Josiah Abigail Patterson Campbell

Josiah Abigail Patterson Campbell (March 2, 1830 – January 10, 1917) was an American politician and lawyer who served as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, and was previously a Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and Deputy from Mississippi to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1862.

Biography
Josiah Abigail Patterson Campbell was born in Lancaster District, South Carolina, the son of a Presbyterian minister and the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. His family was of Scottish descent. He learned to read at four years old.

He was educated at Davidson College in North Carolina, thereafter moving to Madison County, Mississippi at the age of fifteen. He was admitted to the bar at Kosciusko, Mississippi on June 12, 1847, at the age of seventeen, making him the youngest lawyer in Mississippi, where he opened a law office and "conducted a large and profitable practice". He was elected to the state legislature in 1851 and 1859. He was the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1859 to 1860. He was a President pro tempore of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States for two days in 1861 and again for one day in 1862, becoming one of the original signers of the Confederate Constitution, and attained the rank of Lieutenant colonel in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, serving in the Mississippi 40th Infantry Regiment, where he was slightly wounded at the Second Battle of Corinth. 

After the war, he was elected circuit judge for the Fifth Circuit and served until 1868, when he was forced out of office for not swearing allegiance to the United States. In 1870, he was one of the commissioners who framed the code of 1871, and in 1879, he similarly worked on the code of 1880. In 1876, he became one of the chief organizers of the Mississippi Plan, which ended the era of Republican rule in Mississippi. He was appointed to a seat on the Supreme Court of Mississippi vacated by the resignation of Jonathan Tarbell in 1876, and served as Chief Justice from 1891 to 1894. He became one of the drafters of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, which enforced legal white supremacy. In 1895, he declined re-appointment, and returned to private practice. He was succeeded on the court by Albert H. Whitfield.

Campbell was also very active in Confederate veterans' organizations before official formation of the United Confederate Veterans club. In 1892, for example, about eighteen months after the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 went into effect, he gave a lengthy speech at the state capitol to a group of Confederate veterans. A copy of that nearly 8,000-word speech appeared in a number of newspapers, including the Jackson Clarion, dated July 14, 1892. His statements two days earlier at the Grand Camp Reunion held in Jackson indicate his ideas about society in the postwar context. Much of his words formed apologetics for Mississippi's secession in 1861, proclaiming it a right of the several states enacted upon by white Mississippians to protect the U.S. Constitution. He refused and encouraged others to refuse the idea that slavery was a moral evil, and instead pointed to the Republican Party and abolitionism as the true moral evil in the United States. The speech he delivered that day to veterans asked them to be on guard against historical interpretations about the war, and to teach their lineage that the South's white population are the only true defenders of the U.S. Constitution.

The Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court also made blatantly racist statements to Confederate veterans assembled in Jackson for a reunion. He informed his audience that African Americans would forever remain as an "inferior race" and would forever be dominated by whites since it was God's plan to establish white supremacy. Campbell was a paternalist who believed that Blacks in Mississippi were a dependent subgroup of people, and he asked veterans and other whites to remain vigilant so that barriers to suffrage for Black men remained, thereby preventing suffrage rights for the state's majority population (African Americans). 

In a preview of white Mississippians' view of the federal government through much of the twentieth and all of the twenty-first century, he characterized federal power as "coercive" and trampling upon the rights of white citizens by granting citizenship to African Americans. He also considered the federal government as interference with local control and the rights of states to freely discriminate against people.

Without offering any evidence or proof of his claims, James Meredith, the first Black student at the University of Mississippi maintained that Campbell was his great-grandfather, and Campbell was also the "father of White supremacy in Mississippi". Again, claims made by Meredith family members provided no evidence or proof of their lineage.  Campbell was a supporter of legal equality of court testimony between races, but insisted throughout his career that obstacles for voting be carefully guarded so that "radical misrule" did not overtake the state's system of government. 

Campbell died on January 10, 1917, in Canton, Mississippi, and lay in state at the Mississippi Capitol Rotunda as per Governor Bilbo's request. At the time of his death, he was the last living member of the first Confederate Congress and last living signer of the Confederate Constitution. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery.

References

External links

 
 Josiah Abigail Patterson Campbell at The Political Graveyard

1830 births
1917 deaths
19th-century American politicians
19th-century jurists
Burials in Mississippi
Chief Justices of the Mississippi Supreme Court
Confederate States Army officers
Deputies and delegates to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States
People from Camden, South Carolina
People of Mississippi in the American Civil War
Signers of the Confederate States Constitution
Signers of the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States
19th-century American judges