This historical marker is located on US 158 at Leasburg in Caswell County. It was erected in 1959.
Jacob Thompson played a little remembered role in the Civil War. Appointed a Confederate ambassador to Canada, he operated a spy network and helped orchestrate several failed schemes to attack the United States from across the Great Lakes....
Thompson entered the Confederate army, and although never formally a member of any regiment, he accepted a commission as a lieutenant colonel and operated as an aide-de-camp, first to Gen. Pierre Beauregard at the Battle of Shiloh and then as inspector general for Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton during the Vicksburg Campaign. He also became the inspiration for one Confederate unit, Company K, 19th Mississippi Infantry, known as the “Jake Thompson Guards”.
Elected to the Mississippi legislature in 1863, he was sent the following year to Canada by the Confederate government as a secret agent. He cooperated with the “Sons of Liberty,” a organization of Copperheads in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois sympathetic to the South in an effort to release Confederate prisoners held near the Great Lakes. Thompson also encouraged a plan to burn several northern cities including New York. He was charged with complicity in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and after the war lived in Canada and Europe.
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