I. Governor Winthrop Sargent
The first governor of Mississippi Territory was Winthrop Sargent, a New Englander, the record of whose administration lives in history because of the discontent and even open dissensions that marked it. Your true Mississippian has always been wont to hold this sour and selfish Puritan—so characterized—who had been foisted upon the young territory through the prejudice of President Adams, as solely answerable for all these troubles. The leading historian of Mississippi, J. F. H. Claiborne, has depicted Sargent as so lacking in the kindly virtues that the wonder is, not that he was removed at the close of his third year of office, but that he had not been sooner thrust forth through the just anger of the people.
Recently the Mississippi Department of History has sent out the first volume of “Territorial Archives,” containing the journals of the first two executives of that state. These papers, now for the first time printed, are important for the light which they throw upon Sargent’s character and official record.
Winthrop Sargent was a native of Massachusetts, well born and college bred, who achieved a good record as an officer of artillery during the Revolutionary War. After the war he worked as a surveyor, until in 1787 he was made secretary of the Northwest Territory. In May, 1798, he was made governor of the territory of Mississippi. He was in very poor health at the time and when he at last reached Natchez, August 6, he was so weak that he was taken to Concord House, the old home of the Spanish Governors, to rest and recover his strength. Twelve days later, however, he was able to make a brief address before a large assemblage of citizens at Natchez. In this he assured the people of his solicitude for their welfare, of his desire to so administer the government as to deserve and retain their confidence, and he pledged himself to consider merit only in his appointments to office.
It must be admitted that he showed a sincere desire to make a good impression upon his new constituency, and the reason for his total failure is not readily defined, from the evidence of the record.
The historian Claiborne ascribes the mistakes of Governor Sargent largely to the influence of Andrew Ellicott. The latter, sent to the territory in 1795 to lay out the boundary line under the Spanish treaty, applied himself after he arrived there to everything but his business. He claimed authority as a representative of the government which his commission in no way warranted, established himself as a sort of adviser-in-chief of all newcomers, and by ingratiating himself with the Indian tribes of the territory, he made no end of trouble for the government by lavish promises of gifts and privileges. It may well be that this man Ellicott was by no means as black as he has been painted, but there is sufficient contemporary evidence that he acted the part of a mischief-maker in Mississippi. From the journals, however, no evidence can be obtained that he had any particular influence with the governor. And before the close of his first year in office, Sargent fully recognized the mischief that the surveyor’s meddling in Indian affairs had caused.
WINTHROP SARGENT
Photographic facsimile of portrait by Gilbert Stuart, in the Mississippi Hall of Fame