Representative Jacob Thompson

Jacob Thompson (May 15, 1810 – March 24, 1885) was an American lawyer, Democratic politician, United States Representative from Mississippi, and United States Secretary of the Interior who resigned at the outbreak of the American Civil War and became Inspector General of the Confederate States Army. He later played a prominent role in Confederate clandestine operations based in Canada and, after the war, became a benefactor of Southern educational institutions.

Thompson was born in Leasburg, Caswell County, North Carolina, on May 15, 1810, the son of Nicolas Thompson and Lucretia (van Hook) Thompson. He attended Bingham Academy in Orange County, North Carolina, and then enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1831, where he was a member of the Philanthropic Society. Following his graduation, he briefly served on the university faculty before deciding to pursue a legal career. In 1832 he left the university to study law, was admitted to the bar in 1834, and in 1837 established a law practice in Pontotoc, Mississippi. Early in his Mississippi career he made an unsuccessful bid to become the state attorney general, marking his first significant foray into public life.

Thompson’s political career began in earnest with his election as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives. He was elected to the Twenty‑sixth Congress and served continuously through the Thirty‑first Congress, from March 4, 1839, to March 3, 1851. During his tenure he became a prominent Southern legislator and, in the Twenty‑ninth Congress, served as chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, where he dealt with issues related to Native American policy and western expansion. In 1845 he was appointed to the United States Senate, but he never received the commission, and the seat ultimately went to Joseph W. Chalmers. After losing his bid for reelection to the Thirty‑second Congress, Thompson returned to the practice of law in Mississippi. In 1853 President Franklin Pierce offered him the post of United States consul to Havana, which Thompson declined. He remained active in Mississippi politics and sought a seat in the United States Senate in 1855, but was defeated by Jefferson Davis.

In 1857, with the inauguration of President James Buchanan, Thompson returned to national office when Buchanan appointed him United States Secretary of the Interior, a post he held from 1857 until 1861. As Interior Secretary he oversaw the department responsible for public lands, Indian affairs, and various domestic functions at a time of mounting sectional crisis. During the later years of the Buchanan administration, the cabinet was riven by disputes over slavery and secession. In an 1859 speech, Thompson advanced what he presented as a moderate unionist position: he denounced Republicans in the North who characterized slavery as an “irrepressible conflict,” while also criticizing Southern extremists who advocated reopening the Atlantic slave trade. Nonetheless, following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Thompson aligned himself with the secessionist movement. While still serving as Interior Secretary, he was appointed by the state of Mississippi as a “secession commissioner” to North Carolina and was tasked with persuading that state to leave the Union. Passing through Baltimore on December 17, 1860, en route to Raleigh, he was reported by the New York Times on December 20 as having “entered openly into the secession service, while professing still to serve the Federal authority.” That same day, December 20, his open letter to North Carolina Governor John W. Ellis was published in the Raleigh State Journal, warning that the South faced “common humiliation and ruin” if it remained in the Union and predicting that a Northern majority “trained from infancy to hate our people and their institutions” would overthrow slavery and bring about “the subjugation of our people.” Thompson resigned as Secretary of the Interior in January 1861; Horace Greeley’s New‑York Daily Tribune denounced him as “a traitor,” declaring that “undertaking to overthrow the Government of which you are a sworn minister may be in accordance with the ideas of cotton‑growing chivalry, but to common men cannot be made to appear creditable.”

After leaving the Buchanan administration, Thompson entered Confederate service. He was appointed Inspector General of the Confederate States Army, a position that involved oversight and inspection duties rather than field command. Although not a professional soldier by training, he later joined the army as an officer and served as an aide to General P. G. T. Beauregard at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862. He attained the rank of lieutenant colonel and was present at several major engagements in the Western Theater, including the battles of Corinth, Vicksburg, and Tupelo. His wartime experience thus combined administrative responsibilities with direct participation in some of the Confederacy’s most critical campaigns west of the Appalachians.

In March 1864, Confederate President Jefferson Davis asked Thompson to lead a secret delegation to British North America, and he accepted the assignment. Arriving in Montreal in May 1864, Thompson appears to have become the effective leader of Confederate Secret Service operations in Canada. From his base there he organized and supported a series of plots and schemes against Union targets. He directed a failed attempt in September 1864 to free Confederate prisoners of war held on Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay, Ohio, and arranged for the purchase of a steamer that was to be armed and used to disrupt shipping on the Great Lakes. On June 13, 1864, he met former New York Governor Washington Hunt at Niagara Falls; according to the later testimony of Peace Democrat Clement Vallandigham, Hunt discussed with Thompson the idea of a Northwestern Confederacy and secured funds for arms, which were routed through a subordinate. Thompson also provided money to Benjamin Wood, owner of the New York Daily News, to purchase arms. One of the most notorious plots associated with his Canadian operations was the planned burning of New York City on November 25, 1864, conceived as retaliation for the scorched‑earth tactics of Union Generals Philip Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman in the South. Regarded in the North as a schemer and conspirator, Thompson’s name became attached to numerous alleged plots, some of which may have been exaggerated by public hysteria. He was suspected by some contemporaries of having met John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s future assassin, though no conclusive proof has ever been produced; in the years after the war, Thompson labored to clear his name of any involvement in the assassination. In the spring of 1865, Canadian customs officials raided a house in Toronto that Thompson had rented and discovered coal torpedoes and other incendiary devices hidden beneath the floorboards. During the war, Union troops also burned his Oxford, Mississippi, manor, known as “Home Place.” Oxford would later become the hometown of writer William Faulkner, who is believed to have based some of his fictional characters on Thompson.

With the collapse of the Confederacy, Thompson fled first to England and then returned to Canada, remaining abroad while passions in the United States subsided and while questions lingered about his role in Confederate clandestine activities. In time he was able to return to the United States and settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he devoted himself to managing his extensive business and land holdings. In his later years he became associated with efforts to rebuild Southern educational and religious institutions. He was appointed to the board of the University of the South at Sewanee and was regarded as a significant benefactor of that institution, reflecting his longstanding interest in higher education dating back to his early association with the University of North Carolina.

Jacob Thompson died in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 24, 1885, and was interred in Elmwood Cemetery. His death provoked renewed controversy in national politics. When the administration of President Grover Cleveland ordered flags in Washington lowered to half‑mast and Secretary of the Interior Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II closed the Department of the Interior in Thompson’s honor, Republicans and Union veterans sharply condemned these gestures, citing Thompson’s role in secession and Confederate intrigue. Thompson’s papers and related materials, including the Jacob Thompson Collection (MUM00266) within the William and Marjorie Lewis Collection, are preserved in the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi, providing a documentary record of his long and contentious public career.