Jackson, Mississippi: The Capital That Missed the Center

The men sent to find a capital near the center of Mississippi in 1821 picked a bluff about 35 miles south of it, and the town laid out there became Jackson. The legislature named it for Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson, in so many words, in the law that created it.

Twenty miles, then thirty-five

For its first few years as a state, Mississippi didn’t have a settled capital. Dunbar Rowland’s 1907 encyclopedia of the state says Natchez and Washington, the old capitals, “were not deemed near enough to the center of the State,” and other towns wanted the honor for themselves. So on February 12, 1821, the legislature named three commissioners, Thomas Hinds, James Patton and William Lattimore, to locate a seat of government “within twenty miles of the true center of the state.”

The land in the middle had only just opened up. Rowland says “the Choctaw cession of 1820 provided a central region,” and that cession came from the treaty Andrew Jackson and Thomas Hinds made with the Choctaws at Doak’s Stand in October 1820. Major Freeman, the surveyor, put the center of the state close to Doak’s Stand itself, in what’s now Madison County.

Hinds and Lattimore set out from Columbia on November 12 with a guide and interpreter, Middleton Mackay. They looked at Yellow Bluff and didn’t like it, and they decided there was no good spot on the Big Black River “or anywhere within the limits set by the legislature.” So they went back to a bluff on the Pearl River they’d passed on the way up.

What they saw at the bluff

You can see why they liked it from their own list. Rowland says they were won over by a high rise next to the bluff, “a never-failing spring of pure water,” good soil, plenty of timber and “evidently healthful air.” A keel boat had gone up the river past the bluff several times.

And the 35 miles? Rowland says that being that far south of the center “was only a recommendation to the present population.” A century later, the Hinds County history put it more simply: being “only thirty-five miles south of the center of the state was greatly in its favor.” The commissioners also suggested laying the town out on the “checker-board plan” that President Jefferson had once proposed to Governor Claiborne, with every other square left open as a park.

Louis LeFleur’s bluff

Before it was Jackson, the place had a Frenchman’s name. The 1922 History of Hinds County, by Mrs. Dunbar Rowland, says that before the capital came, it “was known as LeFleurs Bluff,” the site of Louis LeFleur’s trading post. The encyclopedia says LeFleur was a French trader who came to Mobile in 1792 and set up a station “at the bluff on Pearl river that afterward bore his name.” He married Rebecca Cravat, whom the book calls “an Indian girl,” and their son Greenwood LeFlore was born at the bluff on June 3, 1800. Greenwood LeFlore later became a chief of the Choctaws.

As it turns out, Andrew Jackson had already camped at a LeFleur place before the town took his name. Around 1812, Rowland writes, Louis LeFleur moved north to the Natchez Trace and kept a stopping place that travelers called French Camp. In 1813, when General Jackson marched his troops from Nashville to Natchez, “he camped at this place for a week.”

A name written into the law

On November 28, 1821, the legislature signed off on the site. The act, which Rowland quotes, leaves no room for guessing: “The town shall be called and known by the name of Jackson, in honor of Major-General Andrew Jackson.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 survey of American place names lists Jackson among the many places “named for Gen. Andrew Jackson,” though it doesn’t single out the Mississippi capital by name.

Lawmakers didn’t stop arguing about the spot right away. The 1922 county history says that in 1829 the state senate passed a bill to move the capital to Clinton, and it failed in the house on a tie vote. In 1830 the house voted to move it to Vicksburg instead, 20 to 16. “No change was made, however.” So the capital you find on the map today sits on the Pearl, at the bluff that once carried Louis LeFleur’s name, about 35 miles south of where an 1821 surveyor put the middle of Mississippi.

Sources & further reading

• Dunbar Rowland, ed., Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, vol. 1 (1907). The entry “Capital” (pp. 353–354): the act of February 12, 1821, “within twenty miles of the true center of the state,” the Choctaw cession of 1820, Major Freeman and Doak’s Stand, the trip of November 12, Yellow Bluff, the spring, the “checker-board plan,” the 35 miles “only a recommendation,” and the town “to be named Jackson, in honor of Maj-Gen. Andrew Jackson.” The entry “French Camp” (p. 750): Louis LeFleur’s stopping place on the Natchez Trace and General Jackson’s week there in 1813; Greenwood LeFlore as chief of the Choctaws. The entry “Jackson” (p. 950): the old capitals “not deemed near enough to the center of the State” and the text of the act of November 28, 1821.
• Dunbar Rowland, ed., same work, vol. 2 (1907). The entry “LeFlore, Greenwood” (p. 72): Louis LeFleur, the station on the Pearl, Rebecca Cravat, and Greenwood LeFlore’s birth at the bluff on June 3, 1800. The entry “Treaty of Doak’s Stand, 1820” (pp. 803–806): the treaty Jackson and Hinds made with the Choctaws in October 1820.
• Mrs. Dunbar Rowland, History of Hinds County, Mississippi, 1821–1922 (1922), pp. 13–16. Published for the city’s centennial. “Known as LeFleurs Bluff,” the 35 miles “greatly in its favor,” and the 1829 and 1830 votes to move the capital to Clinton and Vicksburg.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (U.S. Geological Survey, 1905), p. 167. “Many other places, named for Gen. Andrew Jackson.”
• GNIS feature 711543 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Jackson: “Founded in 1821.”