Thomas Shackelford

Not to be confused with Thomas Shackleford.

Thomas G. Shackelford (died December 19, 1877)[1] was chief justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi from 1868 to 1870.[2]

He graduated from the law school at Transylvania University and settled in Mississippi. He was appointed to the bench in 1868 by General Adelbert Ames, military commandant. On February 25, 1868, General Alvan Cullem Gillem, who had been given post-Civil War command over a region including Mississippi, named Shackelford to the state supreme court, along with Elza Jeffords and Ephraim G. Peyton.[3]

Elza Jeffords, of Issaquena County, also sat by appointment under military rule in 1868. The opinions of this tribunal are found in the forty-second volume of the Mississippi reports. Later justices criticized a case cited in that volume, Lusby v. Railroad Co., describing them "utterances of a tribunal appointed by a military satrap who then ruled in a prostrate commonwealth, and have no other binding authority upon us than that each case therein must be regarded as res adjudicata!"[4]

He was circuit judge for several years after his retirement from the supreme bench. He died at the New Orleans, Louisiana, home of his son-in-law, Colonel George Mooreman, and his body was returned by special train car to Canton, Mississippi, for burial.[1]

  1. ^ a b "Death of Judge Thos. Shackelford", Vicksburg Weekly Commercial Herald (December 28, 1877), p. 1.
  2. ^ Leslie Southwick, Mississippi Supreme Court Elections: A Historical Perspective 1916-1996, 18 Miss. C. L. Rev. 115 (1997-1998).
  3. ^ "Latest by Telegraph", Natchez Democrat (February 27, 1868), p. 2.
  4. ^ Thomas H. Somerville, "A Sketch of the Supreme Court of Mississippi", in Horace W. Fuller, ed., The Green Bag, Vol. XI (1899), p. 511.