James L. Alcorn
James Lusk Alcorn (November 4, 1816 – December 19, 1894) was a governor, and U.S. senator during the Reconstruction era in Mississippi. A Moderate Republican and Whiggish "scalawag",[1] he engaged in a bitter rivalry with Radical Republican Adelbert Ames, who defeated him in the 1873 gubernatorial race. Alcorn was the first elected Republican governor of Mississippi.[1]
James L. Alcorn
December 19, 1894 (aged 78)
Friars Point, Mississippi, US
Politician, lawyer
Mississippi Militia
1861–1862
Although a Unionist,[2] Alcorn briefly served as a Confederate brigadier-general of the Mississippi Militia. Among former Confederates who joined the postbellum Republican Party, only James Longstreet had been of higher rank than Alcorn.
Early life and career[edit]
Alcorn was born near Golconda, Illinois Territory[3] to James Alcorn and Hanna Lusk, a Scots-Irish family. He attended Cumberland College in Princeton, Kentucky,[3] and from 1839 to 1844 served as deputy sheriff of Livingston County, Kentucky. He was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1838 and for six years practicing law in Salem, Kentucky. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1843 before moving to Mississippi the following year.
Alcorn set up a law office in Coahoma County, Mississippi.[4] As his law practice flourished and his property holdings in the Mississippi Delta increased, he became a wealthy man. In 1850, he built a three-story house at his Mound Place Plantation in Coahoma County, where he resided with his family. By 1860, he enslaved nearly one hundred people and held lands valued at a quarter of a million dollars. Alcorn served in the Mississippi House of Representatives and Mississippi Senate during the 1840s and 1850s being one of the leaders of the then Whigs in the state.
He founded the levee system and was chosen president of the levee board.[3] In the Mississippi legislature, Alcorn pushed for the construction of levees to protect Delta counties from flooding. A levee district was established in 1858 through his efforts.[5] He ran for Congress in 1856 but was defeated. In 1857, Alcorn was nominated for governor by the Whigs but declined.[3]
Alcorn was a delegate to the special Mississippi convention of 1851 called by Democratic Governor John A. Quitman, who, as an opponent of Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850 advocated secession.[6] Alcorn joined the Mississippi Unionists to thwart Quitman's plans. Like many other Whig planters, Alcorn opposed secession, pleading with the secessionists to reflect on the realities of the national balance of power. He foretold a horrific picture of a beaten Southern United States, "when the northern soldier would tread her cotton fields, when the slave should be made free and the proud Southerner stricken to the dust in his presence."[7] However, in January 1861, at the Mississippi state convention, he joined the secessionists and was elected to the Committee of Fifteen to prepare the Ordinance of Secession.[8]
American Civil War[edit]
When secession was declared, Alcorn, although born in what became in 1818 the free, pro-U.S. state of Illinois, joined the Confederate States of America and was appointed by the Mississippi secession convention as a militia brigadier-general. However, when his brigade entered the Confederate States Army, Jefferson Davis refused to commission him on account of political differences.[3] Alcorn, during the war, was in uniform for about eighteen months of inconspicuous field service, mainly in raising troops and in garrison duty. After the resignation of several major generals of the Mississippi State Troops, including Davis, Earl Van Dorn, and Charles Clark, Alcorn became eligible for promotion in rank but was passed over because his political foe, John J. Pettus, was the governor of Mississippi at the time.
At the start of the Civil War, Alcorn was ordered to proceed with his troops to central Kentucky; then, he was stationed at Fort Donelson, Tennessee. In October 1861, Alcorn raised three regiments of militia troops, designated as the Army of 10,000, committed to sixty days of service in Mississippi and led his brigade to Camp Beauregard, Kentucky, at which he served under General Leonidas Polk. His field service ended after his brigade was disbanded in January 1862. Alcorn was taken prisoner in Arkansas in 1862, was paroled later in the year, and returned to his Mound Place Plantation in Mississippi. In 1863, he was elected to the Mississippi state legislature, where he joined critics of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.[9]
During the war, Alcorn spent a fortune raising and supplying troops. Additionally, in 1863 his plantation was raided by General Leonard Ross' troops during the Yazoo Pass Expedition, part of the Vicksburg Campaign.[10][11] However, he managed to preserve part of his wealth during the war by trading cotton with the North.[12] In November 1863, Alcorn wrote to his wife: "I have been very busy hiding & selling my cotton. I have sold in all one hundred & eleven bales, I have now here ten thousand dollars in paper (Green backs) and one thousand dollars in gold."[13] After the war, he was estimated to be among the fifty wealthiest men in the South.
Alcorn lost two sons. His older son, James Lusk Alcorn Jr., committed suicide in 1879 after returning home from the war partially deaf and a drunkard. An inscription on the monument at the family cemetery attributes James' death to the "insane war of rebellion" (apparently his father's words). Seventeen-year-old Henry "Hal" Alcorn ran away during the war to join the military against his father's wishes, became ill, and was left behind and captured. He was held in Camp Chase and made his way to Richmond, Virginia after the surrender. He died of typhoid fever en route to Mississippi.
Honors[edit]
Alcorn County, Mississippi is named in his honor, as is the historically black Alcorn State University, the first black land-grant university.