[2] In July 1849 Maples was appointed to a "committee of twenty" in DeSoto County, Mississippi that produced a resolution that opposed the Wilmot Proviso, protested northern aggression, and "Resolved, 5th.

[7] Maples was one of three major business partners of slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest, along with (serially, not simultaneously) Seaborne S. Jones and Byrd Hill.

)[8] According to a history of DeSoto County, Mississippi produced by the WPA in the late 1930s, "An interesting fact concerning Gen. Forrest, related by [Anna Maples of Olive Branch, Mississippi], was his having worked for Josiah Maples in his youth, on the old Evans place, a few miles from Pleasant Hill".

[11] At the time of the 1860 U.S. federal census, Maples, occupation "planter," with personal property valued at $10,000, lived in Redfork Township, Desha County, Arkansas, in a household shared with an overseer, a housekeeper, and their respective families.

[16] During the American Civil War he sold some cotton that was later partially burned by Union troops; there was a lawsuit.

[17] The case Butler v. Maples "established that buying cotton through an insurrectionary area through an agent licensed by the Treasury Department was legal".