The Old Capitol and What Happened There

The Old Capitol building on State Street in downtown Jackson opened as the seat of Mississippi government in eighteen thirty-nine and served that function until nineteen oh three, when the present Capitol, a Beaux Arts building with a copper eagle gilded in gold at the summit of its dome, was completed two blocks away. The Old Capitol has been restored and operates now as a free museum.

The building saw things. In eighteen thirty-nine, the Mississippi legislature passed the Married Women's Property Act, a genuinely radical piece of legislation for its time, giving married women in Mississippi independent property rights decades before most other states followed. In January eighteen sixty-one, the legislature met in this chamber and voted Mississippi out of the United States. The secession ordinance was passed here.

Under the Reconstruction constitution of eighteen sixty-eight, drafted here, Mississippi's legislature included Black men for the first time: state legislators, county officials, a Black speaker of the house. Mississippi sent Black men to the United States Senate during Reconstruction, Hiram Revels in eighteen seventy and Blanche Bruce in eighteen seventy-four. Both of those men were products of a political moment made possible by what happened in this building in eighteen sixty-eight.

Then came the eighteen ninety constitution, also shaped here, explicitly designed to disenfranchise Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. That constitution succeeded. By nineteen hundred, Black voter registration in Mississippi had collapsed to near zero. The same building that had, in eighteen sixty-eight, helped produce Black senators, had, in eighteen ninety, produced the legal architecture for their disenfranchisement.

This is not a story with a simple moral. It is a story about what legislatures do with power and who they are willing to share it with and for how long.