Mississippi

D

1

Territorial Period

In 1802 Georgia ceded its western land claims to the federal government, which agreed to settle the issues in the Yazoo Fraud. The cession included all the land then constituting the Mississippi Territory, as well as the land northward to the southern boundary of Tennessee. In 1804 that additional northern area was added to the Mississippi Territory. However, the area south of latitude 31° north still remained part of Spanish-held West Florida. Then, in 1810, United States settlers in West Florida rebelled against Spanish rule and declared their independence. The territory was subsequently annexed by the United States. In 1812 the part of the region west of the Pearl River was made part of the Territory of Orleans (now the state of Louisiana) and the region eastward to the Perdido River became part of the Mississippi Territory. With that addition, the Mississippi Territory included all the land now in the states of Alabama and Mississippi.

In Fletcher v. Peck (1810), the Supreme Court of the United States declared that, whether or not the Yazoo sale was proper, those later buyers who had bought in good faith from the original grantees were entitled to keep their land. If it was not turned over to them, they were entitled to damages for breach of contract. Thus, in 1814, Congress authorized payment of more than $4 million to the claimants.

In the following years the inhabitants of Mississippi Territory increased the pressure for statehood. Settlers in the Natchez region, which had the heaviest concentration of population and wealth, were the most insistent. Settlers east of the Pearl River were generally wary of statehood; they feared that the wealthy Natchez interests would control the state government. To accommodate the easterners, Congress in 1817 created the Alabama Territory out of what was formerly the eastern part of the Mississippi Territory. On December 10 of that same year, Mississippi was admitted to the federal Union as the 20th state. David Holmes, the last territorial governor, was elected the first governor under statehood, and Natchez was designated the state capital. In 1821 the capital was moved temporarily to Columbia pending selection of a site nearer the state’s geographic center. A site was selected on the P EarlRiver and was named Jackson in honor of the famous general and later president of the United States, Andrew Jackson. The capital was moved there in 1822.

D

2

King Cotton

During the first decades of the 19th century, thousands of farmers migrated westward in search of land for growing cotton. The population of the state grew from 7,600 in 1800 to 75,448 in 1820. Then settlement accelerated, and the state’s population rose to 136,621 by 1830. For the most part, the migrants settled in southern and west-central Mississippi. Northern Mississippi—two-thirds of the state’s total area—remained in the possession of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples.

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By 1830 much of the good virgin land east of the Mississippi River was occupied by settlers, and the state legislature and courts put increasing pressure on the Choctaw and Chickasaw to give up their lands. Within the next three years the Choctaw and Chickasaw ceded their lands to the federal government and agreed to leave the state. Subsequently, settlers in unprecedented numbers migrated to Mississippi by river and road to settle on these vast newly ceded lands. By 1860 the state’s population rose to 791,305, of which about 45 percent were white settlers and the remainder black slaves, on whom the cotton economy depended. The state’s cotton production increased greatly. By 1860 Mississippi was the leading cotton-producing state in the nation, and cotton was the “king” of Mississippi’s agricultural products.

Although cotton was planted in almost every part of Mississippi, it was generally on the richest lands, such as those in the Black Belt or the Bluff Hills, that the large cotton plantations were concentrated. The rich alluvial lands of the Yazoo Basin, however, were initially shunned by settlers because of the danger of floods from the nearby Mississippi River. Then, in the 1850s, the state undertook an extensive program to build levees along the river, and these lands too were brought into cotton production.

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3

The Civil War

Slavery was one of the most divisive political issues in Congress in the first half of the 19th century. Members of Congress from the Northern states pressed to end slavery, both because it was considered immoral and because white labor could not compete with unpaid black labor. Members from the Deep South (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida) believed that slavery was essential to their cotton-based agricultural system and that the North was trying to dominate the national economy. Both the slaveowners and nonslaveowners defended the system because they feared the consequences of abolitionism, the movement to end slavery totally and immediately.

By the 1850s, Southerners saw their power slipping in Congress, the clamor by Northern abolitionists was at a high pitch, and many in the South came to believe that secession from the Union was the only way to protect “Southern rights,” including the right to own slaves. A secession movement, led by extremists in Mississippi and other slave states, arose in 1850. It failed, however, when Congress passed the Compromise Measures of 1850, temporarily reconciling North and South on the issue of slavery.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president as the candidate of the Republican Party, which opposed the spread of slavery. The state of South Carolina, which had threatened to secede if the Republicans won, did so in December 1860. On January 9, 1861, Mississippi became the second state to secede. The next month, after five more states had seceded, the breakaway states organized as the Confederate States of America and began mobilizing for the war that was expected to follow. As their president the Confederates elected Mississippi cotton planter Jefferson Davis, a U.S. senator and former U.S. secretary of war. The American Civil War began officially on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery bombarded a federal fort in Charleston harbor.

The major military campaign in Mississippi during the war was the long Union Army drive leading to the capture of Vicksburg in July 1863. The loss of Vicksburg was a shattering blow because the city was the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. Early the next year a Union Army force under General William T. Sherman marched across the state from Vicksburg to Meridian. After the capture of Vicksburg, most Confederate troops were withdrawn from Mississippi. Some remained, however, under the leadership of Generals Nathan B. Forrest and Stephen D. Lee. These forces defeated several Union attempts to capture northeastern Mississippi in 1864, most notably in the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, near Baldwyn, in June. In all, about 80,000 Mississippians fought for the confederacy. About 25,000 Mississippi soldiers, or one out of every three, died in the war from wounds and disease.

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4

Reconstruction

Under President Andrew Johnson, the federal government formed a plan for restoring the Union, called Reconstruction. Johnson appointed William L. Sharkey as provisional governor of Mississippi in June 1865 and directed him to reorganize the state government. Amendments to the state constitution were made in August, formally abolishing slavery. A new government, elected in October, was dominated by former Confederates. This government enacted the so-called Black Code, which reimposed on the freed blacks many of the old restrictions that had been placed on slaves. All blacks were required to possess, every January, written evidence of employment for the coming year. Laborers leaving their jobs before their contract expired would forfeit wages already earned and would be subject to arrest. Freedmen could not rent land in urban areas. Vagrancy was punishable by plantation labor. Blacks were also denied the right to vote.

Similar codes were enacted by other Southern legislatures. Partly for this reason, the Radical wing of the Republican Party in Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from President Johnson and imposed the harsher regime called Radical Reconstruction. In March 1867, Congress put all the ex-Confederate states except Tennessee under military rule. Readmission to the Union was made conditional on the adoption of new constitutions acceptable to Congress. In January 1868 another constitutional convention, the so-called Black and Tan Convention, met in Jackson and drafted a constitution guaranteeing the vote and other basic rights to blacks. The proposed new constitution was defeated by the electorate in June 1868 but was approved in November 1869. Mississippi was formally readmitted to the Union on February 23, 1870.

The new state government was Republican and consisted mainly of whites from the North (called carpetbaggers by their enemies), white Southerners who were willing to cooperate (called scalawags), and blacks. From the first, the administration faced a hostile white population and economic disruption. Even so, it had positive achievements, among them free public schools for all. However, the Democratic Party grew in strength as former Confederates received federal pardons and were again allowed to participate in politics. Also, increasing numbers of blacks and white Republicans were intimidated by such terrorist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. Finally, in the elections of 1875, Democrats gained control of the state legislature, and in 1876 the legislature undertook impeachment proceedings against Republican Governor Adelbert Ames, Lieutenant Governor A. K. Davis, and other officials. Ames resigned, Davis was removed from office, and the president pro tempore of the state senate, a Democrat, became governor. Thus began more than a century of one-party rule of the state by the Democratic Party.

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5

Hard Times

The physical devastation caused by the Civil War, the freeing of the slaves, and the chaos of the Reconstruction era had ruinous effects on Mississippi’s economy. Money was scarce, and bankruptcy was common. Massive poverty afflicted the newly freed blacks, many of whom had no prospect of earning a livelihood. In some instances the former slaves were granted small tracts of land by the federal government. More often they became sharecroppers or tenant farmers on lands either still owned by planters or recently purchased by large Northern corporations.

Sharecropping and tenant farming were substitutes for paid labor where little cash was available to pay wages. A sharecropper raised part of the landlord’s crop and was paid a share of the profits after deductions for living expenses and the cost of tools and supplies. A tenant farmer sold what he raised and paid the landlord a share of the profits as rent. The landlord either owned the crop (in sharecropping) or had a lien on it (in tenant farming); if the profit was low, he got his share first. The cropper or tenant took what was left or, if none was left, got an advance to keep going until the next harvest.

Desperate to recover financially, landowners relied almost exclusively on their traditional cash crop, cotton. Agriculture failed to diversify. By 1879, cotton production equaled its prewar peak. However, the return of high levels of cotton production failed to improve the lot of most Mississippians because the price for cotton declined through most of the postwar decades, and living costs rose. Mounting debt forced many small farmers to give up their land and become tenants or sharecroppers. Kept in perpetual debt because they could seldom earn enough to pay off their yearly advances, few were able to escape the sharecropping and tenant farming system. Not until World War II (1939-1945), when widespread mechanization of cotton production made sharecropping unprofitable, did the system begin to disappear.

E

The 20th Century

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