Jehu Amaziah Orr was an American jurist and politician. He served in the Confederate States Congress during the American Civil War.
Background
Jehu Amaziah Orr was born on April 10, 1828, in Anderson County, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of Christopher and Martha McCann Orr and a brother of James Lawrence Orr. About 1843 the family moved to the eastern section of Mississippi.
Education
Jehu Orr studied at Erskine College in South Carolina and in 1847 transferred to the College of New Jersey in Princeton (present-day Princeton University). He received a Bachelor of Arts in 1849; he later returned to Princeton and received a Master of Arts in 1857.
In 1849 Jehu Orr entered the practice of law at Houston, Mississippi, and shortly afterward was chosen secretary of the state Senate. In 1852 he became a member of the lower house, and there he actively opposed the immediate sale of the Chickasaw school lands. Unfortunately, the land was sold two years later, after he had completed his term in the legislature and had been appointed United States attorney for the northern district of Mississippi.
He was a member of the Democratic convention that nominated Buchanan. Originally opposed to secession, he deplored the split in the Charleston convention and voted for Stephen A. Douglas; but the results of the election of 1860 and the rising tide of war feeling convinced him that the conflict was inevitable, and from that time he supported the Confederacy. He was a member of the Mississippi convention of 1861 that voted for secession and then served in the provisional Congress of the Confederacy. He raised a regiment of 1400 men, the 316t Mississippi Volunteers, and served in the 1862 and 1863 campaigns in Mississippi. In April of the following year, he resigned to enter the Second Confederate Congress.
After Orr was convinced that the establishment of a separate republic in the South was impossible, he maintained that terms, advantageous to the South, ought to be obtained before exhaustion placed it at the mercy of the enemy, and he was disappointed that the Richmond administration, by insisting on Confederate independence as a sine qua non, rendered futile the Hampton Roads conference. In a subsequent speech before the legislature of Mississippi, he advocated a change in the executive policy of the Confederacy and blamed President Davis for the failure of the peace negotiations. The criticism was not welcomed at the time. At the close of hostilities, he was again ahead of his constituency, when he advised the partial enfranchisement of the negroes.
In 1870 Orr became a judge of the 6th judicial circuit and served for six years. He took part in the movement that returned the Democrats to power in Mississippi in 1876. From 1872 until his resignation in 1904 he was an active member of the board of trustees of the University of Mississippi. For fifty years he was an elder in the Presbyterian Church.
While he was less in the public eye after the close of Reconstruction, his life was none the less active, for he devoted himself with great success to the practice of law, in which his powers seemed to increase with age. The latter part of his life was spent in Columbus, Mississippi.
Achievements
Religion
Jehu was an elder in the Presbyterian church.
Politics
Orr was a member of the Democratic party. An opponent of secession he supported Stephen Douglas in the election of 1860, but as a delegate to the Mississippi convention the following year, he voted for secession. He served in the provisional and second Confederate Congress, where he favored the Hampton Roads Conference and blamed Davis for the failure of peace negotiations.
Connections
Jehu Orr was married twice, first to Elizabeth Ramsay Gates of Chickasaw County, South Carolina, in 1852, and, second, to Cornelia Ewing Van de Graaff of Sumter County, Alabama, in 1857.