Jefferson College: Where Mississippi Was Born

In the village of Washington, Mississippi, two miles east of Natchez, stands a campus that carries more of the territory's early history than any other single place in the state. Jefferson College was the first institution incorporated in the Mississippi Territory, chartered by the Territorial General Assembly in eighteen oh two. The assembly named it after the sitting president, Thomas Jefferson, whose political stock was high and whose name gave the school a useful measure of federal legitimacy.

The school opened slowly. Land in Washington was donated in eighteen oh three, but classes did not begin until January seventh, eighteen eleven, when the college merged with the Washington Academy and took over its newly built classroom building, starting with fifteen students as a preparatory school.

The campus immediately became the center of territorial civic life. Washington was the territorial capital, and Jefferson College was the only chartered educational institution in the region. In eighteen seventeen, when Mississippi was about to become the twentieth state in the Union, delegates gathered in the Methodist church on the college grounds to draft and sign Mississippi's first constitution. The college, in this literal sense, is the birthplace of Mississippi statehood.

The campus also witnessed one of the most dramatic legal episodes of the early republic. In February of eighteen oh seven, Aaron Burr, former vice president and killer of Alexander Hamilton, was arrested in the Mississippi Territory on charges of plotting to carve an independent nation from the Southwest. He was held near Washington before being sent under military guard to Richmond, Virginia, for trial. He was acquitted, but the arrest in these very precincts gave Jefferson College a ringside seat to federal-era political intrigue.

Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States, attended the preparatory school here as a boy. The college struggled through the Civil War, was used as a Confederate hospital, and eventually closed in nineteen sixty-four. Today the Mississippi Department of Archives and History operates it as a state historic site open to visitors.