Creator: Claiborne, J. F. H. (John Francis Hamtramck), 1809-1884.
Collection number: 151
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Abstract: J. F. H. Claiborne was a lawyer, U.S. Representative, editor, planter, and historian of Mississippi and Louisiana. The collection has papers containing relatively few items pertaining to Claiborne’s personal activities but including letters he wrote while a law student in Wytheville, Va.; records of the 1842-1843 commission on Choctaw Indian claims; a few papers of Gov. John Anthony Quitman; diary of Willis Herbert Claiborne as a Confederate officer at Vicksburg in April-July 1863; J. L. Power’s notes on the Mississippi secession convention; materials collected by Claiborne in preparation of his history of Mississippi, among them biographical and autobiographical material on prominent leaders; and writings of Claiborne and others on a wide variety of contemporary and historical subjects.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Included are power-of-attorney papers of Ann Young of Washington, DC, given to Claiborne for the purpose of recovering her minor son, a free black (1836); a long account of grievances of Margaret Forbush, the wife of a freedman, claiming that a group of white men deprived her of property and requesting the protection of the U.S. government and courts (1869); a reply to an unidentified antislavery treatise (Folder 60); fragments and drafts on slavery (Folder 62); and newspaper clippings on slavery (Folder 73).