James Maurice Thompson was born in 1844 in the former town of Fairfield, Indiana, located in Franklin County to a Baptist minister and his wife.

His brother Will moved to Seattle, Washington and became Western Counsel for the Great Northern Railroad, and remained active in Confederate affairs, as well as publishing a poem, "High Tide at Gettysburg".

His first book, Hoosier Mosaics, published in 1875, was a collection of short stories illustrating the people and atmosphere of small Indiana towns.

Thompson wrote the poem "To the South" that was reprinted in George Washington Cable's influential and controversial essay, "The Freedmen's Case in Equity" in 1885.

This poem expressed Thompson's reaction to the freeing of the slaves, and implied that some other Southerners were not as angry about the overturning of that institution as Northerners presumed.

[3] Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1892, read eight lines from Thompson's "An Address by an Ex-Confederate Soldier to the Grand Army of the Republic", calling him "the finest poet of the Confederacy".