The American Board of Commissioners met on October 6, 1875, to discuss foreign religious missions. The meetings were held every day and lasted for about one week. The committee consisted of 207 members, of whom 116 were clergymen and ninety-one were laymen. Inside the Board there was another committee that handled all expenses and missionary affairs. That committee was called the Prudential...
For the second time in less than 10 years, Missouri had written a new State Constitution
which was up for ratification by the citizens of the state. The New York Times reported that
the third Missouri Constitution was well on its way to passing by a wide margin with 8,245 votes
for the Constitution and 1,042 against it in the city of St. Louis alone. For close to twenty towns...
Did we learn anything from the War? The Natchez Weekly Democrat, a local newspaper located in Natchez, Mississippi, asked this question of its readers in more polite terms. In July, 1875, the newspaper lamented the lack of economic development in the form of manufacturing over the previous years in the surrounding area. Southerners in all parts of the former Confederacy were aware that...
A wanted ad for a man named Jeff Williams appeared in The Daily Mississippi Pilot?s reward section. Williams was a convict who escaped while under lease to a family and working on the Noxubee river levee. The Governor of Mississippi offered 50 dollars for someone to arrest and take Williams to the state penitentiary. The description of the man at large was listed. Along with including his height...
Ambition ran high for distinguished men of wealthy Virginia families. For these men, there were relatively few jobs besides running a plantation that were suitable for those in their station. One of these jobs was to be a professor at a prestigious university. On July 25th, 1875, John Jaquelin Ambler wrote his brother from Lynchburg about an open professorship at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,...
Ambition ran high for distinguished men of wealthy Virginia families. For these men, there were relatively few jobs besides running a plantation that were suitable for those in their station. One of these jobs was to be a professor at a prestigious university. On July 25th, 1875, John Jaquelin Ambler wrote his brother from Lynchburg about an open professorship at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,...
Dolly Burge recorded in her diary feelings about events that happened in her life and impacted her. Her daughter's departure for college completely devastated Burge. Since her husband had died, it meant that she was living without her family. When her daughter decided to get married, it devastated her even more. She wrote about how upset she was in her diary entries. Burge felt that she had...
Led by James Z. George and L.Q.C Lamar, Mississippi Democrats made plans to drive the local Republicans from office. The plan was to lure freedman with promises of protected civil rights and to threaten those who remained faithful to the Republicans. By the summer of 1875 the Democrats had created extralegal militias to encourage conversion by means of violence and intimidation. <br /> This...
In July 1875, Judith Page Rives wrote her last will and testament in which she left two thirds of her twelve hundred acres to her son Alfred and four hundred acres to her daughter Ella. She also gave Ella all of her jewelry and clothing, including a diamond brooch valued at 14,000 dollars. Mrs. Rives also left Ella her stocks. If Ella never married, Mrs. Rives wished for her to live with one of...
Race relations during and after Reconstruction were tense. Many whites had never dealt with free blacks and many free blacks had never been free. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed in an attempt to maintain the status quo that had arisen over the past two centuries. Through acts of violence and intimidation, Ku Klux members aimed to scare free blacks into adopting...