James Simons, Jr.

Eldest son of a successful lawyer, in 1860 he was a 21 year old law student living with his parents and younger siblings in Charleston, SC. He enrolled and mustered as First Lieutenant of Company A, Artillery Battalion, Hampton Legion on 22 August 1861.

He was with the battery in Maryland and commanded a section of the Napoleons in action at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

He was with his battery to at least February 1864 when he was detailed to be a member of a Court Martial. He was still on detached service to at least October 1864, and may have been promoted to Captain of the battery by the end of the war.

By 1870 and to at least 1880 he was a practicing attorney in Charleston. He was President of the News & Courier Company, which published a newspaper in Charleston, and he was a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives (1878-91, Speaker 1882-1890). He was Chairman of the Charleston Board of Public School Commissioners (1907-19), and was still working as an attorney in Charleston to at least 1910.

His service from his Compiled Service Records,1 online from fold3, and an October 1862 muster roll for the battery, now at the University of Alabama. His late-war promotion from his brief history of the battery published in U.R. Brooks' Stories of the Confederacy (1912). His role at Sharpsburg from Artillery.2 Personal details from a bio sketch to accompany his papers at the South Carolina Historical Society [finding aid, pdf], family genealogists, and the US Census of 1860-1880, 1910. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

He married Elizabeth Potter Schott (1849-1946) in 1890.

His portrait (c. 1910) hangs in his namesake James Simons School, Moultrie Street at King Street, Charleston, SC.

His letters home from Leipzig are among his father's personal papers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill [finding aid].

11/30/1839; Charleston, SC

07/04/1919; Charleston, SC; burial in Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, SC