Appalachian Figures
John Jones Pettus is usually remembered as Mississippi’s fiery secession governor. He helped pull the state out of the Union and tried to hold it in the Confederate war effort through conscription, militia policy, and heavy use of enslaved labor. Yet before Pettus ever signed a proclamation in Jackson, he was a boy on the move and then a young lawyer on the cotton frontier of Kemper County along the Alabama line.
Looking at his life from that local vantage point turns an abstract “fire eater” into a neighbor, an employer, a politician that Kemper County residents wrote to, argued with, and sometimes defied. Plantation censuses, county histories, and the letters ordinary people mailed to “His Excellency” in Jackson let us recover that story in surprising detail.
From Tennessee boy to Kemper County planter
John Jones Pettus was born on 9 October 1813 in Wilson County, Tennessee. As a small boy he moved with his family into the Deep South, eventually arriving in Kemper County, Mississippi, after time in Alabama.
By the 1830s the region that became Kemper County was a fast growing cotton frontier carved from Choctaw homelands ceded in the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The 1840 census counted 4,623 free people and 3,040 enslaved people in Kemper. Two decades later the county neared twelve thousand residents and was roughly half free and half enslaved, with farms centered on cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, and livestock.
Pettus studied law in neighboring Sumter County, Alabama, then crossed back over the line to open a law practice at Scooba, a small town in eastern Kemper that would remain his home base. In the 1840s he married a cousin, Permelia Winston, and combined legal work with planting.
By mid century he had become what one historian calls a “wealthy cotton planter,” owning well over a thousand acres and at least twenty four enslaved people in Kemper County. The 1850 federal census and slave schedules for Kemper, along with later genealogical compilations of county slaveholders, reinforce that picture of Pettus as one of the larger local enslavers.
In other words, long before he was a state symbol, Pettus was rooted in a particular community. His wealth, his status, and his political world all grew out of Kemper County’s cotton and the people he held in bondage there.
Lawyer, planter, and “fire eater” for Kemper County
Pettus moved quickly from county courthouse to state politics. In 1844 Kemper voters sent him to the Mississippi House of Representatives. Four years later he won a seat in the state senate for the joint district of Neshoba and Kemper Counties and eventually became president of that body.
In 1850 the legislature chose Pettus as one of twelve Mississippi delegates to the Nashville Convention, a gathering of Southern politicians to discuss the expansion of slavery into western territories. According to the Mississippi Encyclopedia, Pettus refused to attend because he expected the convention to lean toward compromise. That decision foreshadowed the stance that earned him the label of “fire eater” in the 1850s – a hard line secessionist who rejected half measures on slavery and states’ rights.
In 1859 Mississippi voters elected Pettus governor by a wide margin, roughly triple the vote of his opponent. His base was the plantation and small town world of places like Scooba, Kellis Store, and De Kalb. Kemper County itself had a very high rate of Confederate enlistment once war came, a sign that his brand of pro slavery radicalism resonated with many white neighbors.
A Kemper County governor in the secession crisis
The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 brought the crisis Pettus had spent years predicting. From Jackson he urged Mississippians to arm themselves and called a special session of the legislature to consider secession. Contemporary summaries of his message, and later state histories, stress that he framed the issue squarely around slavery and property. If the South stayed in the Union, Pettus warned, antislavery politics would eventually destroy the institution and the enormous wealth it represented.
In his inaugural rhetoric and subsequent official correspondence, Pettus argued that secession and the creation of a Southern confederacy were the only reliable way to protect slavery as “the basis of our social and industrial system.” Under his leadership Mississippi followed South Carolina out of the Union on 9 January 1861 and joined the Confederate States a few weeks later.
Although these events unfolded on the floor of the capitol, they were deeply local. The votes that sent Pettus to Jackson came from counties like Kemper, where cotton profits depended on enslaved labor and where a rapid spread of Baptist and Methodist churches shaped white political culture. By 1860 Kemper had forty two churches, the fifth highest number in Mississippi. The spiritual language of duty, sacrifice, and providence that echoed in those pulpits often dovetailed with Pettus’s political appeals.
War, militia policy, and Kemper County’s home front
Once war began, Pettus faced the problem every Confederate governor grappled with: how to turn local enthusiasm into effective military power without collapsing the home front. Mississippi had few arsenals and limited funds. Pettus pressed for weapons, sometimes resorting to dubious private deals, and he encouraged Mississippians to form volunteer companies that could later be absorbed into state or Confederate service.
By 1861 and 1862 the limits of that approach were painfully clear. Many younger white men had already volunteered. To fill the ranks further, the legislature and governor turned to militia drafts and short term “state troops.” Pettus became a champion of broad enrollment. In one famous recommendation he urged that “the entire white male population of the State from 16 to 60 years of age, be enrolled in the militia,” an extraordinary statement of total mobilization that also reveals the racial boundaries he took for granted.
Those policies rippled back into Kemper County. Surviving letters from local men suggest that enthusiasm quickly gave way to frustration when militia musters pulled older farmers away from their fields during crucial seasons. A July 31, 1862 letter from Kemper resident D. A. Clark complained to Pettus about what he described as “great dissatisfaction with the draft” and even charged that some officers were enforcing militia law unevenly.
Other correspondents from Kemper voiced similar concerns. In August 1862 W. W. Little wrote from Scooba to ask the governor for relief from militia duty, a three page plea preserved today in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s digital collections and cataloged as part of the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project. At Kellis Store, another Kemper community, William Kellis petitioned Pettus for a captaincy in the Mississippi militia, hoping to turn local influence into formal authority.
Taken together, these letters show how intimately Kemper County residents engaged with their governor. They also reveal the strains his policies created. When both younger and older white men were in uniform, Pettus and his advisers worried openly about whether enough remained at home to “keep the slaves subdued,” as one Mississippi Encyclopedia essay on the wartime home front puts it.
Pettus himself pressed the Confederate high command to recognize the importance of state troops for internal security. In an April 16, 1863 letter to President Jefferson Davis he insisted that Mississippi’s state forces were “necessary to save north Miss from being over run and desolated while all the Confederate Troops were engaged with superior forces of the enemy.”
Those sentences were framed at the state level, but they speak directly to places like Kemper. A county with nearly equal numbers of enslaved and free residents depended on white men to police plantations and suppress any hint of rebellion. Pettus’s policies stretched that system close to its breaking point, and Kemper’s letters to Jackson read today like early warnings of the social crisis that would follow Confederate defeat.
Defeat, flight, and a contested legacy
By 1862 and 1863 the war was turning against the Confederacy. Federal campaigns at Corinth, Iuka, and along the Mississippi River threatened the state’s railroads and cities. Pettus helped oversee the construction of defensive works around Jackson and Vicksburg and ordered furniture removed from the Governor’s Mansion for safekeeping as Union troops approached.
During the Vicksburg Campaign the state capital briefly moved to Enterprise and then back to Jackson. Pettus’s own family suffered loss when his son John was killed at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in Virginia in 1861.
Pettus’s second gubernatorial term expired in late 1863. He left office urging Mississippians to continue fighting and in 1864 reportedly joined the Confederate army as a private, later serving as an officer near the war’s end. With Confederate defeat he refused to surrender formally. Fearing prosecution by United States authorities, he fled west to Arkansas, settling in the Bottomlands of Pulaski and Jefferson Counties. There he died of pneumonia in January 1867 and was buried at Flat Bayou Cemetery.
Back in Kemper County, the decades after the war were violent. By the 1870s and 1880s the county carried the grim nickname “Bloody Kemper,” associated with political killings such as the 1875 Chisholm Massacre and a broader pattern of racial terror and feuding. Later historians of Reconstruction in Kemper have traced those conflicts in part to the political culture Pettus embodied, in which white supremacy, armed vigilance, and one party rule were treated as natural and necessary.
That legacy sits uneasily beside the more romantic portrayals of Pettus that circulated in former Confederate circles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when his brother Edmund Pettus and their surname became fixtures in Lost Cause memory.
Reading Pettus and Kemper County from the archives
Pettus left no sweeping personal memoir. Instead, his world survives in fragments: census lines, deeds and tax rolls, terse gubernatorial messages, and a mountain of letters sent by thousands of Mississippians between 1859 and 1863.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History preserves those gubernatorial papers in its collections. The ongoing Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi digital edition is steadily transcribing and tagging them, often down to the county and town level. Researchers can search for “Kemper County,” “Scooba,” or “Kellis Store” and watch local voices appear page by page.
Kemper County specific theses and local histories help flesh out that picture. Anel Darvel Bassett’s study of antebellum Kemper describes landholding and slavery on the eve of secession. Charles Ray Fulton’s county history examines how the war and Reconstruction shaped what would later be called “Bloody Kemper.” Michael Brian Connolly’s work follows Reconstruction era violence and politics into the late nineteenth century. Those studies, together with genealogical compilations like the Kemper County “First Families” project, show how Pettus’s plantation neighborhood evolved long after he slipped away to Arkansas.
For readers in the Appalachian region, this Mississippi story may feel both distant and familiar. Like many southern upland counties, Kemper combined a mix of small farms and larger plantations, evangelical churches, and intense debates over loyalty and dissent during the Civil War era. Pettus’s career reminds us how closely these frontiers were linked, and how decisions made in state capitols grew out of conversations in small towns and crossroads communities like Scooba and Kellis Store.
Sources & further reading
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Governor’s Office, Administration of John J. Pettus, 1859-1863, correspondence and papers. Includes letters cited here from Kemper County residents such as D. A. Clark (July 31, 1862, protesting the draft) and W. W. Little of Scooba, as well as William Kellis’s petition from Kellis Store for a militia captaincy. Mississippi Digital Library+3Susannah Jural+3Susannah Jural+3
John J. Pettus, Message of Gov. John J. Pettus to the Legislature of Mississippi, Delivered on the Fifth Day of November, 1861 (Jackson, 1861), available through digital collections such as the Internet Archive and listed in official biographies of Pettus. Wikipedia+1
“Letter from Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus to President Jefferson Davis; April 16, 1863,” Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi digital edition. Wikipedia+1
1850 United States Federal Census, Kemper County, Mississippi, population and slave schedules for the household of John J. Pettus, as summarized in the Mississippi Encyclopedia entry on Pettus and compiled in genealogical databases that list him among Kemper County slave owners. Mississippi Encyclopedia+1
David G. Sansing, “John Jones Pettus,” Mississippi Encyclopedia (2017). Concise scholarly biography emphasizing Pettus’s Kemper County roots, plantation wealth, and role as a secessionist “fire eater.” Mississippi Encyclopedia
Mississippi Encyclopedia Staff, “Kemper County,” Mississippi Encyclopedia (2017, updated 2025). County level overview with data on antebellum population, agriculture, Civil War participation, and the later reputation of “Bloody Kemper.” Mississippi Encyclopedia
Robert W. Dubay, John Jones Pettus, Mississippi Fire Eater: His Life and Times, 1813-1867 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1975). The standard full length scholarly biography, heavily cited in later work on secession and Mississippi politics. Aquila Digital Community+1
Tracey L. Barnett, “Mississippi ‘Milish’: Militiamen in the Civil War,” Civil War History 66, no. 4 (2020), and related dissertation Maligned ‘Milish’ (University of Southern Mississippi, 2017). Analyzes Pettus’s militia and state troops policy, including the social tensions that appear in letters from counties such as Kemper. Wikipedia+1
William Leon Coker, Cotton and Faith: A Social and Political View of Mississippi Wartime Finance, 1861-1865(PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1973). Examines how Pettus’s administration relied on cotton and state led procurement of essentials such as salt. Wikipedia+1
Anel Darvel Bassett, “A Social and Economic History of Kemper County, Mississippi, in the Ante-bellum Period” (MA thesis, University of Alabama, 1947); Charles Ray Fulton, “A History of Kemper County, Mississippi, 1860-1910” (MA thesis, Mississippi State University, 1968); and Michael Brian Connolly, “Reconstruction in Kemper County, Mississippi” (MA thesis, Old Dominion University, 1989). Together these studies trace the county’s social structure, wartime experience, and violent Reconstruction era politics. Mississippi Encyclopedia+1
“A Great Deal of Suffering: Letters to Governor John J. Pettus,” Mississippians in the Confederate Army blog, 2014. A modern commentary that reproduces and interprets several Pettus era letters and helps connect the archival documents to ordinary Mississippians’ experiences. Mississippians in the Confederate Army