Postbellum Years
After the war, Thomas went home to his family and those Cherokee who still looked to him as chief. In 1866, he received a pardon from President Andrew Johnson, after which he hoped to reenter politics and business.
Thomas's mental condition began to deteriorate. According to the historians John Ehle (The Trail of Tears), Matthew D. Parker, and Vernon H. Crow (Storm in the Mountains: Thomas' Confederate Legion of Cherokee Indians and Mountaineers), Thomas may have been suffering from what was later known as Alzheimer's disease. He fell hopelessly into debt. Compounding his worries was caring for his beloved Cherokee, who suffered a devastating smallpox epidemic after the war.
In March 1867, Thomas was declared insane and committed to a state institution in Raleigh. From then until the end of his life in 1893, he lived in and out of mental hospitals. In 1887 Thomas assisted the ethnologist James Mooney of the Smithsonian Institution by telling him of Cherokee ways. Mooney was doing research and field studies on the Cherokee in western North Carolina.
Read more about this topic: William Holland Thomas
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