Creator: Alcorn, J. L. (James Lusk), 1816-1894.
Collection number: 5-z
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Abstract: Planter, brigadier general of Mississippi state forces during the Civil War, Republican governor, and U.S. senator. Letters from Alcorn to his wife, Amelia Walton (Glover) Alcorn, including fifteen Civil War letters, written from Mississippi and Kentucky; pre-war plantation records and Alcorn’s diary (1879-1880) with short entries on the weather, farming, sale of produce, and social, family, and religious affairs. The correspondence chiefly concerns political conditions before and during the Civil War and reflects Alcorn’s political thinking as an antisecessionist, Confederate general, and Republican governor of Mississippi.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Letters discuss Union soldiers freeing slaves (18 December 1862); Alcorn’s relations with slaves and freed blacks (1862- 1864); the marriage of Northern white women to blacks (1865); and the status of free blacks in the South (1865). The collection also contains two plantation inventories and Alcorn’s diary, which contain slave records (1855-1865).