James Byrd Foote enlisted as a private in Company A of the First Regiment, Georgia Regulars, just thirteen days after the surrender of Fort Sumter; transferred to Company C of the Seventh Georgia Infantry Regiment some four months later; and participated in engagements against the Yankees at Yorktown, Seven Pines, Oak Grove, Mechanicsville, Gainess Mill, Garnetts and Goldings Farms, Savages Station, Malvern Hill, Kellys Ford, Rappahannock Station, Thoroughfare Gap, Second Manassas, Ox Hill, Boonsborough, Sharpsburg, Suffolk, Gettysburg, Funkstown, Charleston, Chattanooga, Campbells Station, and Knoxville, where he was captured on November 28, 1863. After spending more than three months as a prisoner of war in several jails and military prison camps, he was forwarded from the Union Military Prison at Louisville, Kentucky, to Fort Delaware and was imprisoned there for 366 days before being delivered for exchange to the Confederate authorities at Boulwares and Coxs Wharves in Virginia during the three-day period of March 1012, 1865. He returned home to Dallas, Georgia, as a paroled prisoner of war to find that the land throughout Paulding County had been laid to waste by the Union and Confederate armies and that his family had been impoverished by the war. He endured the hardships of Reconstruction in Northern Georgia but was determined to prosper, and he did, becoming a successful merchant farmer and a leading citizen of Dallas who was favorably known throughout Paulding and surrounding counties.