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6
The Journal of Mississippi History
article Claiborne had submitted earlier entitled ?Rough Riding Down South.?18 Essentially a study of social conditions in the Piney Woods and the seashore counties of Mississippi, the sketch was composed largely of anecdotes of the political campaigns of Powhatan Ellis, Harry Cage, and Franklin E. Plummer. In 1860, while Claiborne was in New York supervising the publication of two books, he met George Ripley, who solicited from him sketches of Seargent Smith Prentiss and other leading Mississippi figures for the New American Encyclopaedia.*0 In his Life of Sam Dale, Claiborne claimed to have written ?an elaborate memoir of Mr. Prentiss for a historical work on which I am engaged.?21 But the memoir was never published. And in his Life of Quitman, Claiborne stated that he had begun a biography of George Poindexter ?based on his own correspondence and manuscripts.?22 It is probable that the manuscript referred to became the basis for the lengthy sketch of Poindexter that appears in Claiborne?s Mississippi.
During 1860 Claiborne published two biographies of men prominent in the early history of his state. His Life and Times of Gen. Sam Dale, the Mississippi Partisan was brief, popularly written, romantic, and largely fictional; his Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, Major-General, U. S. A., and Governor of the State of Mississippi was lengthy, scholarly, sedate, and entirely veritable.
Claiborne?s major historical contribution, Mississippi, as a Province, Territory and State, was the achievement of his later life. But the short span of time that began in 1857, only to be terminated four years later by the exigencies of war, marked the most productive literary period of his career.
19	J. F. H. Claiborne, ?Rough Riding Down South,? Harper?s New Monthly Magazine, XXV (June, 1862), 29-37.
20	George Ripley, New York, to Claiborne, November 14, 1860, J. F. H. Claiborne Papers (University of North Carolina).
21	Claiborne, Sam Dale. 222n.
OH	?!	SS	'T	,
J. F. H. Claiborne at ?Laurel Wood? Plantation, 1853-1870	7
At ?Laurel Wood? Claiborne also resumed his active participation in Mississippi politics. In 1853 he was Albert Gallatin Brown?s chief lieutenant in the southern counties when Brown was a candidate for the United States Senate.23 The following year it was charged by the opposition that Claiborne was active in gerrymandering congressional districts in southern Mississippi,24 and that he worked with Brown and Quitman in controlling the patronage in that area.25 In the 1855 election, when Claiborne managed Quitman?s race for Congress in Hancock, Jackson, Perry, and Greene counties, Brown and Governor John J. McRae expressed confidence that Claiborne would have little difficulty in managing the seaboard counties.26
Always a partisan of the Democratic party, Claiborne gave freely of his fortune as well as of his talents to further the cause of his party. He claimed to have contributed at least ten thousand dollars to Democratic coffers before the Civil War.27 He was mentioned as a candidate to fill the congressional post left vacant in 1858 by the death of Quitman, but he declined the honor.28 In 1860 he was listed as a Douglas elector on the ballot for the fifth district in Mississippi.29
During the 1850?s, in addition to his other activities, Claiborne acted as a claims agent and probably as a lobbyist. Earlier he had advertised in a New Orleans newspaper, offering his services ?for prosecuting claims, or anything requiring government action.? Listing his congressional experience, he advised interested parties to contact him through the offices of Senators Robert J. Walker or Henry John-
23	James Byrne Ranck, Albert Gallatin Brown: Radical Southern Nationalist (New York, 1937), 109.
24	Ibid., 131.
25	Ibid., 142.
26	Claiborne, Quitman, II, 215.
27	Isaac M. Patridge, ?The Press of Mississippi," De Bow?s Commercial Review, XXIX (October, 1860), 609.
28	Nashville Daily News, August 12, 1858.
29	J. W. R. Taylor, Holly Springs, to Claiborne, August 30, 1860,
-.i r>--------- mniirorisitv of North Carolina).