James L. Alcorn - Postbellum Career

Postbellum Career

He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865, but, like all Southerners, was not allowed to take a seat as Congress was pondering Reconstruction. He supported suffrage for Freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment. Alcorn became the leader of the Scalawags, who comprised about a fourth of the Republican Party officials in the state, in coalition with carpetbaggers, African-Americans who had been free before the outbreak of the civil war and Freedmen. Mississippi had a majority of African-Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom were Freedmen, who at this point had no desire to vote for the Democratic Party which would have not welcomed them anyway, thus the majority of votes for the Republican candidates came from African-Americans even though the majority of Republican office holders were whites. James Alcorn was elected by the Republicans as governor in 1869, serving, as Governor of Mississippi from 1870 to 1871. As a modernizer, he appointed many like-minded former Whigs, even if they were now Democrats. He strongly supported education, including public schools for blacks only, and a new college for them, now known as Alcorn State University. He maneuvered to make his ally, Hiram Revels, its president. Radical Republicans opposed Alcorn, angry at his patronage policy. One complained that Alcorn's policy was to see "the old civilization of the South modernized" rather than lead a total political, social and economic revolution.

Alcorn resigned the governorship to become a U.S. Senator (1871–1877), replacing his ally Hiram Revels, the first African American senator. Senator Alcorn urged the removal of the political disabilities of white southerners and rejected Radical Republican proposals to enforce social equality by federal legislation; he denounced the federal cotton tax as robbery, and defended separate schools for both races in Mississippi. Although a former slaveholder, he characterized slavery as "a cancer upon the body of the Nation" and expressed the gratification which he and many other Southerners felt over its destruction.

Alcorn led a furious political battle with Senator Adelbert Ames, the carpetbagger who led the other faction of the Republican Party in Mississippi. The fight ripped apart the Republican Party. In 1873, they both sought a decision by running for governor. Ames was supported by the Radicals and most African Americans, while Alcorn won the votes of conservative whites and most of the scalawags. Ames won by a vote of 69,870 to 50,490.

During the Reconstruction era, Alcorn was an advocate of modernizing the South. Although a believer in white supremacy, he supported civil and political rights for African-Americans. In a letter to his wife (Amelia Alcorn, née Glover, of Rosemount Plantation in southern Alabama), he states that Southerners must make the Negro their friend or "the path ahead will be red with blood and damp with tears." Alcorn was the founder of the Mississippi levee system, and was instrumental in their rebuilding after the Civil War.

After his retirement from politics, he was active in levee affairs and was a delegate to the Mississippi constitutional convention of 1890, in which he supported the black disenfranchisement clause of the new constitution. He was twice married: in 1839 to Mary C. Stewart of Kentucky, who died in 1849; and in 1850 to Amelia Walton Glover of Alabama. In his later life, Alcorn practiced law in Friars Point, Mississippi and lived quietly at his plantation, Eagle's Nest, in Coahoma County, Mississippi, until his death and interment in the family cemetery on his estate in 1894.