Known to his friends and followers as “Johnny McRae of Chickasawhay,” Governor John J. McRae sailed his steamer Triumph up and down the Chickasawhay River “as if it were the Mississippi itself.” McRae was a folk hero and was extremely popular with the people of Mississippi. He was described by a contemporary as “bright ... humorous and fascinating.”
Governor John Jones Pettus has the distinction of serving the shortest term of governor in the state’s history. He served for five days between the resignation of Henry Foote on January 5 and the inauguration of his successor, John J. McRae, on January 10, 1854. Governor Pettus is best known, however, as the governor who took Mississippi out of the Union in 1861.
During the United States sectional crisis of 1850, which was precipitated by California’s petition for statehood as a free state, U. S. Senator Henry Stuart Foote of Mississippi and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts joined with U. S. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois to draft the Great Compromise of 1850. That compromise resolved, at least temporarily, the major controversies between the North and the South.
After Governor John Isaac Guion vacated the office of governor November 4, 1851, Mississippi was without a chief executive for twenty days. The state supreme court had ruled that “all officers of this state are elected for limited terms, which shall expire at the time of the general election.” According to that ruling the term of the secretary of state, Joseph Bell, had also expired, and the attorney general and others advised him that he could no longer legally act as secretary of state.
On February 3, 1851, Union authorities arrested Governor John A. Quitman in Jackson and took him to New Orleans to be arraigned for violating American neutrality laws in relation to his dealings with Cuban insurgents. When the Mississippian and State Gazette announced that Governor Quitman had resigned and that John Isaac Guion, as president pro tempore of the state senate, had assumed the governor’s office, the editor hailed the new governor as “a true Southron in heart and head.”
Governor Joseph W. Matthews was a plain and unlettered frontiersman who lacked the flair for oratory which Mississippians expected from their statesmen. During the 1847 governor’s race, Matthews, a Democrat and surveyor by trade, was jeered by the aristocratic Whigs. But apparently there were more plain folks than aristocrats because Matthews defeated his Whig opponent by 13,000 votes.
Governor Albert Gallatin Brown was Mississippi’s youngest and perhaps its most popular antebellum governor. His election in 1843 ended the bitter division among the state’s Democrats over the issue of whether the state should honor the bonds from two failed banks, Planters Bank and Union Bank, and reunited the party. Following his re-election in 1845 by a large majority and the completion of his second term, Governor Brown was elected to the U. S. Congress, where he served until his appointment to the U. S. Senate in 1854.
Governor Tilghman Tucker and his wife, Sarah F. McBee, were the first residents of the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion and because of the formal opening of the mansion, his inauguration on January 10, 1842, was especially festive. But Governor Tucker was a plain man of simple tastes. He did not enjoy the ceremonial and social trappings of public office, and, to the great disappointment of Jackson residents, Governor Tucker and Mississippi’s First Lady rarely entertained at the mansion.
When Alexander G. McNutt was inaugurated governor in January 1838, Mississippi was entering a period of severe economic depression that lasted through both of his two terms.
John Anthony Quitman was born in New York on September 1, 1798. He migrated to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1821 by way of Ohio, where he had studied law and taught school. In 1824, Quitman married Elizabeth Turner, the daughter of a wealthy Adams County planter, and eventually became one of the largest landowners in Mississippi. At one time, he owned 15,000 acres and 300 enslaved peoples. From Monmouth, his Natchez home, Quitman launched a highly successful military and political career. Quitman’s first biographer, John F. H. Claiborne, wrote that “A more ambitious man never lived. ...