Sharkey, William Lewis, 1798-1873

William Lewis Sharkey served as Mississippi’s governor in 1865, early in the Reconstruction era. Born in Sumner County, Tennessee, on July 12, 1798, Sharkey moved with his family to Warren County, Mississippi, in 1804. As an adult, he studied law and began practicing in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1822. Sharkey moved to Vicksburg in 1825 and pursued political office. He won election to the Mississippi House of Representatives and served one term from 1828 to 1829.

In 1832, Sharkey married Minerva Cage, a widow with two children. The couple had four children over the next several years. In 1832, Sharkey also became a circuit court judge and was shortly thereafter elected to the High Court of Errors and Appeals, the predecessor to the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He served in that role for 18 years, resigning in 1851. From there, he took a diplomatic appointment for the United States government, serving as U.S. Consul in Havana, Cuba, until 1854. After completing that diplomatic assignment, Sharkey returned to Mississippi and returned to legal and political duties, helping compile the Mississippi Code of 1857.

During the secession crisis in the winter of 1860 and 1861, following Abraham Lincoln’s election, Sharkey remained a steadfast Unionist. Having been a member of the Whig Party, he retained his opposition to secession and refused to support the Confederacy, even as he remained in Mississippi through the Civil War. Despite his political stance against Mississippi’s secessionist government, Confederate officials left him alone out of respect of his past service to the state as a judge and legal scholar.

After the Confederacy’s defeat, President Andrew Johnson appointed Sharkey provisional governor of Mississippi in June 1865. In that role, he called forth a constitutional convention to meet Johnson’s goal of swiftly restoring former Confederate states to the Union. In October 1865, Benjamin Humphreys won election as Mississippi’s governor. Sharkey did not vacate the office, though, until December 1865, having served less than a year. Although no longer governor, Sharkey was selected by the Mississippi legislature to serve in the U.S. Senate. Federal officials denied him a seat, and the rest of the Mississippi congressional delegation, following the Republican backlash to Mississippi’s Black Codes—a set of racially discriminatory laws passed by the Mississippi legislature in 1865.

Having been denied a U.S. Senate seat, Sharkey returned to practicing law, in Jackson, Mississippi. He died in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1873, and is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi. (Wikipedia; David Sansing, “William Lewis Sharkey: Twenty-fifth Governor of Mississippi: June to December 1865,” Mississippi History Now; FindaGrave)