Col. James Milton Smith, Gov. of Georgia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Milton_Smith

James Milton Smith (October 24, 1823 – November 25, 1890) was a Confederate infantry colonel in the American Civil War, as well as a post-war Governor of Georgia. He was noted as an ardent opponent of Radical Reconstruction.

Biography

Smith was born in Twiggs County, Georgia and was educated at the Culloden Academy in Monroe County. He became a lawyer in Hall County in the rural part of the state. In 1855, he unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Representative from his district.

With the onset of the Civil War, he entered the Confederate Army as a captain in the 13th Georgia Infantry. He was promoted to major, then to the regiment's colonelcy in 1862. He led his regiment through the Gettysburg Campaign, and marched to the banks of the Susquehanna River before returning to Gettysburg to participate in the Battle of Gettysburg. He was severely wounded in the 1864 Battle of Cold Harbor and returned to Georgia to recuperate.

He resigned from the army to enter politics and was elected a Democratic delegate to the Confederate Congress until hostilities ceased in 1865. He established a very successful law partnership in Columbus, Georgia, and was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1870 as an outspoken opponent of Radical Reconstruction. The following year, he became Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives.

Running unopposed, Smith was elected Governor in 1872 to fill the unexpired term of Rufus B. Bullock, who had fled the state to avoid impeachment and possible punishment. To many, Smith's inauguration on January 12, 1872, symbolized the end of Reconstruction and the "redemption" of the Democratic Party in Georgia. Smith was reelected in 1874, serving until 1877. During his second term, he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1876. Major accomplishments included restoring the state's credit rating by voiding fraudulent bonds and reducing overall expenditures, retiring the debt and leaving office with a surplus in the state treasury. He was a supporter of creating a state department of agriculture, and was noted for appointing the most qualified candidates to fill openings in his administration, a contrast to the patronage system that was popular at the time.

Smith was defeated in his bid for the U.S. Senate in 1877. He was named the first chairman of the new Georgia Railroad Commission, serving a 6-year term. Returning to his legal career, his former Civil War commander, John B. Gordon appointed him as Judge of the Chattahoochee Circuit of the Superior Court from 1888 until 1890, when he died at his Columbus home after suffering a stroke. He was buried in Alta Vista Cemetery in Gainesville.

He was married twice, first to Sally Marshall Welborn, then after her death to Hester Ann R. Brown.

The Atlanta Constitution eulogized James Milton Smith as "one of the boldest and most fearless men in the history of Georgia."

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James M. Smith, a lawyer, Confederate colonel, and Confederate congressman, served as Georgia's governor from 1872 to 1877. Smith rose to the chief executive office on the tide of reaction against Radical Republicanism that toppled Governor Rufus Bullock in 1871. Smith's election marked the end of Reconstruction in Georgia and the beginning of more than a century of Democratic Party rule.

Early Life and Career

James Milton Smith Jr. was born to Martha and James Smith on October 24, 1823, in Twiggs County. He was educated in Culloden in Monroe County, where his father farmed and preached. Smith worked as a blacksmith, studied law, and by the 1850s established himself as an attorney in Thomaston, in Upson County. In 1855 he campaigned unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Third Congressional District seat. In January 1861, three weeks before Georgia seceded from the Union, he won the Flint Circuit Superior Court judicial election but opted for Confederate military service with the Upson Volunteers.

Smith was wounded at Gaines' Mill, Virginia, in 1862 but returned to duty and fought in the battles of Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Sharpsburg. Eventually promoted to colonel and regimental commander of the Thirteenth Regiment Georgia Volunteer Infantry, he left the service in 1863 and returned to Georgia, where he was elected Seventh District representative to the Second Confederate Congress. After the war, Smith moved his law practice to Columbus. There, in 1868, he joined a defense team led by Alexander Stephens in a much publicized—and ultimately unresolved—Reconstruction murder case in which several Muscogee County men were accused of the alleged Ku Klux Klan murder of George W. Ashburn, a Republican organizer. Two years later Smith won a Muscogee County state representative seat in the conservative landslide that restored the Georgia General Assembly to Democratic control.

"Redeemer" and Governor

When the "Redeemer" legislature was seated in November 1871 in the wake of Governor Bullock's resignation, Smith was elected house speaker. Later that same month the assembly called an immediate special election for governor (over the veto of interim Republican governor Benjamin Conley). On December 6 a party caucus chose Smith to be the Democratic candidate. Republicans called a boycott of the election, and in what was virtually ano-contest election on December 19, Smith was elected governor with a mere 39,000 votes out of the state's more than 200,000 eligible voters.

In the regular quadrennial general election of 1872, Smith overwhelmed Republican Dawson Walker with a landslide victory of more than 60,000 votes. The campaign was characterized less by issues than by political maneuvering, and the election was conveniently rescheduled to avoid the complicating presence of federal marshals. All of this took place amid numerous reports of Democratic electoral manipulation, vote fraud, intimidation, and Ku Klux Klan violence.

Smith inherited a poor state that was saddled with debts. Investigations of the prior government's expenditures and of railroad deals produced evidence of widespread corruption and mismanagement. The legislature reacted by repudiating millions of dollars in bonded debt, and Smith proposed ways for the state to improve economic productivity and increase revenue while reducing expenses. He urged the creation of a state department of agriculture, and he created a state geological office to produce a survey of Georgia's mineral resources. His promotion of a canal to join the Coosa and Tennessee rivers failed to generate interest, however, and his decision to allocate the state's entire Morrill Act receipts for a state agricultural school at Athens was criticized as contrary to the act's intent, which was to establish "agricultural and mechanical" schools in areas previously unsupported by higher education.

Among the most controversial of Smith's acts was his institutionalization of the convict lease system. The policy of "leasing" convicted felons out as laborers to railroad builders had been in place for several years, and it represented a way to continue supporting Georgia's extensive railroad investment at the same time that the legislature was repudiating railroad bonds and that Smith was calling for legislation barring such forms of subsidy. Publicly he defended selling convict labor to contractors through twenty-year leases worth $500,000 to the state as a practical necessity. Otherwise, the state would simply have to pay for a costly state penitentiary to house Georgia's rapidly growing convict population. During Smith's administration the number of state convicts grew from 385 to 926, 90 percent of them Black, an increase that Smith assured Georgians was due not to an increase in crime but to "a more rigid enforcement of the laws."

Historians generally identify Smith's administration as furthering the agenda of Georgia's Bourbon Democrats, or "New Departure" Democrats, who aimed Georgia toward a New South economy adapted to the ex–slave society's priorities of white supremacy and rigid control of labor. As Smith told a state agricultural convention at Athens in August 1873, "We may hold inviolate every law of the United States and still so legislate upon our labor system as to retain our old plantation system, or, in lieu of that, establish a baronial one."

Later Career

After leaving the governorship, Smith made an unsuccessful attempt for a U.S. Senate seat in 1877 and then returned to the practice of law in Columbus. In 1879 Governor Alfred H. Colquitt appointed him to a six-year term on the newly organized state railroad commission, for which Smith served as chairman. Governor Henry McDaniel did not reappoint Smith to the commission in 1885, and Smith returned to his law practice until May 1887, when Governor John B. Gordon appointed him to fill a judicial vacancy on the Chattahoochee Circuit Superior Court. He was reelected by the legislature to a four-year term in November 1888.

Smith suffered a stroke and died after a long period of illness on November 25, 1890. Married twice, to Hester Ann Brown (who died in 1880) and Florida Abercrombie Wellborn, Smith had no children. He was buried in Gainesville's Alta Vista Cemetery beside his first wife.