Organization description

Americans of all backgrounds contacted their governors about every concern imaginable. The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project (CWRGM) is digitizing, transcribing, and annotating these valuable records from Mississippi’s governors’ offices and making them freely available online. The project covers nine administrations, beginning amid rumblings of secession in late 1859, continuing through civil war, emancipation, occupation, and Reconstruction, ending in the early Jim Crow South in 1882. Thanks to the diverse nature of this collection, CWRGM documents touch on nearly every topic imaginable. These include questions of loyalty and dissent, the process of emancipation and the changing definition of citizenship, and military experiences that ranged from state militias to Confederate national service to the role of nearly 20,000 Mississippians who served in the Union Army and Navy. The collections also contribute to ongoing debates about Civil War memory and commemoration, and help users explore the question of whose experiences are preserved and how, and whose are ignored or erased. CWRGM features documents in the collection as they are digitized, transcribed, and annotated, and offers lesson plans and a research curriculum with selected documents and short contextualizing essays for K-12 classrooms and information about upcoming free educator workshops.