Alcorn’s Final Option: Joining the Republican Team in Mississippi

This post is number eighteen in a historical series dealing with Mississippi’s Whig/Republican governor and senator following the War Between the States and is a continuation of my 9 March post immediately below discussing Alcorn’s activities under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.

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Not only was the “progressive” constitution defeated in the summer of 1868, so was the Republican ticket expected to make up Mississippi’s legislature as well as her governor and four of five representatives who would represent her in the U.S. House. The men who wrote that constitution and chose the Republican ticket were primarily white and were from the North and ex-Union soldiers to boot. Representative examples include General George C. McKee (Illinois)’, Jonathan Tarbell (New York), L.W. Perce (New York), and H.R. Pease (Connecticut). T.W. Stringer was a Negro minister from Canada who came to the state with the Freedman’s Bureau. Newly “initiated” Mississippi Republicans included R.W. Flourney (ex-slave holder and Confederate, who was one of four men who represented Pontotoc County at the secession convention, voted for secession, raised a military unit for the Confederacy, and after the war turned Republican and became one of the most radical in the state), J.L. Wofford (ex-Confederate turned conservative Republican. I believe he was from South Carolina, but had settled in the Corinth, Mississippi area after the war), J.S. Morris (a Vicksburg attorney, who later became state attorney general), and the Reverend James Lynch, a Negro preacher from Mississippi.  

Before moving on, I’d like to toss out a brief anecdote in regards to Reverend Lynch, who came to Mississippi in league with the Methodist Episcopal Church, North and would become Mississippi’s secretary of state. During the Mississippi Republican Party’s first convention in September 1867, H.R. Pease moved to add the word “colored” to the name of each Negro delegate. Reverend Lynch moved to amend, suggesting the color of each delegate’s hair be added also.

In her autobiography of Alcorn, Lillian Pereyra described the Republican ticket as all-white, but I found one broadside in a July, 1868, Columbus, Mississippi newspaper that lists a freedman, R.O. Gleed, as running for the state house of representatives. The Republican nominee for governor was ex-brevet general, Beroth B. Eggleston (ex-U.S. Army), of the 1st Ohio. He came replete with an impressive record and honorable discharge from the Grand Army of the Republic. Eggleston had accepted the surrender of Atlanta from Colonel Glenn in July of 1864 and there proceeded to establish martial law within the city, or what was left of it.  

As of December 1868, only three “insurrectionary” states still remained outside the Union, Texas, Virginia, and Mississippi—they’d yet to be “reconstructed”—meaning they’d failed to do what Congress directed them to do under the Reconstruction Acts. What it boiled down to was Mississippi and Texas had managed to keep the Republican Parties in their respective states from winning at the polls and putting puppet governments in their stead. Virginia’s Republican Party suffered massive polarization between its conservative and radical factions from the “git-go,” implying the party itself prevented issues from even making it to the polls. Her people finally approved a “blessed” constitution in 1869.  

James Lusk Alcorn took no part in the constitutional convention of 1867 or in choosing the Republican ticket that followed, but his cousin, Robert J. Alcorn, who had come to Mississippi from Kentucky in 1852 and whose name appears on receipts for purchasing cattle for the Confederate Army in the late fall of 1863, appears on the ticket as the nominee for secretary of state. (Hmmm—think a case should have been make for perjury there?) Robert Alcorn represented Yalobusha County and urged adoption of the constitution noting the more obnoxious of its features could later be modified. That would have been a reference to the wholesale proscription clauses disfranchising Confederates and all those who supported the Confederacy. In her work, Pereyra indicates redemption by an oath of allegiance put one back in the voting rolls. General Ord’s registration requirements (see my 9 March post below) do not validate that, but I’ve run across so many clear contradictions I can’t help but think the determination was made at the discretion of whichever tyrant was in charge, his decision predicated on his perception of how the voter would cast his ballot. Certainly Alcorn gave his oath of allegiance, which returned his property to him, but he not only voted, he ran for office (and won) under the Reconstruction Acts...as did his cousin who, without a doubt, also swore an oath to the United States.  

In early 1868, at the time Robert Alcorn would have been running his campaign for secretary of state and stumping the “Reconstruction” constitution, he was busy in Coahoma County founding a newspaper which supported his cousin’s appeal for a new hybrid party. The presence of the newspaper in James’ home county suggests the two cousins were already on the same sheet of music, and James reciprocated support by speaking on behalf of the Republican ticket only days before the 10 July 1868 election. 

By the summer of 1868, politics within the state had polarized into Republican and Democratic camps. If Alcorn’s hybrid party of Douglas Democrats and old-Whigs ever had a chance, it had passed. Since Alcorn believed Mississippi’s road to salvation was through representation in Congress, the Democrats’ determination to resist the Reconstruction Acts and remain under martial law would not have been an option for him. 

Alcorn’s support for the Republican Party widened the gap between him and those who had supported participation (acquiescence in, vice capitulation to) the Reconstruction Acts the year before. The difference, of course, is that with the constitutional convention behind them, the opportunity for participation had passed and the constitution created by those who did attend meant wholesale proscription and rule by those who had little or nothing invested in the state. Now, the reticent purveyors of acquiescence had no recourse for maintaining constitutional liberty except to defeat the Republican agenda at the polls. Alcorn, without a doubt, still clung to the belief that salvation lay with representation in congress. 

As stated in my 9 March post below, to everyone’s surprise, the reinvigorated Democratic Party defeated the Republicans. It is at this point when Alcorn’s name appears on the list of party leaders within the state of Mississippi,  and the party’s first move is an attempt to vacate the Democratic victory, to declare the Republicans victors, the constitution approved, thereby “reconstructing” the state in the image of Northern progressivism, and bring Mississippi back into the Union with her other Southern sisters so betrayed. The fight was on with James Lusk Alcorn clearly aligned on the side of Republican tyranny. 

I’m going to end this post here because the ensuing fight speaks so much to the true agenda of the Radicals not only in Congress, but also in Mississippi (of whom I’d suggest Alcorn was not one—but you know the old adage, if you lie down with dogs you’re gonna get fleas on you). It was a risk he took and fleas he got. He never fully redeemed himself in the eyes of Mississippi, and he never will. That Democratic victory in the summer of 1868 stands as one of the great efforts of political triumph that a people have ever put forth to peacefully thwart tyranny in their own defense, yet Alcorn aligned himself with outsiders, who, once the reality of their unbelievable defeat became known cried foul despite the prior presence of additional U.S. army forces and strict supervision by registrars belonging to those now crying foul. Together, he and his new friends would travel to Washington with reams of “x” marked affidavits declaring intimidation and fraud and fear for their lives (really—who was protecting them then who hadn’t protected then on Election Day?) in an effort to have Congress declare a Republican victory. James Lusk Alcorn thought it was all for the best, of course—salvation lay in representation.

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For earlier posts on Alcorn, best read in sequence from oldest to most recent, see 17 February, 24 March, 16 April, 17 July, 24 July, 18 September, 9 October, 18 October, 5 November, 22 November, 15 December, 29 December 2014, 13 January, 24 January, 9 February, 24 February, and 9 March 2015 below.