He armed them. Then he put the rifles in a depot, kept the key, and never turned it.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Adelbert Ames needs to be remembered.
The Person
On the eleventh of October, 1875, a clerk in Jackson issued sixty Springfield rifles to a militia captain named Oliver Cromwell and entered it in the book. Two days later the governor of Mississippi took them back. The governor was Adelbert Ames, and until that week he had never lost a fight he was willing to have.
He was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1835, the son of a sea captain, and went to sea himself as a mate on a clipper before he went to West Point. His class graduated in May of 1861, a month early, because the war would not wait for it. At Bull Run that July a ball went through his thigh and he stayed with his guns until he was too weak to sit on the caisson.
He commanded the 20th Maine before Joshua Chamberlain did. At Gettysburg, when Barlow went down on the first day, Ames took the division and held East Cemetery Hill against Early, fighting hand to hand on the crest. He went into Fort Fisher with the assault while his staff was shot down around him. He was twenty-nine when the war ended.
The Context
Mississippi made him provisional governor in 1868, sent him to the Senate in 1870, and elected him governor in 1873 on the votes of freedmen. Even the men who hated him conceded he was honest.
In 1875 the Democrats organized what they called the Mississippi Plan — carry the state peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary. On the fourth of September, at a Republican barbecue outside Clinton, a shot was fired into a crowd of two thousand. For two days afterward armed white companies rode through Hinds County and took men out of their houses. The dead were never counted. Eight or ten is documented; twenty to thirty is the defensible estimate; men who were there guessed fifty and admitted they were guessing.
Ames wrote to Grant. Grant was at the seashore in New Jersey, and his answer came down through the Attorney General: the whole public were tired out with these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South. It was in the newspapers within days, which told every rifle club in Mississippi that no soldiers were coming.
So Ames raised his own. That spring the legislature had authorized two regiments and money for Gatling guns, and the Democratic press had called the law the Gatling Gun Bill ever since. No Gatling gun was ever delivered to Mississippi.
What he actually had is in a ledger, printed by the Democrats themselves in the minority report of a Senate investigation, as proof that he had armed the Black population of the state.
October the second, eighty stand of arms with accouterments to Captain Charles Caldwell, colored. The fifth, seventeen more to Caldwell. The sixth, forty-seven to Captain Clingan, white. The seventh, eighty with ammunition to Captain Green Tapley, colored. The ninth, eighty to Gillin and sixty-five to Nixon. The tenth, eighty to Mosely. The eleventh, sixty to Cromwell.
Five hundred and nine rifles. Seven companies, five of them Black, all in one county, out of a thousand muskets ordered. The entries run down the page in a clerk’s hand, four or five days apart, and then they stop.
The Decision
On the thirteenth of October a committee of leading citizens came to the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson and was shown into the west parlor.
Ames offered first to send the companies home with their arms. On further talk a different arrangement was reached. The rifles would go into depots in the neighborhoods where the companies had been raised, guarded by federal troops or by men he and General George would agree on. They would remain under his control, removable only on his order. And they would go back to the militia in case of riot or insurrection which the civil authorities could not suppress.
In exchange, the chairman of the Democratic executive committee promised a free and peaceful election.
Nothing was signed. The only document is the Democrats’ own minute of their own meeting, subscribed by their chairman and secretary, in which Ames appears in the third person as the man reported on. The men who took his rifles gave him their word and then wrote up their own account of what he had said.
He was right about what would have happened otherwise. He had two armed companies against organized veterans in every county. A letter already in his files invited him to send out his troops and his Gatling guns, and promised: “we will wipe them from the face of the earth.” A federal agent living in the Mansion testified that the Democratic leadership meant to destroy the Black companies to the last man. Nearly every Republican in Mississippi, Black and white, believed as he did that arming the freedmen meant a war of races.
He kept the key. He never turned it.
The Aftermath
Inside of three weeks he was told twice that the bargain was dead, and both times by the men he had armed.
Caldwell and another Hinds County Republican wrote to him that the peace agreement was held in utter contempt and served only as cover for the wrongs it was meant to prevent. On the thirtieth of October, Green Tapley — captain of the other company, the one that had drawn eighty rifles on the seventh — chaired a mass meeting called to protest that the agreement was being violated. The condition written into the arrangement was riot or insurrection which the civil authorities could not suppress. It is difficult to read the last three weeks of October 1875 as anything else. The arms stayed in the depots.
Then Washington offered troops after all, and Ames declined them. He wrote to his wife that the election had ceased to have any interest for them. It was lost. Gone forever. A man cannot say that his hands were tied and also that he let go of the rope. Eric Foner, who is not among his enemies, calls Ames an indecisive leader and puts the blame first on his own administration, before turning to the government that abandoned him.
On the second of November the Democrats carried Mississippi. In five majority-Black counties the Republican vote came in at twelve, seven, four, two, and none. Ames wrote to Blanche that a revolution had taken place by force of arms and a race was being returned to serfdom — an era of second slavery.
On the thirtieth of December, in Christmas week, a white acquaintance pressed a holiday drink on Charles Caldwell in the cellar of a store in Clinton and had him shot at the touch of the glasses. His brother was killed the same night. Caldwell’s ninety-seven rifles had been eleven weeks in a depot, under the control of the governor of Mississippi, removable on his order.
The new legislature brought impeachment articles in January. The investigators found nothing, and said so. His lawyers made a trade — the charges dropped, the office vacated — and he resigned on the twenty-ninth of March, 1876. No Republican governed Mississippi again for a hundred and sixteen years.
He lived another fifty-seven. Flour milling in Minnesota, where Jesse James’s men shot up the bank in part because his money was in it. A brigade in Cuba at sixty-two. Golf with John D. Rockefeller in Florida, where he died in April of 1933, at ninety-seven, the last surviving full-rank general of the Civil War on either side.
The Meaning
I have gone back and forth on this one and there is no honest way to write it that hides the fact. The case for him is real. Two companies could not have held Hinds County, let alone the state, and the men who wanted those companies in the field had put in writing what they meant to do when they got there. John Roy Lynch — the most senior Black Republican in Mississippi, writing in 1913 to refute the men who slandered Reconstruction — said that using the colored militia would have been adding fuel to the flames, and laid the failure at Grant’s door. No serious indictment of Ames survives without answering him.
The case against him is also real, and it is not the case his enemies made. He reserved the authority to arm those men and never used it. His own captains told him the terms had been broken. Washington offered him troops and he turned them down. And the risk he was weighing had never been his to carry. He judged the odds on other men’s lives, found them bad, and put the rifles away. Charles Caldwell could not leave Mississippi. Ames could, and did, and lived to be ninety-seven.
So I do not know whether to call it courage. He was right about the massacre and wrong about the promise, and the men who paid for the error were never asked. Restraint may be the hardest form of courage. Or it may only be easier to be calm at a distance. The record supports either reading, and I have stopped expecting it to choose.
Eighty years later, John F. Kennedy put Adelbert Ames into Profiles in Courage as the villain of the chapter on Lucius Lamar, working from the writings of the men who had overthrown him. Ames’s daughter Blanche wrote letters for the rest of her life asking for a correction, and when none came she wrote her father’s biography herself, in her eighties, and the paragraph has never been changed.
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Sources: Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875, Senate Report 527, 44th Cong., 1st sess. — including the adjutant general’s arms-issue register and the sworn testimony of Frank Johnston, G. K. Chase, and Governor Ames. Blanche Butler Ames, comp., Chronicles from the Nineteenth Century (1957); the Mississippi Encyclopedia and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1988); Nicholas Lemann, Redemption (2006); Michael J. Megelsh, Adelbert Ames, the Civil War, and the Creation of Modern America (2024); John R. Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction (1913).
Next in this series: Tunis Campbell — he built a working Black government on the Georgia coast, and Georgia put him on a chain gang at sixty-four.
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Charles Ccranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard nuclear submarines, is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he employs AI tools in a limited, supporting role for research, occasional image creation, and editing, while the prose and judgment remain entirely his own. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live and co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
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