Background
THOMPSON, Jacob was born on May 15, 1810 in Caswell County, North Carolina, United States. Son of Nicholas and Lucretia (Van Hook) Thompson. His father, a tanner, had married into wealth.
THOMPSON, Jacob was born on May 15, 1810 in Caswell County, North Carolina, United States. Son of Nicholas and Lucretia (Van Hook) Thompson. His father, a tanner, had married into wealth.
Graduated from the University North Carolina, 1831.
The younger Thompson attended Bingham Academy in Orange County, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1831. After tutoring at the university, he studied law in Greensboro and was admitted to the bar in 1835. He was an Episcopalian.
Thompson moved to Natchez in 1836 and then to Pontotoc, Mississippi, in 1837. Thompson, who wanted to serve in the state legislature, lost a race for attorney general but became a Democratic leader in northern Mississippi before moving to Oxford, Mississippi, in late 1837.
From 1839 to 1851, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee and supported the Mexican War. He lost a bid for reelection in 1850. In return for his support, President Franklin Pierce offered him the consulship at Havana in 1853 but he declined it.
In 1855, he lost a campaign for the U.S. Senate to Jefferson Davis. From 1857 to 1861, he was secretary of the interior in the Buchanan cabinet. He centralized and personally controlled the management of the department, but his reputation suffered because of fraud in the Indian trust fund.
A secessionist, he resigned his cabinet post in January 1861 to organize Confederate troops in Mississippi. When the Civil War began, he entered the Confederate Army as a lieutenant colonel and served as a voluntary aide to General P.G.T. Beauregard. General John L. Pemberton appointed him inspector general of the Confederate Army in 1862.
Thompson was captured but released after the battle of Vicksburg. He left the army early in 1863 to become active in the Mississippi legislature, and in 1864-1865, he conducted a secret mission to Canada for President Davis. He sought to cooperate with secret organizations in the western states which conspired against the U.S. government.
As part of the Knights of the Golden Circle, Thompson worked with Clement Vallandingham to release and arm 25,000 Confederate prisoners in the North. The scheme did not succeed. Fearing he would be accused as a traitor to the federal government after the war, he did not return to his home.
From 1865 to 1867, he traveled in Canada and in Europe. He returned in 1868 to Oxford, Mississippi, and to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1870, where he acquired extensive property holdings.
"Peculiar institution" of slavery was not only expedient but also ordained by God and upheld in Holy Scripture.
Stands for preserving slavery, states' rights, and political liberty for whites. Every individual state is sovereign, even to the point of secession.