Background
CAMPBELL, Josiah Abigal Patterson was born on March 2, 1830 in Abeville District, South Carolina, United States, United States. Son of the Presbyterian minister Robert B. Campbell and his wife Mary (Patterson).
CAMPBELL, Josiah Abigal Patterson was born on March 2, 1830 in Abeville District, South Carolina, United States, United States. Son of the Presbyterian minister Robert B. Campbell and his wife Mary (Patterson).
Educated Camden Academy and Davidson College, North Carolina. (Doctor of Laws, University of Mississippi). Admitted to bar, 1847.
Educated at Camden Academy and Davidson College in North Carolina, he studied law in Madison County, Mississippi, where his father had moved in 1845. In 1847, he began his law practice in Kosciusko, Mississippi. He married Eugenie E. Nash on May 23, 1850.
The following year he entered the state legislature as a Democrat, where he served until 1853. He returned to private practice and was elected speaker of the lower house in 1859. As a secessionist delegate to the Montgomery convention in 1861, he helped to write the Confederate Constitution.
He was a member of the provisional Confederate Congress, served on the Accounts and Territories Committees and was a president pro tempore. In 1862, he entered the Confederate Army, where he fought as a regimental commander, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel, at luka and Corinth, Mississippi, and was wounded. He also served under General Leonidas Polk at Vicksburg and was a member of Polk’s Corps' military court.
He served in that capacity until the end of the war when he returned to his home. After the war, he was elected a circuit court judge in 1865 but was forced to retire in 1870 when he refused to take the test oath. He was offered, but declined, a professorship of law at the University of Mississippi in 1871 and was named chief justice of the state Supreme Court in 1876.
In 1880, he served on the commission which revised the state legal code. He served on the state supreme court until 1894 when he retired. After his retirement from public life, he practiced law in Canton, Mississippi, for a few years.
"Peculiar institution" of slavery was not only expedient but also ordained by God and upheld in Holy Scripture.
Stands for preserving slavery, states' rights, and political liberty for whites. Every individual state is sovereign, even to the point of secession.
Member House of Representatives, 1851-1859 (speaker, 1859). Member Mississippi Code Commission, 1870.
Married Eugenia East. Nash.