eldest son, Samuel Goode Jones, studied at Williams College in Massachusetts and at Newark College (now the University of Delaware) before he married Martha Goode. In 1849, Samuel Jones moved his young family to Montgomery, Alabama, while he was the Montgomery and West Point Railroad engineer. Thomas had a sister, Mary, who had been born in Atlanta in 1847 and would have five more siblings who survived infancy before the Civil War began and seven half-brothers from his father's second marriage. In any event, he was not educated at home but was sent to Charlottesville, Virginia, to study at a preparatory academy by Charles Minor and Gessner Harrison. In the summer of 1860, he began to attend the Virginia Military Institute, and fellow cadets elected him as a sergeant. During the Civil War, in winter quarters in Petersburg, Virginia, Jones had begun studying William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. After the war, he failed as a planter. He clerked for the Alabama and Florida Railroad, and thanks to his father, Jones read law with John A. Elmore and then in a night class with Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Abram J. Walker. Military career South Carolina declared secession from the United States before Jones's first semester ended. On May 1, 1861, after Virginia's secession vote, about 200 cadets (including Jones) joined Professor and Major General Stonewall Jackson in fighting for the Confederate States Army. Jones later recalled that his first duty was burying the dead after the Battle of McDowell. The cadets marched with Jackson's men until May 16, 1861, when the school summoned them back and later awarded them honorary degrees. Meanwhile, Jones returned to Montgomery and enlisted as a private in the Partisan Rangers, Company K of the 53rd Alabama Regiment, but he was soon promoted to sergeant. The unit fought at the Battle of Thompson's Station, in Tennessee, and Jones received a lieutenant's commission after he had led the unit despite his battle wound; both the company's captain and lieutenant had been wounded and abandoned the field. Jones was appointed aide de camp to General John Brown Gordon and accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg Campaign, including as a messenger when Gordon requested permission to attack Cemetery Ridge but was denied during the Battle of Gettysburg. Jones also fought in the Siege of Petersburg, the Battle of the Wilderness, and the Battle