Appalachian Figures John Jones Pettus is usually remembered as Mississippi’s fiery secession governor. He helped pull the state out of the Union and tried to hold it in the Confederate war effort through conscription, militia policy, and heavy use of enslaved labor. Yet before Pettus ever signed a proclamation in Jackson, he was a boy on the move and then a young lawyer on the cotton frontier of Kemper County along the Alabama line.

