Dates: n.d.
Original is restricted; reference photocopy must be used instead.

Biography:

Benjamin Grubb Humphreys

Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, plantation owner, Confederate brigadier general, eighteenth governor of Mississippi, and insurance agent, was born at the Hermitage, his father's plantation in Claiborne County, Mississippi Territory, on August 26, 1808. His parents were George Wilson and Sarah Smith Humphreys. The Humphreys family was originally from Wales, but they later settled in Ireland. They immigrated to America, locating in the colonies of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Many Humphreys family members served in the Revolutionary War. The grandfather of Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, Ralph Humphreys of Virginia, was a colonel in the Continental Army. He married Agnes Wilson, a niece of James Wilson, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Their eldest son, George Wilson Humphreys, later married Sarah Smith. Her father, Major David Smith, was a native of South Carolina. His ancestors were Huguenots who fled to America after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Sarah Smith Humphreys inherited from her father the land on Bayou Pierre that would become the Hermitage.

Sarah Smith Humphreys died when Benjamin Grubb Humphreys was young, and his father sent him to live with his grandfather in Kentucky, where Humphreys received his early education. Humphreys later attended school in New Jersey from 1821 until his father requested him to return to Mississippi in 1824. He worked as a clerk in a Port Gibson store after his return. Humphreys was later appointed as a cadet to the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, where he was a classmate of Robert E. Lee. For disciplinary reasons, he and several other cadets were expelled after a riot on Christmas Eve of 1826. Humphreys returned to Mississippi to become the overseer of his father's plantation in 1827.

On March 15, 1832, Humphreys married Mary McLaughlin. They settled on his plantation near the Big Black River in Claiborne County, where his wife died three years later. He then returned to the Hermitage with his son, Thomas McLaughlin, who died at the age of four in 1838, and his daughter, Mary Elizabeth Douglas. She later married the nephew of Jefferson Davis, Captain Isaac Stamps, who was killed at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1863.

Humphreys entered the political arena in 1838, when he was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Whig from Claiborne County. He was a successful candidate for the Mississippi Senate in 1839, and on December 3 of that year he married his second wife, Mildred Hickman Maury, daughter of Judge James H. and Lucinda Smith Maury. Humphreys served in the Mississippi Senate from 1840 to 1844. He moved to a plantation on Roebuck Lake in Sunflower County in 1846. Humphreys managed his plantation there until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Despite his earlier opposition to secession, Humphreys organized the Sunflower Guards in 1861. This company later fought in all of the major battles and campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia except the second battle of Bull Run. Humphreys was promoted to brigadier general after the death of General William Barksdale at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and he assumed command of the brigade. Humphreys received a severe chest wound at Berryville, Virginia, on September 3, 1864, which necessitated a long recuperation in Mississippi during the winter of 1864 and 1865. In the spring of 1865, he was reassigned to the Homochitto Military District in Mississippi until the end of the war.

Humphreys was the first Mississippi governor to be elected after the Civil War, and he served from October 2, 1865, to June 15, 1868. In his inaugural address, he pleaded for peace, economic recovery, and federal and state cooperation. Humphreys oversaw greater provisions for destitute soldiers and their families during Reconstruction. During his administration, the Mississippi legislature passed the Black Code of 1865. The legislature also rejected the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on the grounds that Mississippi had already abolished slavery and that national enforcement of the amendment would infringe on states rights. Humphreys and the legislature also contested the Fourteenth Amendment for its similar infringement on states rights. Shortly after being reelected as governor in 1868, he was ousted from office by federal military authorities. Humphreys was succeeded by military governor Adelbert Ames of Massachusetts. This transfer of power was authorized under the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867.

After leaving office, Humphreys worked as an agent for the New York Life Insurance Company in both Jackson and Vicksburg. He eventually retired to his plantation, formerly located in an area of Sunflower County that had become part of Leflore County in 1871, where he died on December 20, 1882. Humphreys was survived by his second wife, Mildred, and four children: Benjamin Grubb II, David Smith, John Barnes, and Mary Elizabeth Douglas Humphreys Stamps.

Benjamin Grubb Humphreys II was born on August 17, 1865. He served in the United States Congress from 1903 to 1923. Humphreys died in office on October 16, 1923.

Scope and Content Note:

This collection consists of an incomplete handwritten manuscript of Benjamin Grubb Humphreys on the Civil War. The majority of the manuscript is a detailed account of his personal involvement in and views on the Civil War, but it also contains some autobiographical material concerning his early life in Claiborne County, Mississippi. Humphreys summarizes the economic and political issues that precipitated the war. He provides military analysis of all the major battles and campaigns, even those not involving his brigade, such as Bull Run, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Shermans March to the Sea. Humphreys frequently provides simultaneous analysis of Confederate and Union military strategies and personnel, noting the strengths and weaknesses of the field generals. He recounts conversations he had with such Confederate military figures as Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and William Barksdale. For the battles in which he saw field service, Humphreys describes in detail the terrain and the military strategies devised by Lee, Longstreet, Barksdale, and himself. Some of these battles and assignments include Seven Pines, the evacuations of Manassas and Leesburg, Chickahominy, Savage Station, Antietam (Sharpsburg), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, the sieges of Chattanooga and Knoxville, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, the siege of Petersburg, and the reconnaissance following Philip Sheridans retreat through the Shenandoah Valley. Humphreys notes his absences from his brigade due to ill health, during which times he had news from the battlefield delivered to him in the hospital at Richmond. After his disabling wound at Berryville, his brigades subsequent battles, among them Cedar Creek, Hatchers Run, and the surrender at Appomattox, were also related to him from eyewitnesses.

Humphreys comments on the demoralized state of civilians during his assignment as commander of the Homochitto District in Mississippi in the spring of 1865, and he describes his efforts to collect the scattered Confederate forces in order to protect the citizenry from deserters and stragglers. He summarizes some of the activities of the Mississippi Department and the Trans-Mississippi Department during this unsettled time. Humphreys lists the steps he took to organize the surrender of Mississippi following the surrender at Appomattox. He then discusses the post-war events and political climate that led from civilian recovery to military rule and Reconstruction. He describes his expulsion from the governors office, the partisan politics surrounding the imprisonment Jefferson Davis at Fort Monroe, and the state of the Union.

Besides providing military analysis, Humphreys describes the camp life of soldiers and the creation of the Confederate army out of a group of individuals from disparate backgrounds. He relates many anecdotes, both grim and humorous, of soldiers and civilians coping with wartime conditions.

Although the Humphreys manuscript is predominantly not in his handwriting, scattered throughout the early chapters are annotations that are very likely to be in his hand. Chapters two and three are not included in the manuscript. It is also not entirely in final form: random pages are missing, several blank spaces are left to be filled in with proper names or statistics, and margin notes occasionally refer to page numbers in the "old manuscript."

 

Series Identification:

Series 1: Manuscript (Original). n.d. 0.66 c.f. (Restricted)

Series 2: Manuscript (Reference Photocopy). n.d. 0.66 cubic ft.