James L. Alcorn

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]

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 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.

Senator James L. Alcorn

Alcorn's grave in Coahoma County, Mississippi

Alcorn was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865. However, he was prohibited from being seated in Congress, like all those disqualified from office for insurrection or rebellion against the United States for their participation in the Confederacy.[3] He supported suffrage for freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment. Alcorn became the leader of the scalawags, who comprised about a fourth of the Republican officials in the state, in coalition with carpetbaggers, African-Americans who had been free before the outbreak of the Civil War, and freedmen. Mississippi had a majority of African-Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom were freedmen. They had no desire to vote for the Democratic Party, which had carried the 1868 elections by intimidation and violence against blacks.

Thus the vast majority of votes for Republican candidates came from African-Americans, even though most of the Republican state officeholders in Mississippi were whites. In the 1869 election, James Alcorn was elected governor of Mississippi, defeating Ulysses S. Grant's brother-in-law Lewis Dent.[14] Alcorn served as governor until 1871.[3] As a modernizer, he appointed many like-minded former Whigs, some since Democrats. He strongly supported public schools for all and a new college exclusively for blacks, now known as Alcorn State University. He maneuvered to make his ally, Hiram Revels, the institution's president. Irritated at his patronage policy, many Republicans opposed Alcorn. They were concerned as well over his understanding of African-American interests. His hostility to a state civil rights bill was well known; so was his unwillingness to appoint local black officers where a white alternative could be found. One complained that Alcorn's policy was to see "the old civilization of the South modernized" rather than lead a total political, social, and economic revolution.[15]

Alcorn resigned from the governorship to become a U.S. senator, with service from 1871 to 1877, when he was succeeded by L. Q. C. Lamar.[3] He succeeded his ally, Hiram Revels, the first African American senator. Senator Alcorn urged the removal of the political disabilities of white southerners and rejected Republican proposals to end segregation in hotels, restaurants, and railroad cars by federal legislation;[16] he denounced the federal cotton tax as robbery,[17] and defended separate schools for both races in Mississippi. Although a former enslaver, he characterized slavery as "a cancer upon the body of the nation" and expressed the gratification he and many other Southerners felt over its destruction.[18]

Alcorn County, Mississippi is named in his honor, as is the historically black Alcorn State University, the first black land-grant university.

• List of American Civil War Generals (Acting Confederate)

• United States Congress. "James L. Alcorn (id: A000079)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Retrieved August 12, 2008.
• Johnson, Rossiter, ed. (1906). "Alcorn, James Lusk". The Biographical Dictionary of America. Vol. 1. Boston, Mass.: American Biographical Society. p. 67. Retrieved November 7, 2020 – via en.wikisource.org. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Harris, William C. (1979), The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi.
• Harris, William C. (1967), Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi. Louisiana State University Press.
• Pereyra, Lillian A. (1966), James Lusk Alcorn: Persistent Whig. LSU Press, the standard scholarly biography.
• Riley, Franklin Lafayette (1928), "Alcorn, James Lusk" in Dictionary of American Biography, Volume 1.