Adelbert Ames (31 October 1835-13 April 1933) was the Republican Governor of Mississippi from 15 June 1868 to 10 March 1870 (succeeding Benjamin G. Humphreys and preceding James L. Alcorn) and from 4 January 1874 to 29 March 1876 (succeeding Alcorn and preceding John M. Stone) and a US Senator from Mississippi from 23 February 1870 to 10 January 1874 (succeeding Jefferson Davis and preceding Henry R. Pease). He was the last Republican governor of Mississippi until Kirk Fordice in 1992 and the penultimate surviving American Civil War general, with Aaron Daggett being the last to die, in 1938. He was also the son-in-law of Benjamin Butler and the father of congressman Butler Ames.
Biography[]
Adelbert Ames was born in Rockland, Maine in 1835, and he graduated from West Point in May 1861 and served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He commanded the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment from 20 August 1862 to 20 May 1863, serving in Virginia and as an aide-de-camp to George G. Meade before being promoted to Brigadier-General and to command the XI Corps of the Army of the Potomac two weeks after the Battle of Chancellorsville. His corps distinguished itself at the Battle of Gettysburg, especially the 20th Maine, now led by Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain. He went on to shift between brigade and division command in northern Virginia and North Carolina, and he was the victor at the Second Battle of Fort Fisher in 1865. In 1868, he was named provisional Governor of Mississippi by the US Congress, advancing the rights of freed African-American slaves and appointing the first Black officeholders in the state's history. A "carpetbagger", he was affiliated with the Radical Republicans, and he led the state's Blacks and Radicals against James L. Alcorn's conservative whites and most "Scalawags" in a battle for the soul of the Mississippi Republican Party. He also fought to cut spending and lower the tax rate, and he served in the US Senate from 1870 to 1874 before returning to the governorship. In 1874, a Democratic coup against him resulted in the Colfax Massacre, and he agreed to disband his militias if the Southern Democrats would agree to free and fair elections. The Democrats reneged on their side of the bargain, and they used voter intimidation to defeat Ames' re-election bid in 1876. Ames then moved in with his family in Northfield, Minnesota before moving to New York City and then to Tewksbury, Massachusetts, where he started up a flour mill. During the Spanish-American War of 1898, he commanded a brigade at the Siege of Santiago in Cuba, and he was holding a divisional command by the time that his corps was mustered out in New York following the war's end. He died at his winter home in Ormond Beach, Florida in 1933 at the age of 97.
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