John Beauchamp Jones

John Beauchamp Jones (March 6, 1810 – February 4, 1866) was an American writer whose books enjoyed popularity during the mid 19th century. Jones was a popular novelist (particularly of the American West and the American South) and a well-connected literary editor and political journalist in the two decades leading up to the American Civil War. During the war, he worked as a clerk in the Confederate War Department in Richmond, Virginia. His diary of those years was published shortly after his death.

John Beauchamp Jones in The Guns of the South
In 1864, during the Second American Revolution, John Beauchamp Jones told Robert E. Lee how Jones' son Custis kept a pet parrot which was eating the family's precious ration of meat. Lee was reminded of his own household's troublesome pet, Custis Morgan the squirrel.

Jones still worked at the War Department in 1865, the year after the Revolution ended.