Thomas H. Woods Biography - Mississippi Genealogy Trails

Thomas H. Woods

Courts, Judges, and Lawyers of Mississippi, 1798-1935, By Dunbar Rowland, B.S., LL.B., LL.D., Press of Hederman Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 1935, pgs 119-121

Honorable Thomas H. Woods, associate justice of the supreme court of Mississippi, was a native of Kentucky. He was born in the quiet town of Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1838, where the first ten years of his life were passed. In 1848 his father, Reverend Hervey Woods, removed from Glasgow, Kentucky to Kemper county, Mississippi, where Justice Woods received the rudiments of an education, and where he resided until the winter of 1871-72, when he removed with his father to Meridian, Lauderdale county, Mississippi. He was kept in school, and his promise as a student warranted his father ins sending him to Williams College, Massachusetts. During his term of two years in that college he displayed both strength of mind and endurance of physical powers above average. On returning to Mississippi, he turned his studies directly to law and in the winter of 1859-60 was admitted a member of the bar.

A well-equipped young lawyer, he decided to begin professional life among a people who knew his father and accordingly established his office at DeKalb, the seat of justice of Kemper county. He soon achieved prominence even among his seniors of the bar. Within a year he was chosen a representative of Kemper in the historic Secession Convention of 1861, the youngest man to occupy a seat in that body. Within a year the Confederacy of the Southern States called all men to arms, and young Woods was among the first to respond for service. His military career commenced as private in the military company raised in Kemper county for the Confederate service. By gradual promotion he attained the rank of captain in his old company before the war closed at Appomattox. As a soldier he was noted for his gallantry and devotion to the constitutional interpretation of the cause of the strife between the States. He suffered from a serious wound, received at Malvern Hill during battle the remainder of his life, and, like all the survivors of the Confederacy who had been wounded in battle, he regarded this as a badge won in defense of rights and customs which he believed inalienable. It was not a matter for surprise to his friends and the public to witness the esteem with which his contemporaries regarded him after the war.

Immediately after his discharge from the army he was chosen attorney for the third Mississippi district to fill a vacancy, and in 1866 was elected for a full term. His administration of law, it has been said, was somewhat rigorous, but was noted for its justice. During the reconstruction period he was displaced by the military authorities. In 1869, he was nominated for the State senate by the unanimous Democratic voice of his district, but the new forms of law militated against his election, and he was defeated with the other Democratic candidates. But Democracy was so strong in his district that he was elected district attorney in 1971, for the full term, and was zealous in the maintenance of law in his district.

His public career had been conspicuous and few years brought him to high position in the public affairs of his State. In 1882, somewhat against his will, he was chosen representative in the legislature almost by acclamation. I 1885 he declined the office of United States district attorney, offered by President Cleveland, and in other affairs showed a decided disinclination to seek public office. In 1889 Governor Lowry appointed him judge of the supreme court, to fill an unexpired term, and he became chief justice on the bench by operation of law. In 1891 Governor Stone reappointment Judge Woods for the full term of nine years, and appointment that gave his friend, Judge J. A. P. Campbell, great pleasure. Since 1889, in common with his associates on the bench he bent his energies to sustained the prestige of the court, and his opinions and decisions were on a high average with any on the bench.

Judge Woods died in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1910. “A volume,” one writing of him has observed, “could be written on the life of this Mississippi jurist, each page of which would portray a man of intense conviction, and well ordered mind – logical, learned, soldierly, and withal genial and beneficent.”