James J. Farris was born around 1835 in Botetourt County, Virginia. By the early 1860s, he was working as a clerk in Tennessee. He enlisted in the Confederate army on May 4, 1861, and he mustered in as a private in Company E of the 154^th Tennessee Infantry. He was 5 feet, 11½ inches tall, with light hair and blue eyes. He contracted a “Remittent Fever” on April 2, 1862, and Confederate officials sent him to a General Hospital in Mississippi to recover. He died of pneumonia in Lauderdale, Mississippi, later that month. 

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