s to guide the state republican party in a sensible direction. Donald believed that most whigs initially supported the Miss republican party but they were soon alienated by the radical demands and growing power of blacks and carpetbaggers within the state republican party organization. They were esp hostile to further racial equality and the result, defection was the major cause of republican defeat in the Miss.15-20,000 whites were Rep in Miss, but the true figure is about 9,000, 15% of the total white electorate in Miss was Scalawag. James Lusk Alcorn was the leader of the Miss Scalawag. He had been wealthy delta planter before the war and after a brief stint he had opposed succession and after a brief stint in the southern army, he retired to his plantation. He smuggled contraband cotton into northern hands along the Miss river and invested his profits in land and in Union currency, not in Confederate bills or bonds. After the war, he sought to set up a republican party in Miss, which would rest on a collition of old line whigs, like himself, and newly enfranchised black voters. As a governor of Miss, Alcorn favored legal equality for blacks in exchange for their support of his legislation. He called for rebuilding levies along the Miss river at state expense so that planters like himself could drain their floodes fields and grow corn again. The leasing of convicts to private individuals or corporations, a reduction in land taxes, and state aid for rr construction. Even though he eventually became disenchanted with reconstruction, be refused to go over to the Democratic party, his lifelong political armies: “I was a whig and a glory in the fact that I am not a democrat.” Allen W. Trelease: a study of votin patterns in the south in the presidential election of 1872 concluded that “most white republican voters of 1872 were small famers, noticible poorer than the southern average and had little in common of the slave...
