Lost Mansions of Mississippi, Volume II

Eagle’s Nest

{ 115 } Swan Lake is a long, narrow oxbow, curling in on itself like a reclining snake. Just above its northern tip, not far from the tiny community of Jonestown ,an Indian mound breaks the flat horizon of the Delta. And atop that burial mound is a marble image of a stout gentleman, gazing toward the lake with a sheaf of vital papers in his left hand. The marble man on the mound is James Lusk Alcorn, a larger-than-life figure even in death. He commissioned the statue himself and had it placed on the front lawn of Eagle’s Nest, where it served as a notice to the Delta’s elite that he held the political reins of the region and had emerged from the storms of Reconstruction with his fortune intact. Alcorn was a native of Illinois, raised and educated in Kentucky. His political career began in that state, but even as a young man he was keenly aware that greater opportunities lay in the rapidly developing states of the South. He uprooted his wife and four children and headed downriver in 1844, in search of virgin land and a place to build his budding legal practice. Friars Point, Mississippi, was his unlikely destination, and he soon acquired several hundred acres along the Yazoo Pass and settled in as a planter and lawyer. There weren’t many neighbors and practically no political competition, and his first race for the Mississippi House of Representatives was an easy win. He took office in 1845, barely a year after his relocation to the state which he would eventually lead. For the next fifteen years, Alcorn expanded his political base, his plantation, and his legal practice. The Delta was ripe for economic development ,but only if the unpredictable network of streams, bayous, and rivers could be harnessed. While raking in legal fees from new landowners and speculators, Alcorn hammered away at his fellow legislators on the need for improved levees. His own Mound Place Plantation was situated along the Yazoo Pass, a narrow neck of water that connected the Mississippi with Moon Lake and the intertwined maze of waterways that twisted all the way down to Vicksburg. By1860,Alcornwasawell-establishedplanter with a significant cotton operation and added financial stability from his second marriage to Amelia Glover, heiress to Alabama’s Rosemount Plantation. Like most of the large planters throughout Mississippi, he realized that the increasing tensions between North and South could only decimate his livelihood. He fought the secession movement until its blockage was futile.As a delegate to the January 1861 Secession Convention, Alcorn used every stalling tactic he could muster, begging the delegates to hold off until Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana had committed to joining South Carolina in this Eagle’s Nest • • • { 116 } eagLe’s nest rush to disaster. His proposal was defeated, and ironically,because of his name,he rose to cast the first vote for the ordinance. Always the dramatic orator, he addressed his fellow Mississippians with these words:“The die is cast—the Rubicon is crossed—and I enlist my self with the army that marches on Rome.”1 He actually did enlist with the Confederate army, serving as an ineffective general and providing the backing for a regiment of real soldiers. Both of his older sons died in the conflict, and the war found its way to his front door by 1863. General Ulysses S. Grant was desperate to take Vicksburg, the last remaining obstacle to Union dominance of the Mississippi River. Its bluffs couldn’t be attacked directly, so Grant’s advisers developed a strange scheme of floating gunboats from the Mississippi into the Yazoo Pass, past Alcorn’s Mound Place Plantation and into Moon Lake. From there, according to the ill-conceived plan, they would wend their way down through the Delta’s treacherously convoluted rivers to Yazoo City and then on to Vicksburg. They got no further than Greenwood, where the luxury steamer Star of the West was scuttled to block their progress. But during the weeks when the boats were heading south and then back north in retreat, Mound Place was occupied and raided. Alcorn’s cattle were slaughtered to feed the troops, his fences were knocked down, and his carriages were rolled off into the pass. The fuming Alcorn was steadily feeding information to the Confederates and selling his cotton through the blockade with the help of smugglers. Alcorn’s actions during the war, effectively protecting his own interests by...