Joining the United States, 1799–1832

Americans have always been a people on the move. The first settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth had barely established a foothold in the early 1600s when they began to push into the continent’s interior. Adventurous settlers, anxious to improve their fortunes, took up new lands in the west, confidently expecting them to be better than the lands they left behind. Westward movement of the colonists continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

William Faulkner, Mississippi’s most famous novelist, once said, “To understand the world, you have to understand a place like Mississippi.”

Governor Charles Clark has the distinction of being one of the three governors of Mississippi to be arrested and imprisoned. The other two are John Quitman and Theodore Bilbo. When the Civil War ended, Governor Clark was arrested by Union authorities and incarcerated briefly at Fort Pulaski in Savannah, Georgia. A witness described the arrest of the former Confederate general, who had twice been wounded, first at Shiloh and then at Baton Rouge:

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. ...

Hiram Runnels lost the office of governor and won the office of governor by the narrowest margins in Mississippi’s history. In 1831 he lost by 247 votes and in 1833 he won by 558 votes, but then lost again in 1835 by 426 votes.

Runnels was an excitable and volatile person. His narrow defeat in 1835 has been attributed, in part at least, to his emotional outburst against one of his opponents during which he used some very harsh and unparliamentary language.

Charles Lynch migrated to Mississippi from his native South Carolina, where he was born in 1783. Lynch is one of the few governors of Mississippi who held office in all three branches of state government. He is also one of the very few men in the state’s history who served as a judge even though he was not a lawyer. Lynch was a farmer when he was appointed probate judge of Lawrence County by the Mississippi Legislature in 1821.

Abram Scott was involved in two of the three closest elections for governor in Mississippi’s history. In 1831 he defeated Hiram G. Runnels by 247 votes, and two years later he lost to Runnels by 558 votes.

Gerard C. Brandon was the first native Mississippian to be elected governor. He also held the office longer than any other governor before the American Civil War.

Although his term began January 7, 1822, Governor Leake did not deliver his inaugural address until June 24 because the capital city was being relocated from Natchez. When he finally gave his address, the capital was temporarily situated at Columbia in Marion County. Five days later, the Mississippi Legislature located the state capital at the new town of Jackson, which was near a trading post on the Pearl River known as LeFleur’s Bluff. In December 1822 members of the legislature and other state officials moved to Jackson.

A contemporary historian wrote that the history of George Poindexter’s public career is “the history of the Territory and the State of Mississippi, so closely and prominently was he connected with everything that occurred.”