Restrictions to Access

No restrictions. Open for research.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the J.L. Alcorn Papers #5-z, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Mrs. P. D. Russell of Memphis, Tenn., before 1940, and purchased from Carnegie Book Shop of New York, N.Y., in March 1968, and Cohasco of New York, N.Y., in November 1975.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Alcorn, Amelia Walton Glover.
• Alcorn, J. L. (James Lusk), 1816-1894.
• Confederate States of America Army--Officers--Correspondence.
• Confederate States of America--Politics and government.
• Confederate States of America--Social conditions.
• Diaries (Blank-books)
• Families--Mississippi--Social life and customs.
• Governors--Mississippi.
• Mississippi--Politics and government--1865-1950.
• Plantation life--Mississippi.
• Plantation owners--Diaries.
• Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877)--Mississippi.
• Secession.

James L. Alcorn was a planter, brigadier general of Mississippi state forces during the Civil War, Republican governor, and U.S. senator.

The collection includes 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.