JONES, DUDLEY WILLIAM (1840-1869). Dudley W. Jones, Confederate Army officer, one of five children of Henry and Martha (Heron) Jones, was born in Lamar County, Texas, in 1840. He was the grandson of Jesse Jones, one of the first settlers of what is now Lamar County, where the family settled in 1836. In 1840, the year of Jones's birth, the family moved to the Titus County community of Mount Pleasant. Jones was primarily educated by his mother and in the common schools of the area and then attended Maury Institute at Coffeeville. He was said to be "a great ladies' man." At the outbreak of the Civil War^qv he returned to Mount Pleasant and enlisted as a private in the Titus Greys, Company I of Col. William B. Simms's Ninth Texas Cavalry. When the regimental adjutant, named Bell, was "accused of Abolitionism and Bigamy-the latter being pretty strongly proven upon him," the men of the regiment hanged him and elected Jones first lieutenant and adjutant in his place, on October 14, 1861. During the first year of the war his regiment served with Gen. Benjamin McCulloch's^qv Army of the West in Arkansas, Missouri, and Indian Territory. After the battle of Elkhorn Tavern in March 1862 the regiment was transferred to Mississippi, where it was reorganized near Corinth on May 26. In this reorganization Jones, although only twenty-two, was elected colonel, replacing Nathan W. Townes, who had resigned soon after superseding Simms. At this time the regiment became part of Lawrence Sullivan Ross's^qv famed brigade.

Commanding the Ninth Texas Cavalry on March 5, 1863, Jones distinguished himself in the defeat and capture of a strong federal reconnoitering expedition at Thompson's Station, Tennessee, and in the defeat of the federal cavalry raid against railroad communications at Lovejoy's Station, Georgia, in the latter part of July 1864. For the final few weeks of the war Jones commanded Ross's brigade.

After the war he traveled about the United States for about a year before returning to his father's farm in 1866; he was elected to the Constitutional Convention of 1866.^qv He was also president of the Texas Club, an organization of former Confederates, and a member of the committee that oversaw the removal of the remains of Albert Sidney Johnston^qv from New Orleans to Austin in 1867. In 1867 he moved to Houston, began the practice of law in the firm of Jones and Barzizer, and edited one of the city's first daily newspapers, the Ku Klux Vidette. He died of a "hemorrhage of the bowels" on August 14, 1869, and is buried in Houston.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clement Anselm Evans, ed., Confederate Military History (Atlanta: Confederate Publishing, 1899; extended ed., Wilmington, North Carolina: Broadfoot, 1987-89). George L. Griscom, Fighting with Ross' Texas Cavalry Brigade, C.S.A.: The Diary of George L. Griscom, ed. Homer L. Kerr (Hillsboro, Texas: Hill Junior College Press, 1976). Victor Marion Rose, Ross' Texas Brigade (Louisville, Kentucky: Courier-Journal, 1881; rpt., Kennesaw, Georgia: Continental, 1960). A. W. Sparks, The War between the States (Tyler, Texas: Lee and Burnett, 1901; rpt., Longview, Texas: D&D, 1987).

Thomas W. Cutrer