Walter A. Goodman was born on March 21, 1830, in Ohio to Walter and Anna Goodman. His father was a land agent who owned $7,000 of real estate by 1850. The family moved to Marshall County, Mississippi, by the 1840s, and Goodman attended school there. He married Corinne Acklen on May 18, 1859, and they had at least four children: Walter, born around 1860; Corinne, born around 1864; Norma, born around 1868; and William, born around 1875. By the early 1860s, he was working as a lawyer in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

 

In the spring of 1861, he served as president of a “meeting of Memphis merchants and business men.” The men pledged their “patriotic support” for the Confederacy and called upon Tennessee to secede. Goodman celebrated the “unanimity of feeling existing in the Confederate States” and expressed confidence in their “destined prosperity.”

 

In June 1861, Goodman received an appointment as an assistant quartermaster in the 17^th Mississippi Infantry. He resigned on February 8, 1862, but in July 1862, he received a commission as captain and assistant adjutant general on General James Chalmers’ staff. The army surrendered to Union forces in May 1865, and Goodman received his parole at Gainesville, Alabama, on May 10, 1865.

 

Goodman settled in Memphis, Tennessee, after the war and earned a living as a “real estate & collection agent.” By 1870, he was working as an insurance agent, and he employed at least one white servant. He supported the Democratic Party, and he served as a chairman of at least one local party meeting in 1880. He died in Memphis on January 20, 1883.

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