Haskins S. Smith (Claiborne County)
State House: 1874-1876
Born: c. 1850 in Louisiana
Died: February 6, 1892 in Port Gibson, MS
Name can also be spelled Haskin Smith, the spelling used for his son and grandson. I’ve included the “s” because it’s the way he wrote it himself in his signature.
In 1874, he married Ellen Smith, a white woman from Kentucky, the daughter of William & Ellen Scyster Smith. Listed on the 1880 census in Claiborne County with wife Ellen, mother Alabama Barnes, and three children. Smith died of pneumonia at age 43 in Port Gibson.
On the 1900 census, Ellen is married to a Black man named Richard Williams, and five of her children with Haskins Smith are in the household, the youngest born in 1891.
“Another case which attracted some attention within the state was the marriage of Haskins Smith, mulatto member of the state legislature, to the daughter of the owner of the hotel in which Smith worked in Port Gibson. Although leading citizens of the community held Smith to be a good man and refused to be aroused over the matter, lower classes among the whites created a great deal of disturbance. References to this marriage in a speech by a Negro in Vicksburg helped to bring about the overthrow of the Republican government in that city a little later in the summer.”
(Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890, 1947)
This page was last updated on January 15, 2026.