Mississippi’s Federal Courts: A History by David M. Hargrove (review)

Historian David M. Hargrove, director of the Matilda J. Gibson Memorial Library in Creston, Iowa, has documented an intriguing history of the federal court system in Mississippi. His book introduces the personalities and events in the state that shaped the courts and those shaped by the courts. His description of U.S. federal district courts as “gatekeepers” to the federal judicial system, adopted from political scientist Kevin Lyles, suggests not only their importance, but also the endless and exhausting workload of the judges who presided over them (p. 4). To write a single-volume history that spans from 1798 to the present would seem daunting for a state with such a rich, often contentious, political and racial history. Hargrove, however, does it admirably.

Throughout the book are vignettes of federal judges in Mississippi struggling to accommodate their legal obligations with the practical and ideological considerations pressuring them. Essentially a genealogy of judicial successions that began during the state’s territorial phase, this book is also a history of how the federal courts in the state were often battlegrounds “to reconcile national and sectional interests” (p. 6). Notable are Hargrove’s descriptions of the challenges of slavery, state sovereignty, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and judicial independence in Mississippi’s federal courts. It is a compelling narrative that intertwines the nation’s history with that of Mississippi and the complications that often resulted.

Personalities are often at the center of developments, and Hargrove is adept at highlighting individuals’ contributions to the court’s culture and reputation. The territorial judges were often inept, alcoholic, and threatened with impeachment as the territorial government persistently and inconsistently reorganized the court system. The growing influence of presidential patronage in Jacksonian America resulted in the 1839 appointment by Martin Van Buren of Samuel Gholson, who finally began to bring a measure of stability to the federal bench in Mississippi after years of unreliability. Yet, as an example of how federal authority could test local loyalties, Gholson also presided over the state’s secession convention in 1861. A further illustration of compromised loyalties, federal district court judges Sidney Carr Mize and William Harold Cox were “‘judicial resistors’” who attempted to mediate federal power in Mississippi by delaying enforcement of civil rights legislation in the 1960s (p. 211).

Hargrove also reveals how the relationships between judges and elected officials often shaped historical developments at the local level. In the twentieth century, the state’s U.S. senators used a gentlemen’s agreement to exert control over federal patronage related to the federal judiciary in Mississippi. Senators John C. Stennis and James O. Eastland stalled confirmation of federal judicial nominees to thwart the progress of civil rights in the state.

The book’s disappointments are few but notable. A discussion of Confederate courts in Mississippi might have shed some understanding of how secession accommodated the legacy of the federal court system. During Reconstruction, Robert Andrews Hill, a Mississippi federal judge appointed by President Andrew Johnson, seemed willing to enforce new civil rights legislation in the state, but Hargrove provides little about the consequences of Hill’s tenure. The weakest section of the book is the final chapter, covering the years from the Ronald Reagan administration to the present, which is basically a list of successive judges without much political or social context.

Hargrove should be commended for compiling such a comprehensive treatment of the federal court history in Mississippi. His ability to capture the influence of policies and personalities on historical development is impressive. Mississippi’s Federal Courts: A History is well written and insightful, and it will be a good resource for scholars searching for the ways in which federal policies affected local events.