W. Jasper Blackburn

Who was W. Jasper Blackburn?

William Jasper Blackburn was an American printer and publisher who served in the United States House of Representatives from northwestern Louisiana from July 18, 1868, to March 3, 1869. A Republican during Reconstruction, he was thereafter a member of the Louisiana State Senate from 1874 to 1878.

Blackburn was born on the Fourche de Mau in Randolph County in northeastern Arkansas. He received his early education from his mother. In 1839, he moved to Batesville to learn his printing trade. He resided in Little Rock in 1845, in Fort Smith in western Arkansas in 1846, and in Minden, the seat of Webster Parish, in 1849, where he established the first of several subsequent newspapers to use the name Minden Herald eventually the Minden Press-Herald.

As a Democrat, Blackburn was elected mayor of Minden, then part of Claiborne Parish, and served a single twelve-month term from May 1855 to May 1856. Blackburn was opposed to slavery and supported the Union during the American Civil War. He left Minden in the late 1850s and settled in nearby Homer, the seat of Claiborne Parish. There he published the Homer Iliad beginning in 1859. He rejected the growing strength of the Know Nothing Party in Louisiana and shifted to unpopular Republican affiliation during the war.