J. Smith Young
Confederate Army officer and politician (1834-1916)
John Smith Young (November 4, 1834 – October 11, 1916) was an American lawyer and Civil War veteran who served briefly as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana from 1878 to 1879.
Early life
John Smith Young is the sixth of thirteen children born to Dr. John Y. Young (1793-1868) and Eliza Henry Jones (1807-1882). Though born in Wake County, North Carolina, he grew up on family cotton plantations in the frontier borderland area of Fayette County, Tennessee (Lagrange postal area), and Marshall County, Mississippi (Lamar postal area). Circa 1847, following the death of John's older sister, Cornelia (1827-1847), Dr. John Y. Young moved his family westward to several locales in southern Arkansas.
In the early 1850s, John attended Washington Male Seminary in Washington, Arkansas, where his older brother, Edwin Young, was on the faculty. John studied classic literature in their original languages—Greek, Latin, French, and English. Thereafter, Young attended Centenary College at its original location in Jackson, Louisiana, and graduated in 1855.
Lawyer
He studied law, was admitted to the state bar, and started his career as an attorney-of-law in Homer, Claiborne Parish, Louisiana.
The public source identifies “J. Smith Young” as confederate Army officer and politician (1834-1916). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Smith, Young and Confederate.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1676405. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1834, 1916, 1878 and 1879.
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This entry incorporates text from “J. Smith Young” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.