Edward McGehee


Edward McGehee was an American judge and major planter in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. He owned nearly 1,000 slaves to work his thousands of acres of cotton land at his Bowling Green Plantation.
In the 1830s, McGehee was among a group of major planters who founded the Mississippi Colonization Society, to transport free people of color from the state to West Africa. They intended to remove what they considered the destabilizing threat of free blacks to the slave society. They bought land known as Mississippi-in-Africa, which later became part of Liberia.

Biography

Early life

Edward McGehee was born on November 8, 1786. His father was Micajah McGehee and his mother, Ann McGehee.

Career

After becoming established as an attorney, McGehee was appointed as a state judge in Mississippi. A wealthy cotton planter, he owned the Bowling Green Plantation near Woodville in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. The plantation spread across several thousand acres; McGehee held nearly 1,000 slaves to work this vast area.
Additionally, McGehee owned a textile factory on his plantation, with about 100 slaves working in it. In 1831, he purchased the West Feliciana Rail Road Company in Louisiana.
As early as the 1830s, together with other planters Isaac Ross, Stephen Duncan, John Ker, and educator/minister Jeremiah Chamberlain, McGehee co-founded the Mississippi Colonization Society, whose goal was to send freedmen and free people of color to Liberia in West Africa. The organization was modeled after the American Colonization Society, but it focused on freedmen from Mississippi, where slaves outnumbered whites by a three-to-one ratio.
During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, McGehee supported the Union. However, he also sold clothes made in his textile factory to the Confederate States Army. The mansion at his Bowling Green Plantation was burned down by United States Colored Troops in 1864. His wife wrote about the incident in Army & Navy Herald, a Confederate newspaper.

Personal life

He married Mary Hines Burruss. They had three sons and two daughters:
McGehee died on October 1, 1880 at his plantation in Woodville, Mississippi.

Legacy