Winona Times clipping

Moore, James Aaron; Morgan, A. T. (Albert Talmon); Miscegenation

In this connection a racy story was current during the carpetbag saturnalia. It seems that Frank Clover, a notorious carpetbagger, was doing some lobbying in the legislature. He was perhaps interested in a bill creating Lincoln County. He approached J. Aaron Moore, a member of the legislature from Lauderdale county. Moore was a negro preacher. He was interested in having the county site moved from Old Marion to Meridian. Clover proposed to Moore that he would get some votes for Moore's bill if Moore would vote for his bill. Moore, the negro preacher member from Lauderdale, protested, and the carpetbagger, Frank Clover, assured him that no one would ever know about the trade.

Whereupon Moore, the negro preacher and legislator, said: "That might be so, but you know I tuk an oath not to do them things, and everytime anybody comes to me and wants me to swap votes on anything gwine on here, I members that Ananias had hell knocked out of him for lying to the Holy Ghost; and if my recollection do not fail me, the young men rose and wound Ananias up and carried him out and buried him; and moreover, the Scripture tells us that Sapphira, Ananias' wife, also tempted the spirit of the Lord by lying, and behold, de feet of dem buried as buried her husband, Ananias, was at de door ready to take her out, and she fell down and yielded up the ghost, and the young men came in and found her daid, and they tuk her forth and buried her by her husband, Ananias."

While Moore was a member of the legislature from Lauderdale county he performed the ceremony here in Jackson when A. T. Morgan, the carpetbag senator from Yazoo county, married Carrie Highgate, the octoroon school-teacher, who came to Mississippi from Ithaca, New York. J. Aaron Moore, was a physical giant. After the carpetbag, scalawag, and negro government was swept from place and power by the uprising of the white manhood of Mississippi in 1875 Moore moved to Jackson. He was a blacksmith. For years he was made bailiff for the federal court when Henry C. Niles of Kosciusko was the federal judge. He use to sell some of the finest Chinese Cling peaches ever seen in Jackson, peddling them in a willow basket which he carried on his arm.