Alcorn, J. L. (James Lusk), 1816-1894

James L. Alcorn served as governor and then U.S. senator for Mississippi in the 1870s. Born November 4, 1816, in Illinois Territory, Alcorn spent much of his young adulthood in Kentucky. After attending Cumberland College in Princeton, Kentucky, Alcorn was deputy sheriff of Livingston County, Kentucky, and then entered legal practice in the state in the 1830s. He served a short stint in the Kentucky House of Representatives in the early 1840s and then relocated to Mississippi, where he practiced law in Coahoma County. Financial success as an attorney enabled Alcorn to buy land and establish Mound Place Plantation in the Mississippi Delta region. By 1860, Alcorn owned nearly one hundred slaves; his land holdings alone were valued at approximately $9.5 million in today’s currency. Alcorn married Mary C. Stewart of Kentucky in 1839. The couple had five children before Mary passed away in 1849. Alcorn married Amelia Walton Glover of Alabama in 1850. He fathered three children with his second wife.

Alcorn was a Unionist during the 1850s. He served as a delegate to a special Mississippi convention to debate the south’s response to the Compromise of 1850—legislation passed in the U.S. Congress designed to settle a fierce dispute over the fate of slavery in territories gained by the United States from Mexico. He warned that secession would lead to war, with federal soldiers invading the south, liberating slaves, and a destroying southern society. Alcorn and other Unionists carried the day during the 1851 convention.

During the 1850s, Alcorn served in the Mississippi House of Representatives and Senate as a Whig. He led a legislative effort to establish levees to reduce flooding in the Delta region, and was elected the first president of the levee board. As his standing in Mississippi politics increased, he ran for election to U.S. Congress in 1856 but lost. Whigs in Mississippi subsequently considered him for a gubernatorial run in 1857, but Alcorn turned it down.

During the secession crisis following Abraham Lincoln’s election to the U.S. presidency in 1860, Alcorn initially maintained his Unionist leanings. However, when Mississippi issued its ordnance of secession, Alcorn pledged his loyalty to the state and volunteered for military service in Mississippi. He received an appointment as brigadier general for the state militia in 1861, but his military advancement was hindered by powerful political rivals. Alcorn led a brigade of three Mississippi militia regiments into the field in October 1861. His brigade spent three months Kentucky—experiencing miserable weather and mud, but no combat—before disbanding in January 1862 when their enlistments expired.

Alcorn returned home from Kentucky embittered and embroiled in disputes with his personal and political rivals. Although he backed Mississippi following secession, Alcorn was not particularly committed to the Confederate cause. After federal soldiers entered Mississippi in 1862, his plantation was among those raided. However, Alcorn established contacts within the Union army and began trading cotton with federal authorities against Confederate policy. As a result, his wealth grew and his plantation was spared the same level of destruction meted out to notable secessionists.

Alcorn reentered Mississippi politics immediately upon the defeat of the Confederacy. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865 by the postwar Mississippi government’s effort to earn readmission into the Union under President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction plan. However, the Mississippi legislature passed a series of highly discriminatory laws (known as the Black Codes) against recently emancipated African Americans, prompting Republicans in the United States Congress to refuse Mississippi back into the Union. As a result, Alcorn was denied his seat in the Senate.

Alcorn became a leading member of the Republican Party in Mississippi as Reconstruction developed. He embraced Black civil rights, including African American suffrage. Although born in the north, his long residency in, and service to, Mississippi before and during the Civil War made him a “scalawag” (white southerner who joined the Republican Party) to conservative whites in the south. Nevertheless, he gained enough political support to win the Republican nomination for governor and then the gubernatorial election in 1869 as Mississippi reentered the Union. He entered office in 1870 and oversaw the development of a state public education system, the creation of a land-grant college for African Americans (named Alcorn University in his honor), and pro-business acts to improve economic development in the state.

Alcorn resigned as governor in 1871 to take a seat in the U.S. Senate for Mississippi. Though still a Republican, Alcorn represented a more conservative side of the party. Though supporting Black civil rights, he resisted some federal intervention in Mississippi affairs, and generally held white supremacist views. This put him in opposition to the other senator from Mississippi, Adelbert Ames, a former Union general who had served as a military governor in Reconstruction Mississippi and led the more radical faction of Republicans in Mississippi that pushed total racial equality. Alcorn and Ames ran against each other for governor of Mississippi in 1873. Ames won by carrying most African American votes.

Alcorn left the U.S. Senate in 1877 and returned to Mississippi. He did not take part in most state political matters, but did stay active in the levee system and governing. In 1890, he was selected to be a delegate to the Mississippi constitutional convention. He was among the delegates the supported new restrictions against Black Mississippi rights. Alcorn died on December 19, 1894. He is buried in Friars Point, Mississippi. (Wikipedia; Timothy B. Smith, Mississippi in the Civil War, 134-135; David Sansing, “James Lusk Alcorn: Twenty-eighth Governor of Mississippi: March 180 to November 1871,” Mississippi History Now)