William Burleigh Jones

William Burleigh Jones (1839-1880) was a doctor in Demopolis, Marengo County, and also served in various elected offices as a Republican during Reconstruction. Although a Unionist, Jones served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. After the war, however, he aligned with the Republican Party and supported full rights for Black citizens. In 1880, he was assassinated for his political views in Lake Providence, Louisiana.  

Jones was born on November 2, 1839, on his family’s cotton plantation, Edgehill, in Half Chance, an unincorporated community near Linden, Marengo County. His parents, Richard Jones and Anne Jane Taylor Jones, were originally from Virginia and moved to Alabama in 1834. William was the youngest of their five children. According to records of his holdings, Richard was one of the wealthiest planters in Marengo County, with more than 5,600 acres and an eventual 70 enslaved people by 1860. In the summer of 1840, before William was a year old, his mother, grandmother and four-year-old sister all died within three months of one another. When he was five years old, William was sent with his older brothers to live in Demopolis with his uncle and aunt. His eldest brother, James Taylor Jones, would be elected to four terms in Congress as a Democrat in post-Reconstruction Alabama, and the other siblings went on to become prominent citizens in Birmingham and Mobile. William was educated in Demopolis and at the Bloomfield Academy just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.

During the Secession crisis, William Jones supported the Unionists, those who opposed secession. In 1860, he served as an elector for Constitutional Union Party candidates John Bell and Edward Everett. Despite his Unionist views, after Alabama seceded Jones, along with his brothers Richard Jr. and James, joined the 4th Alabama Infantry as part of Company D, also known as the Canebrake Rifles. They fought in the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas), after which William developed a chronic medical condition and was relieved of fighting duties for the duration of the war, although he did serve in several staff positions. In 1862, he married Maria “Lillie” Somerville Houston in Demopolis; they had seven children, three of whom survived to adulthood.  

James Taylor Jones

After the war, Jones returned to Demopolis, where he established a cotton plantation and started a medical practice, although there is no indication that he attended medical school and may have apprenticed with his brother Augustus, a graduate of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. In 1866, he was elected mayor of Demopolis and was then re-elected in 1868. Jones also served as an elector for presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant at the Republican National Convention in 1868 and 1872. In 1872, he was elected to the Alabama Senate as a Republican. A member of the Union League, Jones supported full citizenship rights for Black freedmen. Following several threats on his life by the Ku Klux Klan, Jones testified in the 1871 Congressional hearings in Demopolis regarding race-based terror in the South. These hearings, which took place throughout the South that fall, became known as the “Klan Hearings.”

In 1875, after more threats on his life, Jones moved to Lake Providence, Louisiana, where he resumed his medical practice. He also remained an ardent advocate for Republican causes as assistant editor of the North Louisiana Republican. On the night after the 1880 elections, Jones was murdered on the streets of Lake Providence by a gunman supported by a mob of white supremacists, including the local sheriff. Jones’s assassination received front-page coverage in the New York Times and also was reported in newspapers in many major U.S. cities. Most southern newspapers either did not report the assassination or described his death as “due to a personal difficulty,” however. Despite numerous eyewitnesses to the cold-blooded shooting, no one was ever charged in his murder. Prominent southern historians Walter Lynwood Fleming and John Witherspoon Dubose denigrated Jones as a “scalawag,” a term used for southerners who allied with the Union, and then either wrote about his death as a result of personal problems or did not mention him at all. He does not appear in Thomas McAdory Owen’s exhaustive 1921 History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography. These men were representative of historians who promoted the romanticized “Lost Cause” view of the Civil War, according to which the South fought over states’ rights and the southern “way of life” rather than slavery.

In February of 2005, 125 years after Jones’s assassination, the U.S. Senate adopted a resolution, sponsored by Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, formally apologizing to the “Victims of Lynching in Louisiana and Their Descendants.” The resolution included Jones and almost 400 other people. The Legacy Museum of the Equal Justice Initiative includes William Burleigh Jones as a victim of lynching in its archives.