Background
Thomas Jefferson Simmons was born on June 25, 1837 at Hickory Grove, Crawford County, Georgia, the son of Allen G. and Mary (Cleveland) Simmons. His grandfather, William Simmons, was a native of North Carolina.
Thomas Jefferson Simmons was born on June 25, 1837 at Hickory Grove, Crawford County, Georgia, the son of Allen G. and Mary (Cleveland) Simmons. His grandfather, William Simmons, was a native of North Carolina.
Poverty prevented Thomas from receiving even the scanty educational advantages afforded by the county schools, but with borrowed money he was at length enabled to attend Bromwood Institute at Lagrange, in Troup County. Later he studied in the law office of A. D. Hammond, of Forsyth.
In August 1857 was admitted to the bar and began practice at Knoxville in his native county.
At the beginning of the Civil War he entered the Confederate army. Enlisting in the Crawford Greys, the first troops to leave the county, he was made a lieutenant. His company became a part of the 6th Georgia Infantry under Col. A. H. Colquitt, and Simmons was soon in Virginia, where he fought until Lee's surrender. He was attached to the 45th Georgia Infantry in the 3rd Brigade in A. P. Hill's division of Longstreet's corps; in 1862, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel; and near the end of the year he was made a colonel.
He was recommended by General Lee for a brigadier-generalship, but the surrender came before his commission could be delivered. At the battle of Seven Pines, he received a severe wound which disabled him for six months. After the war, he returned to Georgia and soon thereafter was chosen a delegate to the constitutional convention which met in November 1865.
Under the new government set up, he was elected to the state Senate. In 1867 he became solicitor of the Macon circuit; but, being a Conservative, he was replaced with a Republican a few months later by the incoming Radicals. He then moved to Macon and in 1871 served again in the state Senate. With the Radicals now displaced from power, he played a conspicuous part as chairman of the committee on finance and bonds.
By proving many of the Reconstruction bonds to be fraudulent, he prevented their validation and thereby saved the state millions of dollars. The amount the legislature repudiated was $7, 957, 000. He was reëlected to the Senate in 1873, and in 1875 he was made its president.
In 1877 the Conservatives, having the state securely in their hands, called a constitutional convention, to which Simmons was elected and in which he became the chairman of the committee on finance. He reported the financial provisions of the new document and saw them adopted without material change. The next year he was elected to the superior court of the Macon circuit, where he continued as judge for nine years.
In 1887 he was elected to fill a vacancy on the state supreme court, and the following year was elected to a full term. In 1894, when the chief justice, Logan E. Bleckley, retired, Simmons succeeded him and continued in that position until his death eleven years later.
Though not brilliant, he had a tenacious memory and was a patient listener.
In 1859 he married Pennie Hollis. After the death of his first wife, in 1864, he married, in 1867, Lucille Peck, who died in 1882. Six years later he married Mrs. Nannie R. Renfro, who with three of his children, survived him.