Belle Montgomery
2nd Lieutenant
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2017
- Location
- 44022
- 50,000 Civil War-era letters collected from ordinary citizens.
- Letters to be made available to public as part of Civil War Governors of Mississippi Project.
- Only other project of this kind in U.S. is in Kentucky.
Now a new state project has collected 50,000 Civil War-era letters from ordinary citizens who wrote to their Mississippi governors from the period of 1859-1882. They range from personal appeals to requests for weapons to expressions of opinion. The topics can reveal much about the writers and what was happening in the state at the time.
Here are a few:
- A November 1859 letter from an anonymous abolitionist warning of a large slave uprising near Vicksburg.
- A story about an assault and battery that ended with the victim asleep.
- A December 1859 request from a Quitman citizen for a cannon for his village.
- A fiery November 1859 opinion piece on the state of North-South relations.
- A December 1859 appeal for clemency for someone who had stolen a watch.
- How can I see these Civil War letters?
These are just some of the letters written to Mississippi Gov. John Pettus (1859-1863) in the era leading up to the Civil War that have been documented and put on a website, for the public to view.
Eventually, all 50,000 letters to governors from Pettus to Marshall Stone (1876-1882) will be available for public research as part of the Civil War Governors of Mississippi Project.
"We're able to cover 1859 all the way through the Civil War through reconstruction into the New South," said Susannah Ural, director of the project and a University of Southern Mississippi history professor. "You've got Mississippi thinking about... - REST OF ARTICLE:https://www.hattiesburgamerican.com...overnors-project-history-research/3298762002/