George Colin McKee was a Reconstruction-era politician from Mississippi, representing the Vicksburg district in the 41st, 42nd, and 43rd U. S. Congresses (1870 to 1875). McKee was born on 2 October 1837 in Joliet, Illinois. He was educated at Knox College and admitted to the bar in 1858, thereafter serving as city attorney of Centralia, Illinois (1858-1861). With the outbreak of war McKee enlisted in the 11th Illinois Infantry, rising to captain (Co. C., 1861) and major (1863). In 1864 he was commissioned brigadier general of Mississippi militia, charged with raising four regiments of freedmen. After the war he remained in Mississippi, practicing law in Vicksburg and planting cotton in Hinds County. He also became a prominent figure in the moderate wing of the state's Republican party. "[F]ew carpetbaggers during Reconstruction", William C. Harris has written, "proved more consistent or more active in the advocacy of moderation and conciliation than McKee." (The Day of the Carpetbagger, 1979, 122). Among the chief poltical goals of the moderates was the cultivation of a strong white constituency within the Republican party, to complement its black majority. McKee was a delegate at the (failed) state constitutional convention of 1868, and was elected to the House, for the first of three consecutive terms, when Mississippi was readmitted to the Union in 1869. As a member of the House McKee worked for legislation to rebuild the Mississippi levees and improve the Yazoo River, to refund the Federal cotton tax of 1865-68, and to overturn political disabilities imposed on white Southerners. He also served as chairman of the Committee on Territories (43rd Congress). In the struggle for power within the Mississippi Republican party between the radical Adalbert Ames and the moderate James Lusk Alcorn, McKee typically aligned himself with Alcorn. Even after the Democratic "redemption" of Mississippi in the elections of 1875 (and after suffering a politically motivated assault on the streets of Canton in 1876) McKee remained in his adopted state. He married Anita Hortense Camp (b. ca. 1854), of New York, with whom he began raising a family. He stayed active in Republican affairs. During the Garfield and Arthur administrations McKee served as postmaster at Jackson, a position to which he was appointed, amid some controversy, over the black Republican leader James J. Hill. Later, in 1889-90, he served as receiver of public monies at Jackson. In 1877 he was granted a patent for a cotton press. McKee died at Jackson on 17 November 1890.