The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project (CWRGM) is digitizing, transcribing, and annotating over 20,000 records from Mississippi’s governors’ offices and making them freely available online.
This site features blog posts that explore the backstories behind some of our most fascinating documents.
If you want to see the original documents themselves, go to CWRGM.org. You’ll also find lesson plans, podcasts, and suggestions for getting involved. You can learn more about our research team, developers, faculty, and staff here.
CWRGM 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. We’re uploading new documents every month, and we’ll have all 20,000+ freely available online — digitized with metadata, transcriptions, and annotations — by 2030.
Regardless of race, class, or gender, nineteenth-century Americans contacted their governors about every concern imaginable. That makes governors’ collections an invaluable resource for “hearing” from individuals whose voices are often missing in traditional sources, as well as from those who wielded significant power during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
