Josiah A. P. Campbell

Josiah Abigail Patterson Campbell (1830 to 1917) was an American lawyer and politician from Mississippi who served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi from 1891 to 1894. Born in Lancaster District, South Carolina, he was admitted to the bar at Kosciusko in 1847 at the age of seventeen, the youngest lawyer in the state, sat in the state legislature from 1851 and was Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1859 to 1860. He was a delegate to the 1861 secession convention, represented Mississippi in the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, signed the Confederate Constitution and then served in the Confederate army. After the war he was circuit judge for the Fifth Circuit until 1868, helped frame the state codes of 1871 and 1880, and in 1876 was appointed to a seat on the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He was a chief organizer of the Mississippi Plan, which ended Republican rule in the state, and one of the drafters of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, which enforced legal white supremacy. He declined reappointment to the court in 1895 and died in 1917.