Mississippi’s Federal Courts: A History

By David M. Hargrove

This resource produces the first comprehensive history of the state’s federal courts from the inception of the Mississippi Territory to the late twentieth century. Using archival material and legal documents, David M. Hargrove untangles the state’s complex legal history, which includes slavery and secession, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and civil rights.

In this important overview of the United States courts in Mississippi, Hargrove surveys the state’s federal judiciary as it rules on key issues in Mississippi’s past. He examines the court as it mediates conflict between regional and national agendas as well as protects constitutional rights of the state’s African American citizens during the Reconstruction and civil rights eras.

Hargrove traces how political activities of the state’s federal judges affected public perceptions of an independent judiciary. Growing demands for federal judicial and law enforcement infrastructure, he notes, called for courthouses that remain iconic presences in the state’s largest cities.

Hargrove presents detailed judicial biographies of judges who shaped Mississippi’s federal bench. Commissioned by the state’s federal judiciary to write the book, he offers balanced perspectives on jurists whose reputations have suffered in hindsight, while illuminating the achievements of those who have received little public recognition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496819499

David M. Hargrove

David M. Hargrove is director of Winterset Public Library. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Mississippi, and worked as the circulation manager at the Grisham Law Library. He has published in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and Mississippi Law Journal.

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Introduction

Our national history will not have adequately been written, wrote Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in his seminal 1928 study of the federal judiciary, until the history of our judicial systems can be adequately told through monograph studies of individual courts. Mississippians will celebrate two hundred years of statehood in 2017, but April 3, 2018, marks the bicentennial of its United States courts, making the present an appropriate time to tell and interpret the story of the federal judiciary in Mississippi.¹

The story of Mississippi’s federal judiciary is much more than a tale of hard work, staggering caseloads, and irksome travel. At times in our national history, the eyes of the world focused on Mississippi’s federal courts. Whether issuing arrest warrants for an antebellum governor accused of fomenting insurrection, suppressing the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan and the agrarian revolts of the early twentieth century, or enforcing federal legislation and Supreme Court decisions during the civil rights era, Mississippi’s federal judges—with a few notable exceptions—did their best to uphold constitutional guarantees of justice and civil liberties for all Americans. In Mississippi perhaps more than any other state of the union, a functioning federal judiciary has underwritten the state’s good standing as a member of the United States. Having played a vital role in our national history, the federal courts of Mississippi deserve a current and comprehensive narrative.

Historians of the federal judiciary have spent much of their focus on the Supreme Court and the courts of appeal, but in recent years, a movement to document the business of the lower courts has produced more than a dozen individual histories of US district courts.² The present historical survey of Mississippi’s federal judiciary continues that trend. Its primary aims are to survey the statutory development of the US district courts in Mississippi and to present biographical sketches of the state’s US district judges and magistrate judges. However, broader conclusions about how those courts and their personnel contributed to the history of the South and the nation are inevitable.

Above all, there is much to be learned about Mississippi in the history of its federal courts. Some episodes involving the federal courts, such as the Oxford Klan trials of Reconstruction and well-known cases of the civil rights era, are already the subject of historical scholarship. Other similar events, such as the habeas corpus cases of Reconstruction, the Chisolm Massacre of 1877, the Whitecap trials, the trial of Governor Lee Russell, the Republican spoils scandal of the 1920s, the Prohibition era in Mississippi, and judicial appointments of the civil rights era have received little, if any, attention from historians. This volume considers relevant historical literature where it exists but when possible utilizes primary sources—materials originating from the period in question—to construct the narrative.

Compared to the higher courts, the business of federal district courts is largely undocumented. Early US district judges wrote and published few opinions, and appellate reports tell us little about the machinery and personnel of Mississippi’s federal courts. Before West Publishing produced the Federal Reporter in 1880, the decisions of US district courts were unpublished. West later compiled pre-1880 decisions from various regional reporters into a separate reporter, Federal Cases, but even today most activities of the federal district courts are not documented by West Publishers, Westlaw, or Lexis. Moreover, though occasionally useful to historians as primary sources, case reporters disclose very little of what happens in US district courts and nothing of the political process that gives life to federal judicial institutions.

In the roughest sense, the statutory history of the state’s federal judiciary outlines its growth. A few surviving docket sheets, government documents, newspaper reports, and accounts of leading lawyers add to what we know about the courts’ physical settings, the volume of their litigation, and the character of the state’s earliest federal judges, attorneys, and marshals. A few judges left memoirs that contribute much to the history of Mississippi’s federal judiciary. Since 1871 the Register of the Department of Justice and annual reports by the US attorney general’s office have provided reliable information on federal caseloads, court personnel, and where and when courts convened. In recent years, congressional archives afford a closer look at judicial administration and how politics affected the state’s federal courts. During the lengthy tenures of US senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis, the executive branch, Congress, the legal community, and even grassroots constituencies influenced the administration of Mississippi’s federal courts and the judicial appointments process.

Scholars have described US district courts and their judges as gatekeepers of the federal judiciary.³ All federal litigation begins in district courts, and the vast majority of cases end there. District courts are the only federal trial courts where litigants introduce evidence, determine facts, and meet in open conflict subject to adjudication by judges and juries. They usually decide who benefits from federal judicial policymaking, what form those benefits take, and when parties receive them. Federal district courts apply Supreme Court decisions to vast numbers of cases and implement decisions made by higher courts. However, with the broad formulations and ambiguity of many Supreme Court rulings, district judges possess significant latitude in interpreting higher court decisions. In many respects, with regard to federal jurisprudence, US district courts are where the action is.

If US district courts and their judges are the gatekeepers of the federal judiciary, they are also its workhorses. The earliest surviving docket sheet for Mississippi’s federal courts, from May 1838, shows that the US clerk of court averaged filing between three and five hundred new cases twice annually. As the flood of land-related cases from the 1830s subsided, Congress charged the US district courts with administering the Bankruptcy Act of 1841, the first modern American bankruptcy law. After the Civil War, a growing list of federal crimes and the Bankruptcy Act of 1867 caused federal caseloads to rise again, and filings in Mississippi’s Northern and Southern Districts swelled with prosecutions of illegal liquor sales.

By 1900 the state’s Southern District caseloads began to outpace those of the Northern District by more than two to one, a result of economic and demographic expansion in south Mississippi and on the Gulf Coast that remains consistent into 2018. Prohibition enforcement significantly increased criminal and civil caseloads, straining judicial administration in both Mississippi districts. Despite 1929 legislation creating a second Mississippi district judgeship, the disparity in workloads between the districts widened in the years following World War II. Caseloads from the current era reflect the difference in scale between the two districts. In 2016, with 992 cases pending, Northern District officials received 1,006 new filings and terminated 835 cases. In the same year, Southern District officials terminated 2,142 cases, with 2,264 new filings and 2,048 cases pending.⁴

This account of Mississippi’s federal district courts reveals something of the mighty workloads, responsibilities, and challenges facing past and present US judges, marshals, and judicial officers. Many of the state’s federal judges were extraordinary individuals, admired and beloved for their diligence, conscientiousness, wits, and humor. Exemplars of fairness, compassion, and grace on the bench and in their daily lives, they added credibility to their institutions, and bolstered respect for a sometimes unpopular branch of the federal government. Unfortunately, the state’s most controversial federal judges are perhaps best known to journalists, historians, and legal scholars. My hope is that the following biographies provide more balanced perspectives on judges who deservedly suffer in hindsight while also illuminating the lives and labors of those whose career achievements generated less public scrutiny.

Want to be a federal judge in Mississippi? Until the twentieth century only white males held United States judgeships, but with social progress, more recent federal judicial appointments conform less to traditional racial and gender stereotypes. The US judges of Mississippi mirror the federal judiciary as such, and today the state’s federal bench is closer to resembling all Mississippians. In addition to gender and race, other demographic characteristics stand out among those who have served Mississippi as US district judges. More than two-thirds were born in Mississippi. More than one-third have served in the US Army, Navy, or Air Force. More than one-quarter were second-generation attorneys. On average, Mississippi’s US district judges were just under age forty-seven when confirmed and just under sixty-seven when they retired. Whether they retired or died while in active service, their careers on the bench averaged about seventeen years. The last to read law for his legal training instead of attending law school was Judge Allen Cox, nominated in 1929 by President Calvin Coolidge. Of the twenty-seven judges who attended law school, seventeen graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law; the first was Judge Sidney Mize, nominated in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt.⁵

This volume, in a strict sense, surveys the history of an institution. In an effort to show how Mississippi’s federal judiciary changed over time, its organizational scheme is chronological. However, several overarching and often related themes emerge in the chapters that follow. Throughout the history of federal jurisprudence in Mississippi, the state’s federal judges struggled to reconcile national and sectional interests. When facing fierce state and local resistance to federal laws and equally vociferous demands that those laws be enforced, the state’s federal judges have, with some notable exceptions, approached thorny and divisive questions about the interplay of federal, state, and local authority with equanimity and poise while disposing of less spectacular but nonetheless contentious business on their dockets.

The role of the state’s federal courts in mediating conflict between regional and national political agendas grew significantly during the Reconstruction period and culminated in the civil rights era. Much of that conflict was the outcome of struggles by African American Mississippians for constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizenship—to vote, to sit on juries, and to enjoy public accommodations in transportation, education, and recreation. The question of civil rights for African Americans is central to the narrative of Mississippi’s federal courts from Reconstruction to the present. Accordingly, the enforcement of constitutional civil rights protections and federal civil rights legislation is a prominent and at times a dominant theme of this history.

Related to the central and sometimes overlapping themes of regional and national reconciliation and the struggle for civil rights were the political activities of the state’s federal judges and notions of an independent judiciary. Judicial independence—the idea that the courts should not be subject to improper influence from other branches of government or from private or partisan interests—is vital to a system of government based on a separation of powers. However, judicial candidates, and above all those who appoint and confirm them, are inevitably political actors, and the makeup of the courts was and always will be a coordinated product of the legislative and executive branches of government. Party affiliation serves as a baseline for judicial nominees, but who receives consideration for an appointment usually reflects a compromise between senatorial prerogatives and bureaucratic political exigencies.

In the antebellum era, little separation between legal and political institutions existed. Mississippi’s federal judges and marshals were typically Democratic Party operators, but disagreements often flared up between the state’s US senators and the president over who should fill those offices. During the Jacksonian era, Mississippi’s federal judgeship and marshalcy (the most lucrative office in the South according to historian J. F. H. Claiborne) often proved to involve more hardship than those who sought and won the posts expected. Before the Civil War, the state’s federal judiciary fell under the influence of Jackson cronies who used their offices for partisan advantage and the cause of westward expansion, but judicial involvement with politics reached a climax with the secessionist activities of Judge Samuel Jameson Gholson.

Republican judicial appointments during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras somewhat insulated the state’s federal courts against the southern system of Democratic rule. However, with the death of Judge Henry Niles in 1918 and the collapse of Black and Tan Republican influence in the late 1920s, political appointments to Mississippi’s federal courts and other federal patronage fell into the hands of state Democrats. Political manipulation of the state’s federal judiciary peaked during the civil rights era. Conservative Democrats led by Senator James O. Eastland shaped the state’s federal courts into an instrument for delaying and defying the implementation of civil rights legislation, setting the stage for monumental challenges to Mississippi’s legal system of segregation by African American litigants. The struggle for civil rights in the federal courts was not unique to Mississippi, but with conservative Democrats Sidney Mize and Harold Cox on the bench, the road to compliance with Supreme Court rulings, even on settled questions of law, was long and rocky. In the wake of those difficult years, judges William Keady, Orma Smith, and Dan Russell did much to restore the independence of Mississippi’s federal judiciary.

Southern politics, national politics, and civil rights for African Americans are inescapable frames of reference for Mississippi’s federal courts, but a final theme emerges in the historiography of the state’s federal judiciary. Federal judicial offices and buildings did not appear overnight on Mississippi townscapes, but with the growth of federal jurisdiction, a persistent need for federal judicial and law enforcement infrastructure emerged. Before the Civil War, the federal courts rented space in county courthouses and the State Capitol, but federal judicial venues were still a source of income and prestige, and several Mississippi towns undertook rivalries to secure the pride and patronage associated with United States court sessions.

To many Mississippians the public spaces and official personnel of the state’s federal courts were the most visible manifestation of the US government in the region, with the possible exception of post offices. After the Civil War, the human and physical infrastructure of Mississippi’s federal judiciary gained stability with the construction of courthouses that included space for US attorneys, marshals, commissioners, clerks, and later bankruptcy referees and probation officers. During the Jim Crow era, courthouses that doubled as post offices emerged in Aberdeen, Clarksdale, Oxford, Jackson, Biloxi, Hattiesburg, Meridian, and Vicksburg. As local federal bureaucracies outgrew those structures, officials erected new buildings during the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Newer federal facilities have superseded most of those spaces, and the older structures are now owned by local governments or private parties, but they remain an iconic architectural presence in the state’s largest cities.

Chapter 1 locates the origins of Mississippi’s judiciary and invites consideration of the relationship between the territorial courts and the federal judiciary. The territorial legislature encountered widespread dissatisfaction with its presidentially appointed judges and undertook five judicial reorganizations over two decades. The question of whether or not territorial courts possessed federal jurisdiction complicated the adjudication of land claims in the period, cast doubt on the legality of Aaron Burr’s 1807 Mississippi trial on charges of treason, and created uncertainty for territorial inhabitants about what were the courts of last resort. Legacies of the period included the state’s first federal judge, a tempestuous Jeffersonian Republican and inveterate duelist, and Sargent’s Code, a compilation of statutes by the first territorial governor that despite its excesses outlasted his administration and cemented the common law basis of frontier society in the Mississippi Territory.

Chapter 2 details the administrative growth of the Mississippi District, the types of cases that made up its docket, and the role of Democratic partisanship in shaping the state’s antebellum federal courts. Established by Congress in 1818, Mississippi’s first federal district court convened at Washington (in Adams County), then at Natchez, and after 1835 met at the new state capital in Jackson. In 1837 Congress assigned the Mississippi District to the Ninth Circuit with Alabama, Arkansas, and the Eastern District of Louisiana, where it remained until the Civil War. In 1838 after much white settlement of north Mississippi Indian lands, Congress divided the state’s federal judiciary into two districts, with a Northern District court in Pontotoc and a Southern District court in Jackson.

Chapter 3 covers the years between 1839 and secession, when US District Judge Samuel Gholson brought a period of relative stability to Mississippi’s federal courts. In Gholson’s first year on the bench, a court crier’s assault on a Supreme Court justice at the US circuit court in Jackson was national news, drawing attention to the turbulence of state politics, the scarcity of federal judicial resources facing a throng of litigious debtors, and the hardships of justices who traveled the scattered Ninth Circuit. The Bankruptcy Act of 1841 created significant additional workloads in both districts, but the chapter focuses on Judge Gholson’s role in sectional crises precipitating the Civil War. An active states’ rights Democrat, he wrestled with his duty to order the arrest of secessionist Governor John Quitman, accused in 1850 by the government of taking part in a conspiracy to topple Spanish rule in Cuba. In January 1861 Judge Gholson chaired Mississippi’s secession convention, and the state’s antebellum federal courts fell on the sword of secession.

Chapter 4 includes a brief history of the state’s Confederate courts, which mirrored the structure and procedure of the federal judiciary. In 1866 President Andrew Johnson chose Judge Robert A. Hill of Tishomingo County to lead the second coming of the federal courts in Mississippi. Hill had opposed secession, and his early support for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, progovernment rulings in two leading habeas corpus cases during military reconstruction, and aggressive Klan prosecutions in north Mississippi did not endear him to state Democrats. As Republican hopes for Reconstruction faded, however, his distaste for controversy and a desire for security led the ever-diplomatic Judge Hill to accept the dominance of Democratic political forces.

Chapter 5 describes Hill’s conduct of the 1871 Oxford Klan trial, when Judge Gholson reprised his role as a defender of white supremacy and courtroom remonstrations by future US senator and Supreme Court justice L. Q. C. Lamar nearly provoked a confrontation with federal troops. New courthouses in Jackson, Oxford, Aberdeen, and Vicksburg underscored an abiding federal presence in the state, but by 1885 enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments was no longer a priority. Like most of his brethren on the federal bench, Judge Hill settled on a passive approach to civil rights for African Americans and adopted instead the role of temperance crusader.

Chapter 6 details efforts of the state bar association to secure an additional federal district judgeship for Mississippi and suggests that for political reasons, Congress failed to support the state’s federal judiciary in perhaps its greatest hour of need. When Judge Hill retired in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison appointed a fellow Republican, Henry C. Niles, to Mississippi’s lone federal judgeship. The Judiciary Act of 1891 established nine new circuit courts of appeal, which dramatically lowered the Supreme Court caseload, but with significant growth in federal jurisdiction following the Civil War, district court caseloads continued to rise. Niles too was a temperance warrior but struggled to manage growing dockets in the Northern District, which by 1918 had division points in Oxford, Aberdeen, and Clarksdale, and in the Southern District, with sessions in Jackson, Meridian, Vicksburg, and Biloxi.

Chapter 7 documents the growth of federal law enforcement that accompanied implementation of the Eighteenth Amendment in Mississippi. In 1918 Judge Niles died from overwork, and Mississippi Democrats were jubilant when President Woodrow Wilson filled the vacancy with Yazoo City Democrat Edwin R. Holmes. National Prohibition Act cases soon swamped northern and southern dockets, and Judge Holmes struggled in vain to keep up with liquor violators, but a pair of political scandals erupted on the state’s federal bench that detracted from Prohibition enforcement. In 1922 a former secretary initiated a civil sexual trial against Governor Lee Russell, claiming that he had seduced her with the promise of marriage. Civil sexual suits remained viable causes of action in the 1920s, and the case made national headlines, stoked by the involvement of former governor (and later US senator) Theodore Bilbo.

The second political scandal of the 1920s, detailed in chapter 7, directly involved the state’s federal judiciary. Though not as sensational as the Russell case, it was the culmination of years of political in-fighting over federal patronage in Mississippi and undermined judicial independence and the rule of law in the state. The Constitution provides that federal judgeships be lifetime appointments, but the offices of US attorney, US marshal, and certain other federal offices are subject to political changes in the executive branch of the national government. Until 1926 federal law did not strictly prohibit the barter and sale of public offices, and throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century party officials regarded control over many federal and state government jobs as the spoils of electoral victory. During the administrations of presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, a cadre of Black and Tan Republicans led by African American Jackson attorney Perry Wilbon Howard controlled federal patronage in Mississippi (a state then dominated by Democrats), but a lily-white Republican faction contested their claim to the state’s party leadership. Political opportunism fueled attacks on the patronage network controlled by Mississippi’s Black and Tan Republicans at the state and national levels, but Mississippians, including Judge Holmes, could not deny that the barter and sale of offices had ensnarled the machinery of the Northern District court, and the state’s Republican patronage brokers eventually proved an inviting target for federal prosecutors.

Chapter 8 describes changes that ushered Mississippi’s federal judiciary into the modern era: steeply rising caseloads in the Southern District, the appearance of Senator James O. Eastland on the political landscape, and the return of civil rights litigation to the state’s federal courts. Congress finally provided a much-needed second federal judgeship for Mississippi in 1929, and New Deal building projects brought updated federal facilities to Meridian, Vicksburg, and Jackson. Despite strident objections from Senator Bilbo, President Franklin Roosevelt elevated Judge Holmes to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1936 and filled the resulting Southern District vacancy with Judge Sidney Mize. As global attention to African American civil rights increasingly focused on racial inequalities in the South, Mize was the first Mississippi federal judge since Reconstruction to hear civil rights litigation.

Chapter 9 shows how the prospect of federal civil rights litigation influenced the makeup of the state’s district court bench during the late 1950s, marking another period in which the major political struggles of the era disrupted the business of the court. Rising annual caseloads stifled Judge Mize’s efforts to make headway in the Southern District docket, but unlike Judge Niles, who never requested relief in the form of an additional jurist, Mize lobbied his congressional delegation aggressively for a second Southern District judge. Until 1953 Senator Eastland and Senator John C. Stennis were receptive to his pleas, but enabling legislation stumbled in the House Judiciary Committee, compelling Mize to undertake the extraordinary step of reaching out to its leadership in a desperate bid for relief. However, when the Supreme Court announced its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring racially separated schools inherently unequal, the state’s Democratic congressional delegation had fresh cause to oppose new judgeships in Mississippi and other southern states. After 1956, when Eastland became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he used his power to delay the creation of much-needed federal judgeships, including a new district judgeship for southern Mississippi, until a Democratic president could fill them. By the time President John F. Kennedy signed the Omnibus Judgeship Act of 1961, which provided the much-needed judgeship, Southern District dockets neared chaos. The resulting appointment of the senator’s longtime friend and supporter, Judge Harold Cox, proved popular among Mississippi’s conservative Democrats, who relished his uncouth treatment of civil rights litigants and feuds with the Justice Department, but Cox’s orchestrated delays and one-sided decisions soon drew rebukes from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Uncertainty abounded as to how the state’s federal district judges would treat civil rights actions, and questions about whether they would carry out higher court orders striking down the legal basis for segregation were a growing source of anxiety for many Mississippians, regardless of their racial identities.

Chapter 10 covers the high points of federal civil rights litigation in Mississippi and scrutinizes the records of judges Mize, Cox, and Claude Feemster Clayton in adjudicating actions on behalf of the state’s African American citizens. From 1961 to 1965, all three judges used delay as their primary tactic for slowing the progress of civil rights litigation in Mississippi’s Northern and Southern District Courts. In many cases, their inaction forced the hand of Fifth Circuit judges and Supreme Court justices, who dutifully put Mississippi’s district judges on the path to compliance with federal laws and the Constitution. By the mid-1960s, the district courts of the Fifth Circuit handled over 90 percent of civil rights cases nationwide, with 83 percent of those cases filed in the Northern and Southern Districts of Mississippi.

Chapter 10 also describes the emergence of a new generation of district judges that did much to restore Mississippi’s federal judiciary as a functional unit of the United States courts. With the death of Judge Mize in 1965, the creation of two new Mississippi judgeships in 1966, and Judge Clayton’s promotion to the Fifth Circuit in 1967, senators Eastland and Stennis confronted a mass of judicial aspirants and settled into the process of identifying potential nominees. Facing fallout from the Cox appointment, Justice Department officials were skeptical of Eastland’s recommendations, and often rejected his candidates before settling on nominees acceptable to the American Bar Association, the attorney general, the president, and the state’s US senators. Extant correspondence between Eastland, Stennis, Justice Department officials, and dozens of judicial candidates and their supporters shows who received serious consideration for federal judgeships in Mississippi during the civil rights era.

Chapter 11 brings Mississippi’s federal courts to the twenty-first century, covering judicial appointments since 1983, when President Ronald Reagan made the first of his six appointments to Mississippi’s US district courts. Eastland retired from the Senate in 1978, and that year all twenty-eight judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals requested that Congress divide the circuit, which faced insurmountable administrative difficulties. In October 1980, President Carter signed legislation reorganizing the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Reorganization Act placed Mississippi with Louisiana and Texas in a revised Fifth Circuit and created a new Eleventh Circuit comprising Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

The story of Mississippi’s federal courts reflects the state’s transformation from small frontier communities to a complex society with urban and rural settings, populated by people of highly varied social, economic, and ethnocultural orientations. In the antebellum era, the state’s federal judiciary sprang from its territorial roots in Adams County and established itself in the state capital at Jackson, adding a Northern District with sessions at Pontotoc in 1838. After the Civil War, Northern District sessions moved to Oxford, with Congress later adding division points in Aberdeen, Clarksdale, Greenville, and Cleveland. Southern District sessions remained in Jackson, with the addition of division points at Vicksburg, Mississippi City (later Biloxi), Meridian, Hattiesburg, Gulfport, and Natchez.

Historically, the growth of Mississippi’s federal bench has failed to keep up with rising caseloads and increasingly scattered venues. From 1866 to 1929, before Congress mandated a second judge for the state, judges Hill, Niles, and Holmes held biannual sessions for both districts at a minimum of five division points. Until the addition of a second Southern District judge in 1961, one judge served each district, with four division points in the Northern District and five in the Southern District. The current allocation of judicial resources to the Northern and Southern Districts more accurately reflects the volume of their business. Three active district judges and three magistrate judges oversee Northern District dockets with courts in Aberdeen, Greenville, and Oxford. In the Southern District, six active district judges and six magistrate judges superintend courts in Jackson, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, and Natchez.

After two centuries of federal jurisprudence in Mississippi, the state’s federal judges and magistrate judges continue to protect and secure the state’s citizens according to the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Their decisions in civil and criminal cases affect the lives of all Mississippians in some way or another, by setting the limits of free speech, privacy, or the free exercise of religion. They supervise congressional redistricting, resolve regulatory disputes, settle mass torts and bankruptcies, conduct citizenship ceremonies, and oversee the prosecution of illegal narcotics sales. By providing for the enforcement of federal civil rights laws, the United States courts have insured that, despite defiant resistance from many state and local leaders (and even a few federal judges), the state of Mississippi kept its compact with the national government and the Constitution. Much, indeed, can be learned about Mississippi in the history of its federal courts.

  CHAPTER ONE  

The Courts of the Mississippi Territory, 1798–1817

Settlers of the Mississippi Territory were not only litigious; they were also contentious, fractious, and bitterly partisan. Rival families, disputes between debtors and creditors, animosity between Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, an exaggerated sense of personal honor, a partisan press, and overlapping land claims kept the territory in turmoil. Much of the area that became the Mississippi Territory had been under French, British, and Spanish dominion for 135 years. After the English colony of Georgia became a state, the Georgia legislature claimed its western boundary was the Mississippi River and issued huge grants to several land speculators. This entangling web of ownership based on French, English, Spanish, and Georgia land grants took years to resolve.¹

Early on the morning of March 30, 1798, Andrew Ellicott stood on the parapet of Fort Rosalie and watched the Spanish galleys pull away from the Natchez landing. They were out of sight by daylight, and American troops took formal possession of Natchez and its environs. President George Washington had appointed Ellicott to locate and survey the thirty-first parallel, the southern boundary between the United States and Spanish Florida as established by the Pinckney Treaty of 1795.²

A week later, on April 7, 1798, the US Congress established the Mississippi Territory. Its original boundaries were the 32.28 parallel on the north, the Mississippi River on the west, the thirty-first parallel on the south, and the Chattahoochee River on the east. In 1804 the northern boundary of the territory was extended up to the thirty-fifth parallel, which is the southern boundary of the state of Tennessee, and in 1810 the coastal area between the Pearl River and the Perdido River was added to the Mississippi Territory. After 1810 and until its admission to statehood on December 10, 1817, the Mississippi Territory included the present-day states of Mississippi and Alabama. In 1817 the eastern half of the territory became the Alabama Territory, which was admitted to statehood in 1819.³

On May 7, 1798, President John Adams appointed Winthrop Sargent governor of the territory. John Steele was soon appointed secretary, and Peter Bryan Bruin and Daniel Tilton were appointed judges, neither of whom had any significant legal training or had practiced law. The third judge was reserved for an experienced law-character, if one could be found to accept it. After Secretary of State Timothy Pickering notified William McGuire on June 30, 1798, that he had been appointed to the third judgeship, which was designated chief justice, he urged McGuire to repair to the Mississippi Territory as soon as possible because the nearly five thousand inhabitants since the last of March have been destitute of civil government. Secretary Pickering also apologized for the eight-hundred-dollar salary. Pickering conceded the salary was quite inadequate and suggested that Judge McGuire make some other provision for his family. Judge McGuire left his family in Virginia, and after only three months in the territory he resigned and returned to Virginia. Judge Tilton was absent from his office so often that some thought he had also resigned. There was so much anguish about the courts among the inhabitants of the territory that they petitioned Congress to remove the territorial judges and replace them with judges appointed by the local citizenry. In opposition to this petition, thirteen Practitioners of Law in the Mississippi Territory filed a rebuttal to the criticism of the territorial judiciary, and Congress took no action.⁴

Before Governor Sargent’s arrival, Captain Isaac Guion, the commanding officer of American troops in Natchez, exercised both military and civil authority in the territory. The territorial population at the time of its establishment was approximately five thousand, with about four thousand living in the Old Natchez District, and the remainder living in scattered settlements along the lower Tombigbee River. When General James Wilkinson, commanding general of the United States Army, sent Captain Guion to the Mississippi Territory in December 1797 to oversee the transfer of the territory from Spain to the United States, he warned him that Natchez was an opulent, and polished community, but it was agitated by a variety of political interests and opinions…. The moment the Spanish domain terminates[, the inhabitants] will find themselves without laws or magistrates, and the bonds of society being dissolved[,] … irregularities will ensue. The captain had been warned, but he was unprepared for the scale of irregularities that he would find in America’s newest possession. Soon after he took command of the territory, he brought the rival factions together, but he became so disgusted with their bickering that he stormed out of the room. For the next few months, Captain Guion held tightly the reins of authority.⁵

As Governor Sargent was in the process of transferring to the Mississippi Territory from the Northwest Territory, where he had been secretary for ten years, he wrote to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering. From the best intelligence I have been able to procure, he said, there prevails in the country of our destination, a refractory and turbulent spirit, with parties headed by men of perverseness and cunning. They have run wild in recess of government, and every moment’s delay in the adoption of rules and regulations … must be productive of growing evils and discontents.⁶

Governor Sargent arrived in Natchez on August 6, 1798, and he did not make a good impression. Soon after his arrival, a man down on his luck and deep in debt came to see him in his office and asked for help. In a rather dismissive tone, the governor told him to get a good lawyer. The debtor explained that he had consulted a lawyer whose fee he could not possibly afford and told the lawyer that he was going to seek the governor’s aid. The attorney told him that talking to the governor would be a waste of time because the governor had "never spoke to a Poor man in his life. In relating this incident to John Marshall, Governor Sargent revealed much about himself. I candidly admit, he wrote in a private letter, that I am not ‘overanxious of popularity,’ [and] I shall never be so far Degraded, as to become the Machine of the Multitude."⁷

Soon after his arrival at Natchez, Governor Sargent addressed a considerable collection of the Inhabitants of the Territory. He explained the major provisions of the law creating the territory and outlined the three stages by which the territory would eventually achieve statehood. During the first stage the governor and the three territorial judges appointed by the president would make the necessary laws to govern the territory until it was advanced to the second stage. In the second stage the citizens would elect a general assembly consisting of an elected house of representatives and a legislative council appointed by the president from names submitted by the representatives. The general assembly would have broad legislative authority over the structure of territorial courts, but it would not have the power to appoint or approve the territorial judges or justices of the peace. Natchez, which was incorporated in 1803, was the only incorporated town in the territory. The three territorial judges were appointed by the president, and the power to appoint all local officials, including justices of the county courts, sheriffs, coroners, and constables, was vested in the territorial governor. When the population reached sixty thousand, Congress could advance the territory to the third and final stage. The inhabitants would draft a state constitution, elect public officials established under that document, and petition Congress for admission as a coequal member of the United States of America. The route to statehood would be circuitous and contentious, but Governor Sargent assured the inhabitants that personal merit and firm attachment to the United States would be the primary qualification for office under his administration.⁸

Two days after this speech, Governor Sargent sent a frantic message to Secretary Pickering. My great source of uneasiness, he wrote, is the want of the Judges—I pray God that Mr. McGuire may soon arrive, or some law character—In a court from which is no appeal … there should be law knowledge—Judge Bruin … is beyond doubt deficient, and Judge Tilton cannot have had more reading or experience. Under these circumstances might it not be advisable to make compensation to some gentleman learned in the law, to reside here as an attorney for the United States, and Territory. Governor Sargent informed the secretary that he was in the process of dividing the Mississippi Territory into two counties that he would name Adams and Pickering. He asked the secretary to send him an official seal for each county and blank commissions for the various appointments he would make in those counties. Governor Sargent also referred to recent disturbances caused by some Choctaw Indians and asked the secretary for a little Bread, Beef, and liquor, and some trifling presents … to keep them in good humor. Further complicating the establishment of civil authority in the Mississippi Territory, John Steele, the secretary of the territory, did not arrive until the late fall of 1798, and when he did arrive, he was ill and indisposed. Governor Sargent informed Secretary Pickering that it was doubtful if he can recover. In closing Governor Sargent asked the secretary of state to please send him some newspapers to that far distant post on the outer rim of the young American republic.⁹

Governor Sargent had intended to wait for the arrival of all three judges before dividing the territory into political subdivisions and appointing local officials. However, as he explained to Secretary Pickering, he was forced by unexpected delay and imperious necessity to issue executive orders on September 8 and 9, 1798, dividing the Mississippi Territory into a northern and a Southern District, establishing a militia in each district, and appointing conservators of the peace, sheriffs, and other officials in each of those two districts.¹⁰

The establishment of civil authority necessitated the construction of courthouses and jails in the two districts. In the Southern District, which was the lower half of the Mississippi Territory and would become the Adams District, the seat of justice was established at Natchez. An appendage to a Catholic church, which had been occupied by Captain Guion, was used as the first courthouse in Adams County. On November 24, 1798, Governor Sargent authorized Sheriff Lewis Evans to select an appropriate site in the town of Natchez and construct a gaol. By June 6, 1799, the jail had been completed. According to Dunbar Rowland, the founding director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, This was the first building erected in Mississippi Territory for public purposes. In the Pickering District, the upper district that was eventually renamed Jefferson District, after much bickering and contention, a commission was authorized to select an appropriate site and "erect a courthouse, jail, pillory