Thomas Goode was born on November 26, 1844 in Macon, Georgia, United States, but when he was still young the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama. He was the son of Samuel Goode and Martha Ward (Goode) Jones, first cousins, and a descendant of Maj. Peter Jones of Virginia who aided in punishing Indian depredations in 1676. His father, a graduate of Williams College (1837), was a pioneer railroad constructor in the South, having built one of the first railroads in Georgia.
Jones's early education was obtained in the schools of Montgomery and the academies of Charles Minor and Gessner Harrison in Virginia.
When the Civil War opened, Jones was a cadet in the Virginia Military Institute. Leaving there to enter the Confederate army as a private in an Alabama regiment, he rose to the rank of major, served as an aide to Generals Early and Gordon, participated in many of the decisive battles in Virginia, and acted as bearer of a flag of truce at Appomattox.
At the conclusion of the war, Jones returned to Montgomery, engaged in agriculture, studied law, and was admitted to practice in 1868. From that time to his death he was almost constantly in public service and was generally engaged in sharp controversies. From June to November 1868 he edited the Daily Picayune, a Democratic paper published in Montgomery. He was connected with the municipal government for many years; was the reporter of the decisions of the Alabama supreme court from 1870 to 1880 (43-60 Alabama Reports); served in the lower house of the legislature and was the speaker of that body for two terms; and was colonel of the state troops from 1880 to 1890.
In a bitter factional fight between the conservative democracy and the radical Farmers' Alliance group, he was elected governor in 1890. Renominated in 1892, he successfully withstood the vigorous attacks of the Farmers' Alliance men, now calling themselves Jeffersonians, under the leadership of his old political opponent, Reuben F. Kolb. This era constituted one of the stormiest periods in Alabama politics; there was much friction and recrimination, and Governor Jones was bitterly assailed in many quarters.
In the same year he was appointed by President Roosevelt a federal judge for the northern and middle district of Alabama. In his judicial capacity he was closely connected with the railroad rate fight in Alabama and in his decisions upheld the constitutional rights of corporations to appeal rate regulations to the federal court, when Gov. B. B. Comer, elected on an anti-railroad platform, sought by state legislation to deny this right to common carriers. Many of his decisions struck at the system of peonage in the state.
He died in Montgomery shortly before his scheduled retirement from the federal bench.
Thomas Goode Jones was the 28th Governor of Alabama. He had large business capacity and his administration was notable for its constructive policies as well as for its vigor. In the Alabama constitutional convention of 1901 he played an important part and was instrumental in having placed in the new constitution a provision for the removal of sheriffs recreant to duty in the face of mobs. His career covered a transition period, and his long and bitter fight over railroad matters constituted an epoch in Alabama politics. Today, the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law at Faulkner University, in Montgomery, Alabama, is named for him.
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Jones was a man of great ability, forcefulness of character, and aggressiveness. As a controversialist, he was unsparing and singularly incisive.
Thomas Goode was married, December 20, 1866, to Georgena Caroline Bird of Montgomery and was the father of thirteen children.
