Biographical Sidebar:
James L. Alcorn

Born in Illinois but raised in Kentucky, James L. Alcorn (1816-1894) became Mississippi's first Reconstruction governor, and perhaps the era's most prominent "scalawag," or Southern white Republican.

Alcorn in 1844 moved to Mississippi, where he married a planter's daughter, and became one of the largest landowners in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.

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In 1860, he strongly opposed secession. After serving briefly in the Confederate Army, Alcorn retired to his plantation.

At the end of the Civil War, Alcorn broke with his state's political leadership by advocating limited black suffrage and supporting the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1867, he joined the Republican party, insisting that only if men like himself took the lead in Reconstruction could a "harnessed revolution" take place. Blacks' rights would be respected, but political power would remain in white hands.