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- [S2711] Encyclopedia of Arkansas, (Name: Central Arkansas Library System; Location: Little Rock;), Jeff Williams (1811–1865).
Thomas Jefferson (Jeff) Williams was a farmer, preacher, and Union officer in the Civil War. He serves as an example of mountain Unionists, and his experiences show how the Civil War affected farm families in northern Arkansas.
Jeff Williams was born in Caswell County, North Carolina, the son of Nathan Williams and Rebecca (Jackson) Williams, a Cherokee Indian. During his childhood, the family moved to Franklin County, Tennessee. Williams married Margaret Ann Hill there in 1832, and the couple had thirteen children.
Williams saw Arkansas for the first time in the spring of 1838, when he and two of his brothers formed part of a Tennessee militia company that escorted several hundred Cherokees west to Indian Territory. Six years later, following the death of his father in 1844, Williams and his large family, along with at least five of his brothers and sisters and their families, migrated to Arkansas, settling in the northern part of Conway County. There, he farmed 160 acres, ran a small cotton gin, and served as preacher for a congregation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Williams supported the Whig Party in the 1850s, even naming two of his sons Daniel Webster and Henry Clay after two Whig leaders. Shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, Williams, who owned one slave at the time, led a county meeting in Springfield, the seat of government in Conway County, in which the participants took a stand against secession but upheld the right of citizens to own slaves. He remained devoted to the Union even after Arkansas seceded and the war began.
With the Confederate Conscription Act of April 1862, pressure to enlist in the Confederate army became intense in Arkansas. Williams led a band of several dozen men from Conway and Van Buren counties who had left their homes to hide out in the bush to avoid conscription. In May, a large Union force under General Samuel Curtis made its way to Batesville (Independence County) from southern Missouri. Williams’s band traveled through Rebel territory and joined Curtis’s army, enlisting for six months in what would be designated Company B of the First Arkansas Infantry Battalion. The company elected Williams as captain and his son Nathan as second lieutenant.
In July 1862, the company marched with Curtis’s men from Batesville to Helena (Phillips County), where they remained camped during the summer and fall of 1862. With 20,000 additional men crowded into Helena during the malarial months of late summer, disease took its toll. Almost half of Williams’s company died of camp diseases, including his two brothers, nephew, and brother-in-law. Williams became so debilitated by diarrhea that the camp surgeon and his commanding officer judged him unfit for service and discharged him in September, but he refused to leave his men. To save the remnant of the battalion, the commander sent Williams and his men upriver to Benton Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri, where they remained until they were mustered out in December 1862.
Williams and the survivors of his company feared they would be killed if they returned to their homes in Rebel territory. They went to southwestern Missouri, where they scouted for the Union army, occasionally making forays into northern Arkansas. In late summer 1863, Union forces took Little Rock (Pulaski County) and moved up the Arkansas River to Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Williams’s band traveled with Union troops to central Arkansas and home. In September, General Frederick Steele authorized the Union men of Conway County to form an independent company, to protect themselves from Rebel threats. During the following seventeen months, Williams led his men in a guerrilla war against bands of Rebels in north-central Arkansas. Called variously Williams’s Raiders or Williams’s Company of Scouts and Spies, the men scouted for the Third Arkansas Union Cavalry, garrisoned at Lewisburg (Conway County).
Williams’s main foe was Colonel Alan R. Witt, who led a band of ragtag Confederates based around Quitman (Cleburne County), located about twenty miles east of Williams’s farm near present-day Center Ridge (Conway County). In the last two years of the war, Witt’s and Williams’s companies waged an on-going feud, as did families in the area known to be sympathetic to either side.
On the night of February 12, 1865, approximately sixty members of Witt’s band surrounded Williams’s home. They shot and killed him when he opened the door. He is buried in Grandview Cemetery near Center Ridge.
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/jeff-williams-1796/
- [S1009] National Park Service, U.S. Civil War Soldiers, 1861-1865, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations Inc; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2007;).
- [S515] Ancestry.com, U.S., Find A Grave Index, 1600s-Current, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2012;).
- [S168] Ancestry.com, Arkansas, Death Certificates, 1914-1969, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Lehi, UT, USA; Date: 2019;), Arkansas Department of Vital Records; Little Rock, Arkansas; Death Certificates; Year: 1937; Roll: 2.
- [S1551] Ancestry.com, U.S., Union Soldiers Compiled Service Records, 1861-1865, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2011;), National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, D.C.; Record Group Title: Records of the AGO, 1780s-1917; Record Group #: 94; Series Number: M399; Roll #: 0053.
- [S73] National Archives and Records Administration, U.S., Civil War Pension Index: General Index to Pension Files, 1861-1934, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations Inc; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2000;), The National Archives at Washington, D.C.; Washington, D.C.; NAI Title: U.S., Civil War Pension Index: General Index to Pension Files, 1861-1934; NAI Number: T288; Record Group Title: Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, 1773-2007; Record Group N.
- [S100] Ancestry.com, 1860 United States Federal Census, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2009;), Year: 1860; Census Place: Lick Mountain, Conway, Arkansas; Page: 559.
- [S163] Ancestry.com, 1830 United States Federal Census, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2010;), Year: 1830; Census Place: Franklin, Tennessee; Series: M19; Roll: 176; Page: 96; Family History Library Film: 0024534.
- [S3442] Ancestry.com, 1840 United States Federal Census, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2010;), Year: 1840; Census Place: Franklin, Tennessee; Roll: 523; Page: 70; Family History Library Film: 0024545.
- [S18] Ancestry.com, 1850 United States Federal Census, (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Lehi, UT, USA; Date: 2009;), Year: 1850; Census Place: Lick Mountain, Conway, Arkansas; Roll: 25; Page: 265b.
- [S2723] Wikipedia: Trail of Tears, (Name: Wikipedia;), Trail of Tears.
The Trail of Tears was part of a series of forced displacements of approximately 60,000 Native Americans between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government known as the Indian removal. Members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations (including thousands of their black slaves) were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas to the west of the Mississippi River that had been designated 'Indian Territory'. The forced relocations were carried out by government authorities after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.
The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated reserve. Thousands died before reaching their destinations or shortly after from disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
- [S1983] Google eBooks, eBook: Who Killed John Clayton, "Thomas Jefferson Williams - Unionist in Arkansas".
The earliest known organized resistance to secession in Arkansas came when Unionists in Conway County and neighboring counties of the Arkansas Ozarks formed underground peace societies, as they called them, in the fall of 1861.
But the likely leader of the county's resistance faction was Thomas Jefferson Williams, a Disciples of Christ preacher, who had ties with several leaders of the society (also Disciples preachers) in neighboring Van Buren County. A small farmer and staunch Unionist in the county's northernmost township, Lick Mountain, Williams was typical of the yeoman hill farmers mobilized for the first time in their lives into political action by the secession crisis.
In April 1862, Williams organized a band of relatives and neighbors in northern Conway County to resist the Confederate Conscription Act, which made military service compulsory for men aged eighteen to thirty-five. Two new rebel companies were raised in the county
Just as Williams organized his Union band in Conway County, General Samuel Curtis marched a large Union force from Missouri south along the White River into Arkansas, arriving in Batesville in early May. Williams and about seventy Union men made their way through rebel lines from Conway County to Curtis's camp and there joined the Union army. Mustered into service as Company B of the First Arkansas Infantry Battalion, these farmers from the northern hills were the first citizens of Conway County to wear the Union blue. The men elected Thomas Jefferson Williams as their captain and his son, Nathan, as second lieutenant. They marched off with Curtis’s army to Helena,
One victim of rebel retribution was the Unionist leader Thomas Jefferson Williams During the night of February 12, 1865, Witt’s rebel guerrillas surrounded the home of Captain Williams and called for him to come out. Turning to his wife, Margaret, Williams said, "My time has come." The rebels shot him dead as he opened the door. The vendetta waged by the Williams clan against the rebels who had killed the captain would not end for years afterward.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Who_Killed_John_Clayton/eenSh9eVjw8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22+Thomas+Jefferson+Williams%22+1811&pg=PA16&printsec=frontcover6&printsec=frontcover
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1811 - 1865 (53 years)
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