Colin J. McRae (born Colin John McRae; October 22, 1812 – February 1877) was an American politician who had served as a Deputy from Alabama to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1862.The Colin J. McRae Papers, Columbia: South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military MuseumAndrew Lambert, Colin J. McRae, Confederate Financial Agent: Blockade Running in the Trans-Mississippi South as Affected by the Confederate Government's Direct Procurement of European Goods Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalties and Illicit Trade in the North East, 1783–1820, The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, August 2009
Biography Colin J. McRae was born on October 22, 1812, in Anson County, North Carolina.The Political Graveyard His brother, John J. McRae, served as the 21st Governor of Mississippi (1854–1857). Before the Civil War, McRae was a merchant from Mobile, Alabama. He co-owned a foundry in Selma, Alabama, which made ammunition and iron plate for gunboats.William F. Donnelly, American Economic Growth: The Historic Challenge, Ardent Media, 1973, 152 Some of these gunboats were used during the war.Edwin Layton, Colin J. McRae and the Selma Arsenal, Alabama Review, XVIII (1966), 132-133
McRae served as Confederate States Financial Agent in Europe from 1862 to 1865.
In 1867, McRae moved to Puerto de Caballos, British Honduras (present-day Puerto Cortés, Belize), where he purchased land and ran a plantation and mercantile business centered on mahogany. McRae died there in February 1877. He bequeathed the plantation and mercantile business to his sister and her husband. They leased the plantation to tenants until 1894.Donald C. Simmons, Jr., Confederate Settlements in British Honduras, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2001, p. 91 The location of his grave, in Belize, is unknown.
In October 2011, a college student at the University of New Hampshire found relics of his Belize plantation house on an archeological expedition in the middle of the Belize Valley. His records were found in Monterey Place in Mobile, Alabama. They are held at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, in Columbia, South Carolina.
See also Confederate settlements in British Honduras
References
Further reading Charles S. Davis, Colin J. McRae: Confederate Financial Agent (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Confederate Publishing, 1961). Ray J. Fletcher, Colin J. McRae, Confederate Agent in Europe (Tallahassee, Florida: Florida State University Press, 1956).
External links Colin J. McRae at The Political Graveyard