John Beauchamp Jones was a writer whose books enjoyed popularity during the mid-19th century. Jones was a popular novelist and a well-connected literary editor and political journalist in the two decades leading up to the American Civil War. During the war, he served in the Confederate War Department, and is today, above all, remembered for his published diary from the war period.
Antebellum life
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Jones spent his childhood in Kentucky and Missouri. He settled in Arrow Rock, Missouri in 1835 as a storekeeper. Jones left Arrow Rock about the same time he was married, in 1840. The following year, he became editor of the Baltimore Sunday Visitor. His first novel, Wild Western Scenes, was serialized in the Visitor. Jones became editor of the pro-Tyler the Madisonian, later being rewarded for his efforts with the U.S. consulship at Naples. In 1857 he founded and edited the proslavery paper the Southern Monitor, in Philadelphia. After the outbreak of the American Civil War, he abandoned the paper, left his family behind, and fled to Montgomery, Alabama.
Civil War
In Montgomery, Jones was employed as a high-ranking government clerk in the Confederate States War Department. When the Confederate government moved to Richmond, Virginia, his family joined him. From the first day of his flight from the North, Jones kept a diary, with the expressed objective of preserving the details of these eventful times for future publication. After the war, Jones and family returned to his farm at Burlington, New Jersey, and prepared his manuscript for publication. In 1866, the year of his death, it was published as A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, although he would never see it in print. The published diary is one of the best sources of everyday life in Richmond during the war; also with details concerning the inner workings of the War Department. James I. Robertson, Jr. has called him "The Civil War's Most Valuable Diarist."
Literary activities
Jones's fiction and activities as an editor attracted the attention of other literary notables of the period, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. Jones' early novels, Wild Western Scenes: A Narrative of Adventures in the Western Wilderness, Forty Years Ago, The Western Merchant: A Narrative..., and Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of His Exploits at Home, during His Travels, and in the Cities; Designed to Amuse and Instruct, capture the picturesque and generally Edenic qualities of the West, where he spent his early years. Jones' novels commend the honesty of "the People" and predict their abiding success, based on the democratic republicanism of Thomas Jefferson
Wild Western Scenes; or, The White Spirit of the Wilderness. Being a Narrative of Adventures, Embracing the Same Characters Portrayed in the Original "Wild Western Scenes." New Series, 1863.
, T.B. Peterson, 1865.
, J. B. Lippincott, 1875.
Diary
, , J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1866.
Citations
Cited literature
Bradford, Gamaliel. "A Confederate Pepys." The American Mercury, December: 470-478.
Cates, Misty. "Jones, John Beauchamp." Dictionary of Missouri Biography.University of Missouri Press.
