Civil War & Reconstruction

L. Q. C. Lamar is perhaps Mississippi’s most noted nineteenth century statesman. He was the first person, and one of only two in American history (the other was South Carolina’s James Byrnes in the twentieth century), to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U. S. Senate, as a member of the President’s Cabinet, and as a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. Despite these accomplishments, Lamar's legacy is tainted today by his active role in the reestablishment of White supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.

The six southern states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida met February 4, 1861, in convention at Montgomery, Alabama, and established the Confederate States of America.

They were soon joined by Texas, and after the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, they were joined by Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Virginia. Missouri and Kentucky were prevented from seceding by the presence of federal troops, but both states sent unofficial representatives to the Confederate Congress and both supplied troops to the Confederate Army.

The Political Life of Isaiah T. Montgomery

Isaiah T. Montgomery might be called Mississippi’s Booker T. Washington. Though Montgomery was not as famous or as influential, his life and work in many other respects closely paralleled that of the great educator at Tuskegee Institute, a college for Black people in Alabama.

The Life and Times of Isaiah T. Montgomery

Isaiah Thornton Montgomery was born enslaved on May 21, 1847, at Hurricane Plantation on Davis Bend, now Davis Island, below Vicksburg, Mississippi. This large and fertile estate near the Mississippi River was one of several Davis Bend plantations owned by Joseph E. Davis, elder brother of Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America.