Bradford 1925, passim.

Cited literature

  • Bradford, Gamaliel (1925). "A Confederate Pepys." The American Mercury, December: 470–478.
  • Cates, Misty (1999). "Jones, John Beauchamp (1810-1866)." Dictionary of Missouri Biography. University of Missouri Press.
  • Eicher, David J. (1997). The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography. University of Illinois Press.
  • Lapides, Frederick R (1970). "John Beauchamp Jones: A Southern View of the Abolitionists." The Journal of the Rutger University Libraries, 33(2): 63–73.
  • Pierpauli, Jr., Paul G. (2013). "Jones, John Beauchamp." American Civil War: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection . ABC-CLIO.
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