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6
The Journal of Mississippi History
article Claiborne had submitted earlier entitled ?Rough Riding Down South.?1? Essentially a study of social conditions in the Piney Woods and the seashore counties of Mississippi, the sketch was composed largely of anecdotes of the political campaigns of Powhatan Ellis, Harry Cage, and Franklin E. Plummer. In 1860, while Claiborne was in New York supervising the publication of two books, he met George Ripley, who solicited from him sketches of Seargent Smith Prentiss and other leading Mississippi figures for the New American Encyclopaedia,t0 In his Life of Sam Dale, Claiborne claimed to have written ?an elaborate memoir of Mr. Prentiss for a historical work on which I am engaged.?21 But the memoir was never published. And in his Life of Quitman, Claiborne stated that he had begun a biography of George Poindexter ?based on his own correspondence and manuscripts.?22 It is probable that the manuscript referred to became the basis for the lengthy sketch of Poindexter that appears in Claiborne?s Mississippi.
During 1860 Claiborne published two biographies of men prominent in the early history of his state. His Life and Times of Gen. Sam Dale, the Mississippi Partisan was brief, popularly written, romantic, and largely fictional; his Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, Major-General, U. S. A., and Governor of the State of Mississippi was lengthy, scholarly, sedate, and entirely veritable.
Claiborne?s major historical contribution, Mississippi, as a Province, Territory and State, was the achievement of his later life. But the short span of time that began in 1857, only to be terminated four years later by the exigencies of war, marked the most productive literary period of his career.
19	J. F. H. Claiborne, ?Rough Riding Down South,? Harper?s New Monthly Magazine, XXV (June, 1862), 29-37.
20	George Ripley, New York, to Claiborne, November 14, 1860, J. F. H. Claiborne Papers (University of North Carolina).
21	Claiborne, Sam Bale, 222n.
22	Claiborne, Quitman, I, 107n.