West, Absalom Madden, 1818-1894

Absolom Madden West was a Confederate general, a Mississippi politician, railroad executive, and vice presidential candidate. Born in Alabama in 1818, West moved to Mississippi around 1837 to establish a plantation with property he acquired from federal land grants. He entered Mississippi state politics as a Whig and won a seat in the Mississippi Senate in 1847. He married Caroline O. Glover in the 1840s and the couple had four surviving children, born between 1849 and 1862.

In 1853, he took an office job with the new Mississippi Central Railroad, gaining experience not only in railroad development but corporate and logistical operations. As a Whig, West originally opposed secession. However, after Mississippi left the Union in 1861, during the secession crisis that split the country following Abraham Lincon’s election to president in November 1860, West offered his loyalty and services to the state. He was promoted a brigadier general in the Mississippi state militia, and helped raised a regiment of volunteers. Recognizing his skill and experience in administrative and logistical work, state officials appointed him to several different managerial roles, such as quartermaster general, paymaster general, and commissary general of the militia. He made recommendations to the state legislature to improve the accounting of funds, and was the only state officer to have his accounting books in order and submitted at the end of the war.

West took the role of president over the Mississippi Central Railroad around 1864. He remained in that position until around the end of the war, then returned to state politics—again serving in the Mississippi Senate—after the Illinois Central purchased the Mississippi Central. West was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives during the early effort by the Mississippi government in 1865 to earn readmission to the Union under President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction plan. However, he was among the Mississippi delegation refused seats in Congress when Republicans in Washington, D.C., objected to Mississippi’s “Black Codes”—a series of highly discriminatory laws passed in the summer of 1865 to restrict the civil rights of African Americans.

West became involved in labor rights during Reconstruction, helping form a branch of the National Labor Union. Reentering the Mississippi Senate in the early 1870s, around 1876 he broke away from the Democratic Party and joined the emerging “Greenback Party”—an independent, anti-monopoly political party. It united many state-level politicians in the north and the south on economic matters, namely the expansion of paper currency believed to help farmers and small businesses. Attesting to the party’s ability to bring former enemies together, the party’s national convention in 1884 nominated former Union general Benjamin Butler (who had been despised within the Confederacy during his occupation of New Orleans during the Civil War) for its presidential candidate and the former Confederate militia general West as vice president. The party polled only a 1.7% of the popular vote in 1884.

West’s wife Caroline died in 1889 after a long bout of poor health. He died five years later, in 1894. The couple is buried in Hill Crest Cemetery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. (Wikipedia; FindaGrave)