This post is the second in a series correcting historical errors that I have discovered in my work. Divulging the embarrassing finds are, I humbly propose, to my credit because they show that I continue to research and grow as an amateur historian. As my time on this planet wanes, I intend to focus my study on the history of the Southern states from their earliest exploration by Europeans through colonization, the Revolution, the Confederacy, and beyond. Okay, studying the present is pretty convoluted. Yoda was wrong. It’s not the future that’s hard to see because it’s “always in motion.” It’s the present, which is a darn cyclone, but I digress.
Following up on my February 10, 2014 post, the next
misspeak I’d like to set right is that regarding James Lusk Alcorn in the
introductory “Historical Note” to my novel Wolf
Dawson. This historical suspense, replete with romance, mystery, and its touch
of the paranormal, is set near the close of Congressional Reconstruction in
Mississippi. To give the reader a perspective of the setting, I provided a brief
outline of the conditions in post-war Mississippi. I wrote the
paragraph below in respect to the 1873 gubernatorial election pitting two
Republican candidates against each other, Adelbert Ames, ex-brevet General U.S.
Army and Maine native who’d never stepped foot in Mississippi before the war,
and Mississippian J. L. Alcorn. In the second full paragraph on “page ix,” I stated:
“J.L. Alcorn, the man Ames defeated, was a Mississippian. He was
intimately familiar with Southern politics in general and Mississippi politics
in particular. Since the arrival of Federal troops during the war, this man who
had passionately supported and voted for secession had accepted reconstruction
and urged white Mississippians to embrace the Negro. He warned that otherwise
the Negro electorate would fall under the influence of corrupt Republicans.”
Most of what I
say is correct—at least as the record shows—but there is a misrepresentation—that
being the implication Alcorn was a zealot on the subject of secession. James Lusk Alcorn was a Whig, as
ardent, according to Hodding Carter (The
Angry Scar) as Henry Clay himself. Kentucky-born of hard-working common
folk, Alcorn attended one year at Cumberland College, taught school in Jackson,
Arkansas, and in 1838, became a member of the Kentucky bar. Between 1839 and
1843 he served as a Livingston County, Kentucky deputy sheriff from where he resigned
and served one term as a member of the Kentucky legislature. In 1844, he migrated
to Mississippi’s Coahoma County where he practiced law and established a small
plantation, dubbed Mound Place, on the Yazoo Pass. In time he became a very
wealthy cotton planter with land holdings of 12,000 acres.
Two years after
coming to Mississippi he was elected to the state legislature on the Whig
ticket. He was always a Union man and ardent anti-secessionist. On 7 January 1861,
a hundred delegates gathered at the capitol building in Jackson to vote on
secession. William Barry, a secessionist from Lowndes County, defeated Alcorn
to become president of the convention. Barry then appointed a committee of
fifteen to draft an ordinance of secession. L. Q. C. Lamar chaired the
committee—and he just happened to have brought the draft of a proposed ordinance
of secession with him. Judge J. S. Yerger (like Alcorn, a Unionist Whig)
proposed approaching the North for concessions [in return for shelving
secession] and thereby wait before taking a vote. When the committee voted down
Yerger’s proposal, Alcorn proposed waiting until Georgia, Florida, Alabama and
Louisiana voted to secede, then follow them out. Alcorn’s proposal was also
voted down at which point Walter Brooke requested the vote be taken to the
people in a referendum to be scheduled for 2 February. This proposal was also
voted down, but a proposal to have the people vote on the ordinance as part of
the state elections in the fall was floated by some on the committee—a proposal
not formally voted down. War intervened and that vote never took place.
In The Angry Scar, Carter states there were
four committee votes against and eleven votes in favor of secession (Lamar’s Ordinance
of Secession). The convention approved the committee’s vote and as Coahoma’s
representative to the convention, Alcorn, as well as Yerger (Washington County)
and Brooke (one of two representatives from Warren County) signed the Ordinance
of Secession on 9 January 1861 along with ninety-five other county
representatives. Regarding that decision, I quote Alcorn from Hodding Carter’s The Angry Scar:
“I have thought that a different course...should have been adopted and
to that end I have labored and spoken,” Alcorn told the convention. “But the die
is cast—the Rubicon is crossed—and I enlist in the army that marches to Rome.”
And he did (join
the army, I mean). Actually, his avowed proclamation above is a double
entendre. Ultimately, he “served” both armies, to the detriment of the reputed “initial”
commitment he made above and to the benefit of both the “Union” and himself
once Grant and Sherman started stomping around, first plundering, then burning
the state. But I would argue that his “first” loyalty was fomented as a Whig
and that his subsequent two-faced double-cross when the going got tough (or the advantages became clear) was such
a Whig thing to do.
But I will
grudgingly submit that there was more to Alcorn than greed and
self-aggrandizement—even though that “more to” in reference to the State was to
his own good—and believe me, he saw it. Vis-à-vis the likes of Adelbert Ames I
can bring myself to side with the man. On that, there’s more to come.
Thanks for reading.
Charlsie
