Clark, Charles, 1811-1877

Charles Clark served as Mississippi’s governor during the last two years of the Civil War. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 24, 1811, Clark later moved to Mississippi, where he became a lawyer and a state representative in the late 1830s. After successfully representing a Mississippi settler in a land dispute with members of the Choctaw Nation in the early 1840s, Clark received a large tract of land near Beulah, Mississippi, as payment. Clark eventually enlarged his property to over five thousand acres, making it one of the largest and most successful plantations in Mississippi. During this time, he married Ann Eliza Darden and between 1840 and 1852 fathered three children.

Clark volunteered for military service during the Mexican-American War in 1846 and raised a company of volunteers that was placed into the 2nd Mississippi Regiment. After its original commander resigned, Clark was elected colonel. Following the war in 1848, he returned to Mississippi resumed an interest in politics. He was selected as a delegate to a state convention in 1851 that debated the matter of secession in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, which had tried to settle a fierce dispute over the fate of slavery in territories gained by the United States from Mexico. Clark attended the convention as a Unionist, opposed to withdrawing from the Union. Developments over the next ten years changed his mind.

Clark won a seat in the Mississippi’s House of Representatives as a Whig, serving from 1856 to 1861. Following Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, Clark embraced Mississippi’s secession. When the Civil War broke out, Clark received a commission as a brigadier general in the Mississippi Militia. He later entered the Confederate Army and eventually took command of a division. Slightly wounded at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, he was more seriously wounded and captured during fighting at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in August 1862. Clark spent a short time as a prisoner of war before he was paroled by Union forces.

In 1863, Clark ran for governor of Mississippi, in the wake of Confederate defeats at Vicksburg and Jackson. Clark campaigned on continued resistance to the Union and easily won the executive seat. Due to Union campaigns in Mississippi, Clark periodically moved the state government, from Jackson to Macon, then to Columbus, and back to Macon. When Confederate forces in Mississippi surrendered in May 1865, Clark instructed the state legislature to convene for a special session in Jackson. In June 1865, federal troops at Jackson arrested Clark and imprisoned him at Fort Pulaski, Georgia.

Eventually released from federal custody, Clark returned to Bolivar County, Mississippi. He quietly practiced law and served on the University of Mississippi Board of Trustees during Reconstruction. In 1876, Clark received an appointment as chancellor for the fourth judicial district. He died a year later, on December 17, 1877. Clark is buried in a family cemetery at Beulah, Mississippi. (Wikipedia; David Sansing, “Charles Clark: Twenty-fourth Governor of Mississippi: 1863–1865,” Mississippi History Now; FindaGrave)