Mississippi ratifies 13th amendment abolishing slavery ... 147 years late
Academics prompt ratification after noticing that 1995 move to accept amendment detailed in Lincoln had not been completed * Share77 * * * 1 * inShare0 * -------------------------------------------------
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Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln. Photograph: David James/AP
Mississippi has officially ratified the 13th amendment to the US constitution, which abolishes slavery and which was officially noted in the constitution on 6 December 1865. All 50 states have now ratified the amendment. 1. -------------------------------------------------
Lincoln
2. Production year: 2012 3. Countries: India, Rest of the world, USA 4. Cert (UK): 12A 5. Runtime: 150 mins 6. Directors: Steven Spielberg 7. Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, David Strathairn, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lee Pace, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones 8. More on this film
Mississippi's tardiness has been put down to an oversight that was only corrected after two academics embarked on research prompted by watching Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated film about president Abraham Lincoln's efforts to secure the amendment.
Dr Ranjan Batra, a professor in the department of neurobiology and anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, saw Spielberg's film and wondered about the implementation of the 13th amendment after the Civil War. He discussed the issue with Ken Sullivan, an anatomical material specialist at UMC, who began to research the matter.
Sullivan, a longtime resident of the Mississippi, remembered that a 1995 move to ratify the 13th amendment had passed the state Senate and House. He tracked down a copy of the bill and learned that its last paragraph required the secretary of state to send a copy to the office of the federal register, to officially sign it into law. That copy was never sent.
Sullivan contacted the current Mississippi secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, who filed the paperwork for the passage of the bill on 30 January. The bill passed on 7 February. Hosemann said the passage of the bill "was long overdue".

rom African Prince to Mississippi Slave: Abdul Rahman Ibrahima
In the summer of 1829, Abdul Rahman Ibrahima returned to Africa after 40 years of enslavement in the United States. Having obtained his freedom via the agency of President John Quincy Adams, he set off on the voyage that was supposed to take him to his birthplace in Timbuktu, in what is now Mali. However, he made it only as far as the American colony in Monrovia, Liberia, where he died July 6, 1829, shortly after his arrival. This month, Documenting the American South remembers the remarkable story of a Muslim prince who became a slave in Mississippi.
Much of what is currently known about Abdul Rahman Ibrahima comes from a pamphlet titled "A Statement with Regard to the Moorish Prince, Abduhl Rahhahman," written by Thomas H. Gallaudet, one of the co-founders of the American School for the Deaf. According to this account, during Ibrahima's childhood in Africa, his father was sent to conquer the "Soosoos" (also spelled Susu or Soso) and founded a new capital of the kingdom of Futa Jallon in a town called Timbo. Ibrahima therefore moved from Timbuktu to Timbo at age five, returning to Timbuktu to attend school at age twelve. Around 1788, at the age of approximately 26, Ibrahima was taken captive after a raid against a rival tribe, the "Hebohs." Ibrahima's captors sold him into slavery, and after surviving the Middle Passage, he was auctioned to Colonel Thomas Foster, on whose Natchez, Mississippi, cotton plantation he became a field hand.
At least one failed attempt to procure his freedom—on the part of a Dr. John Coates Cox, who had met Ibrahima in Africa and who was familiar with his background—was made before the Adams administration intervened. The groundwork for Ibrahima's manumission, according to twentieth-century biographer Terry Alford, was laid by Andrew Marschalk, who became convinced of Ibrahima's claim to be the son of the ruler of an African kingdom. Erroneously believing that he was from Morocco, Marschalk informed the sultan of Morocco about Ibrahima's plight and forwarded a "letter" Ibrahima had written, which actually consisted only of Koranic verses that he had memorized. Despite Marschalk's error, the sultan, after reviewing the verses, promptly offered the American consul funds to finance Ibrahima's return. The Adams administration was also convinced of the truth of Ibrahima's story, and, in 1827 or 1828, it authorized Marschalk to procure his freedom. Shortly thereafter, Ibrahima embarked on his fateful voyage to Africa.
Gallaudet's pamphlet, published in 1828, does not complete the story of Abdul Rahman Ibrahima, but Alford's biography explains that the pamphlet—sold as an attempt to fund the release of Ibrahima's family and their subsequent return to Africa—did not raise sufficient funds to free his large family, so he was accompanied only by his wife, Isabella. After Ibrahima's death—caused by what Alford describes as "coast fever"—Isabella remained in Liberia and was later joined by two of her sons; at least three sons and four daughters remained enslaved in Mississippi.
Gallaudet's short account is one of hundreds of slave narratives published byDocumenting the American South in its "North American Slave Narratives" collection and is one of several accounts of Muslim slaves found there.
Works Consulted: Alford, Terry, Prince Among Slaves, 30th Anniversary Ed., New York: Oxford UP, 2007; Austin, Allan D., African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, New York: Routledge, 1997.

Worse Than Slavery:
Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
David M. Oshinsky

Chapter One: Emancipation

I think God intended the niggers to be slaves. Now since man has deranged God's plan, I think the best we can do is keep 'em as near to a state of bondage as possible. . . . My theory is, feed 'em well, clothe 'em well, and then, if they don't work . . . whip 'em well. -- A Yazoo Delta planter, 1866

In the tumultuous summer of 1861, a Mississippi planter named William Nugent rode off to war with a regiment from Vicksburg. He did not expect a very long fight, viewing a Southern victory as all but inevitable. Nugent worried instead about his own mortality--about dying on a faraway battlefield without "leaving an heir behind to . . . represent me hereafter in the affairs of men." His early letters home were filled with bluster and pride. "I feel that I would like to shoot a Yankee." he told his young wife. "The North will yet suffer for this fratricidal war she has forced upon us--Her fields win be desolated, her cities laid to waste, and the treasuries of her citizens dissipated in the vain attempt to subjugate a free people."(1)
Nugent was mistaken, of course. By war's end, only the South matched his grim portrait of destruction, and no other state had suffered more than his own. The fields of Mississippi had been "desolated" by fire and flood and simple neglect. The cities had been flattened by Grant's artillery and pillaged by Sherman's roaming troops. Following the seven-month siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Union soldiers had marched through the heart of Mississippi, burning houses, killing livestock, and trampling crops. Writing to his wife in 1864, Nugent described the damage near Jackson, the state capital, which had just been put to the torch: "The largest plantations are . . . grown up in weeds . . . ; fences are pulled down & destroyed; houses burned; negroes run off. . . The prospects are gloomy enough and may be worse. I think the present year will wind it up and. . . see me at home again."(2)
Nugent was among the lucky ones: he came back alive. More than a third of Mississippi's 78,000 soldiers were killed in battle or died from disease. And more than half of the survivors brought home a lasting disability of war. Visitors to the state were astonished by the broken bodies they saw at every gathering, in every town square. Mississippi resembled a giant hospital ward, a land of missing arms and legs. In 1866, one-fifth of the state budget went for the purchase of artificial limbs.(3)
Few could escape the consequences of this war. Mississippi was bankrupt. Its commerce and transportation had collapsed. The railroads and levees lay in ruins. Local governments barely functioned. In Desoto County, just below Memphis, judge James F Trotter portrayed a landscape "enveloped in shadows, clouds and darkness. "Wherever we turn our eyes," he said, "we witness the sad memorials of our misfortunes, melancholy evidence of our sufferings, and of the cruelty and savage ferocity of our late enemies. . . . Our one consolation is the hope that we have reached the bottom."(4)
Desperate planters and farmers struggled simply to survive. Their slaves had been freed; their currency was worthless; their livestock and equipment had been stolen by soldiers from both sides. In the fertile Yazoo Delta, "plows and wagons were as scarce as mules, with no means to buy new ones. The cavalryman fortunate enough to have been paroled with his horse . . . was the envy of his neighbor."(5)
Many of these farms were now tended by women and elderly men, the war having wiped out more than one quarter of the white males in Mississippi over the age of fifteen. In his popular travel account, The Desolate South, author John T. Trowbridge described a visit to Corinth, Mississippi, near the Shiloh battlefield, in the winter of 1866. The "bruised and battered" town was fined with "lonely white women." he wrote, "crouched shivering over the hearth." In Natchez, reformer Carl Schurz found an old gentleman--"delicate hands; clothes shabby"--cutting down "a splendid shade tree" on the grounds of his once magnificent home. When Schurz asked him why, the man replied, "I must live. My sons fell in the war. An my servants have left me. I sell firewood to the steamboats passing by"(6)
Even Schurz, who despised the slaveholding class, was moved by the suffering of its members. Their cause had been morally indefensible, he believed, but their "heroic self-sacrifice" had been very real indeed. Schurz returned to the North "troubled with great anxiety." He worried most about the rising tide of white anger he saw in places like Natchez and Vicksburg--an anger directed mainly against blacks, the traditional victims of violence and exploitation in the South.
There were reasons for concern. With slavery abolished, Mississippi was moving toward a formal--and violent--separation of the races. Deeply rooted customs were now being written into law. The state legislature had just passed the South's first Jim Crow ordinance, prohibiting Negroes from riding in railroad coaches set aside for whites. Following suit, the city of Natchez had segregated its river walkways in order to keep black men and white women apart--the right bluff for use "of the whites, for ladies and children and nurses; the central bluff for bachelors and the colored population; and the lower promenade for whites."(7)
Blacks who challenged these rules faced arrest, humiliation, and sometimes worse. On a steamboat ride down the Mississippi River, Trowbridge noticed "a fashionably dressed couple" come on board near Vicksburg.
Terrible was the captain's wrath. "God damn your soul," he said, "get off this boat." The gentleman and lady were colored, and they had been guilty of unpardonable impudence in asking for a stateroom.
"Kick the nigger!" "He ought to have his neck broke!" "He ought to be hung!" said the indignant passangers, by whom the captain's prompt action was strongly commended.
The unwelcome couple went quietly ashore and one of the hands pitched their trunk after them. They were in a dilemma: their clothes were too fine for deck passage and their skins were too dark for cabin passage. So they sat down on the shore to wait for the next steamer.
"They won't find a boat that'll take 'em." said the grim captain.
"Anyhow, they can't force their damned nigger equality on to met" Afterwards I heard the virtuous passengers talking over the affair.
"How would you feel." said one with solemn emphasis, "to know that your wife was sleeping in the next room to a nigger and his wife?"(8)
This hatred had many sources. The ex-slave had become a scapegoat for the South's humiliating defeat. John E H. Claiborne, Mississippi's most prominent historian, blamed him for causing the war and for helping the North to prevail. Others saw the freedman as a living symbol, a dally reminder, of all that had changed. For the planter, emancipation meant the loss of human property and the disruption of his labor supply. For the poor white farmer, it meant even more. Emancipation had not only crushed his passionate dreams of slaveholding; it had also erased one of the two "great distinctions" between himself and the Negro. The farmer was white and free; the Negro was black--but also free. How best to preserve the remaining distinction--white supremacy--would become an obsession in the post-civil War South.(9)
Throughout Mississippi, these tensions seemed particularly severe. That, at least, was the opinion of northerners who visited the South, or were stationed there, after the war. Whitelaw Reid of the New york Tribune was struck by the enormous hostility he found in the Magnolia State, where blacks greatly outnumbered whites and where a free Negro majority created unique possibilities for political and economic change. "More or less, the same feeling had been apparent in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana," he wrote in 1866, "but it was in Mississippi that I found its fullest expression. However these man may have regarded the negro slave, they hated the negro freeman. However kind they may have been to negro property, they were virulently vindictive against a property that had escaped from their control."(10)

II
By the time of the Confederate surrender in April 1865, more than half of Mississippi's 400,000 blacks were already free. Some of them had fled to Union lines from their poorly guarded plantations; others had been abandoned by their owners as the enemy approached. "The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities. . .," wrote a chaplain in Grant's army. "There were men, women, and children in every stage of disease and decrepitude, often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escapes." Those who survived were put to work as paid laborers, loading supplies, clearing land, and chopping wood. They lived in awful squalor, the chaplain reported, their "ignorance" causing "a veritable moral chaos" in the camps.(11)
Emancipation came late, often grudgingly, to other parts of the state. Former slaves sketched a memorable scene--a kind of ritual--in which the master lined them up, told them they were no longer his Property, and asked (or demanded) that they stay on to help with the crop. "My white folks talked plain to me," recalled a freedman from Adams County, south of Natchez. "They said real sad like: 'Charlie, you is bin a dependence but now you kin go effen you is so desirous. But effen you wants to stay wid us . . . dare is a house fur you, en wood to keep you warm. . . . Do jist ez you please'"(12)
But others described a different reality, filled with false promises from the master. An ex-slave from Amite County, on the Louisiana border, remembered the day that "Marse Bin blowed dat big horn an' all de slaves cum right ter de big house an' he tole dem dat dey was free now, but dat he wanted dem ter stay wid him till de crop wus made an' he wud pay dem fur it." At year's end, however, the field hands received no wages because Marse Bill had charged them dearly for rent and supplies. "All dey made de boss tuk it, and 'iffen you moved to er nudder plantashunm yo' had to go wid nuffin."(13)
Some slaves were not even told they were free. Their masters, believing emancipation to be illegal or immoral, refused to spread the word. This caused particular problems in the deep interior counties of Mississippi, where towns were scattered, plantations were isolated, and news could be tightly controlled. "I heered it talked about . . . but I wuz kinda skeered to ask . . .," said an ex-slave from the Yazoo Delta. "I did one day tho when I asked Ole Miss, 'Miss dey tells me de niggers is free, is dey?' She say, 'No! and you'd better come on and go to work 'fore you gits tored up.' Dey did free us tho about three or fo months after dis."(14)
These planters sought a way to control black labor now that slavery had expired. This would not be easy because the freedmen had interests of their own. They were determined to explore the countryside, to experience the novelties of town life, and to feel freedom under their feet. Mobility was both a precious right and a liberating force for ex-slaves. It permitted them to leave a hated master, to bargain for better conditions, to search for loved ones who had been cruelly sold away. "We have not one of our old hands on the plantation this year," a Mississippian reported in 1867. "They are scattered to the four winds."(15)
Emancipation Provided legal relief from the pace and discipline of slavery, and it allowed blacks to protest old grievances by simply moving on. A freedwoman from Simpson County, south of Jackson, could not forget the flogging of her grandmother, "wid her clothes stripped down to her waist, her hands tied 'hind her to a tree . . . it just made a 'pression on my childest mind." An ex-slave from South Mississippi could still hear the crack of the whip and the futile pleadings of her mother: "O, marse, I is neber gwine to run 'way ergin. O, please, I is gwine to stay here." And a freedmen from the Yazoo Delta could not forgive the brutal beatings of his father: "My pa an' ma wasn't owned by de same masters. . . . At night pa would slip over to see us an' ole Marse wuz mos' always on de look out fer everything. When he would ketch him he would beat him so hard 'till we could tell which way he went by de blood. But pa, he would keep a comin' to see us an' takin' de beatins."(16)
The extent of this mobility is difficult to gauge. Among the hundreds of ex-slaves interviewed in the 1930s, about 40 percent claimed to have moved during the war itself or in the months immediately following emancipation. But most remained where they were, living as tenants or field hands on the same land they had worked all along. And those who did leave often went a very short distance--to a neighboring plantation, perhaps, or the nearest crossroads town. The exhilaration of moving was tempered by feelings of insecurity and fear. "We wanted to be free at times, den we would get scart an' want to stay slaves." a freedman recalled. "We was tol all kinds of things but didn't know jes what to believe " Some returned to their home plantations. " [We] was jes' lak cows an' hogs"' said an ex-slave from central Mississippi. "We would stray off an' didn't know whar to go an' fus thing would go right back to Ole Marse."(17)
Southern whites took a different point of view. Emancipation had ended slavery but had not destroyed the assumptions upon which slavery was based. The fact that many blacks abandoned their plantations in 1865 simply reinforced the image of the lazy, indolent field hand, shuffling aimlessly through life. In white eyes, the Negro viewed his freedom in typically primitive terms--as a license to roam the countryside in search of pleasure and trouble.
By most accounts, the Negro found both. Newspapers reported that "idle darkies" were clogging the roads, stealing crops and livestock, jostling whites from sidewalks, and fouling the air with "cigar smoke and profanity." The white response left no doubt that rough times lay ahead. "The infernal sassy niggers had better look out, or they'll get their throat cut"' warned one Mississippian. "Let a nigger come into my office without tipping his hat, and he'll get a club over it." said another. In Natchez, a local editor predicted an an-out race war unless the Negro acknowledged his permanent inferiority to whites. "One must be superior--one must be dominant." he wrote. "If the negro should be the master, the whites must either abandon the territory, or there will be another civil war in the South . . . and [it will] be a war of extermination."(18)
Others simply wanted the stealing to stop. A woman from the Delta complained that the "poor deluded negro," equating freedom with license, had stripped the region bare. "Not even a cabbage head in the garden or a chicken on its roost is safe, and I guess (I am not a Yankee) it is the same throughout the South."(19)
In fact, some Yankees thought much the same thing. Northern officials in Mississippi were often appalled by the freedman's "lawless" behavior. But unlike Southerners, these officials were more likely to view him as a victim of circumstance, not as a congenital thief To be free and black in Mississippi "is first to beg, then to steal, and then to starve' " a Union officer observed. "That is their reality." A colonel from Illinois took the longer view: "Slavery has made them what they are; if they are ignorant and stupid, don't expect much of them; and give them at least time to [improve] before judging them by the highest standards."(20)
Such views were anathema in the white South, where slavery had long been viewed as a civilizing influence upon an inferior race. Bondage had been good for the Negro, it was argued, because the system kept his primitive instincts in check. And freedom would be bad for the Negro because those checks had been removed. Southerners "understood" such things. They knew that slavery had been a response to the African's inferiority, and not its cause. They knew that the freedman needed constant attention--and a whip at his back. "The negro is [their] sacred animal," said a Mississippi planter. "The Yankees are about negroes like the Egyptians were about cats."(21)

III
Some whites talked about leaving Mississippi--moving west to Texas and California, where they would not have to mingle with Negroes or compete with them for work. "We ain't made to live together under this new style of things," said a migrating farmer. "Free niggers and me couldn't agree." There also was talk about "colonizing" the blacks in Mexico or some other distant place. But this notion had little support in a state so utterly dependent upon Negro sweat and toil. As one editor put it: "Every white man would be glad to have the entire race deported--except his own laborers."(22)
Many believed that blacks would perish in freedom, like fish on the land. The Negro's "incompetence," after all, had been essential to the understanding--and defense--of slavery itself. "Where shall Othello go?" a planter asked in 1865. "Poor elk--poor buffaloe--poor Indian--poor Nigger--this is indeed a white man's country." One newspaper predicted that the freedman would be extinct within a hundred years. Another gave him less time than that. "The child is already born who will behold the last negro in the State of Mississippi, mused the Natchez Democrat. "With no one to provide for the aged and the young . . . and brought unprepared into competition with the superior intelligence, tact, and muscle of free white labor, they must surely and speedily perish."(23)
In the fall of 1865, Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys addressed the "negro problem" before a special session of the Mississippi legislature. A planter by profession and a general during the war, Humphreys had campaigned for office in a "thrice-perforated" army coat shot through with Yankee lead. Like other leading Confederates, he had at first been excluded from participating in the South's postwar political affairs. But President Andrew Johnson had pardoned the general, and hundreds like him, in remarkably short order. Humphreys received his pardon on October 5, 1865, just three days after winning the governor's race in a landslide.(24)
His speech about the Negro was a major event, the first of its kind by a Southern governor since the Confederate defeat. "Under the pressure of federal bayonets." Humphreys began, ". . . the people of Mississippi have abolished the institution of slavery." That decision was final; there could be no turning back. "The Negro is free, whether we like it or not; we must realize that fact now and forever."(25)
But freedom had its limits, Humphreys continued. It protected the Negro's person and property but did not guarantee him political or social equality with whites. Indeed the "purity and progress" of both races required a strict caste system, with blacks accepting their place in the lower order of things. And that place--literally--was the cotton field of the south. Since economic recovery depended on a ready supply of Negro labor, the new system, like the old one, must reward the faithful field hand and punish the loafer. Such was the rule of the plantation, said Humphreys, and the "law of God."
In the following days, the legislature passed a series of acts known collectively as the Black Codes. Their aim was to control the labor supply, to protect the freedman from his own "vices," and to ensure the superior position of whites in southern life. "While some of [these acts] may seem rigid and stringent to sickly modern humanitarians," the legislators declared, "the wicked and improvident, the vagabond and meddler, must be smarted [and] reformed." Others agreed. The Mississippi Black Codes were copied, sometimes word for word, by legislators in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.(26)
The Black Codes listed specific crimes for the "free negro" alone: "mischief," "insulting gestures" "cruel treatment to animals," and the "vending of spiritous or intoxicating liquors." Free blacks were also prohibited from keeping firearms and from cohabiting with whites. The penalty for intermarriage, the ultimate taboo, was "confinement in the State penitentiary for life."
At the heart of these codes were the vagrancy and enticement laws, designed to drive ex-slaves back to their home plantations. The Vagrancy Act provided that "all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen" must have written proof of a job at the beginning of every year. Those found "with no lawful employment . . . shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction . . . fined a sum not exceeding . . . fifty dollars." The Enticement Act made it illegal to lure a worker away from his employer by offering him inducements of any kind. Its purpose, of course, was to restrict the flow (and price) of labor by forcing plantation owners to stop "stealing" each other's Negroes.
Given the huge number of cases, the vagrant could not expect a normal trial. Town officials were put in charge of these proceedings, with the sheriff usually meting out justice by himself If the vagrant did not have fifty dollars to pay his fine--a safe bet--he could be hired out to any white man willing to pay it for him. Naturally, a preference would be given to the vagrant's old master, who was allowed "to deduct and retain the amount so paid from the wages of such freedman."
These codes were vigorously enforced. Hundreds of blacks were arrested and auctioned off to local planters. Others were made to scrub horses, sweep sidewalks, and haul away trash. When news of this crackdown reached the North, a storm of protest arose that there had been little change in the South, despite the sacrifice of 300,000 Yankee lives. "We tell the white men in Mississippi," warned the Chicago Tribune, "that the men of the North will convert [their] state into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves."(27)

IV
These were not just empty words. In the winter of 1867, the US. Congress passed a sweeping Reconstruction Act over President Johnson's angry veto. The act divided the South into five military districts; required the individual states to write new constitutions providing for black manhood suffrage; and compelled their legislatures to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before applying for readmission to the Union.(*)
In Mississippi, this act created a new political majority almost overnight. More than 80,000 black voters were registered by federal officials, as opposed to fewer than 60,000 whites. Not surprisingly, these freedmen joined the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. By 1870, black Republicans in Mississippi were serving as sheriffs, mayors, and state legislators. "Local newspapers routinely described them as "ranting niggers" and "stinking scoundrels.") Their ranks included John R. Lynch, the first black Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, and Hiram B. Revels, the first Negro to serve in the US. Senate. Revels would make history--some called it "historic revenge"--by completing the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis, the state's most famous son.
Reconstruction in Mississippi has sometimes been portrayed as an orgy of waste and corruption, led by Northern profiteers ("carpetbaggers"), Southern opportunists ("scalawags"), and ignorant blacks. In reality, the Reconstruction governments were more compassionate and democratic than any the state had known before. Money was raised to build hospitals, expand state asylums, and repair public works devastated by war. The remaining Black Codes were repealed, and racial distinctions were wiped from the statute books. In 1870, the legislature passed Mississippi's first public education law, guaranteeing four months of free schooling each year to all children, regardless of race. It appeared as if real change were coming to a culture-frozen in time.(28)
The appearance was deceiving. As Reconstruction unfolded in Mississippi, black hopes and white fears collided with murderous force. Violence was central to the South's code of personal behavior, its compulsion to settle private matters outside the law. It had always been so in Mississippi--from the gentleman's code duello to the common man's head-splitting brawls, from the festive public hangings to the dutiful whipping of slaves. After completing an extensive tour of the South during Reconstruction, a prominent journalist noted that the "respectable people of Mississippi are astonishingly tolerant of acts which would arouse a Northern community to the utmost." There was, he added, a "willingness to see men take the law into their own hands; and what is still worse, to let them openly defy the laws, without losing . . . the respect of the community."(29)
Much of this violence owed nothing to race. Mississippi had a well-deserved reputation as America's most dangerous state. When travelers described its primitive river ports and inland hamlets as the 14 worst spots" in the nation, local residents did not normally disagree. In 1866, the mayor of Jackson resigned after failing to mobilize public opinion against brawling and lawlessness in his town. Among Jackson's worst offenders were the white lawmakers who battle each other with pistols, knives, and fists. On a May afternoon in 1870, three separate fights erupted in the capital chamber and spilled out into the streets. In one of them, Representative M. J. Manning landed "a good right-hand" on "the fly-trap" of Senator J. C. Shoup, "splitting his lip considerably." In another, Senator J. H. Pierce, the "Panola Giant," defeated Representative J. S. B. Coggeshall, the "Street Car Conductor," by "planting his right 'digit' in the conductor's left 'peeper' and gouging out the eye./Pierce was declared the winner and "champion of the Mississippi Legislature."(30)
In 1871, Governor James Lusk Alcorn claimed that the "suppression of the pistol and the knife will do as much in Mississippi as the suppression of the sword did in England for asserting the sanctity of human life." Some Englishmen thought so, too. A visitor from London, one of Europe's more raucous cities, was amazed at the speed with which chance encounters and trivial slights escalated into grisly homicides. Even dinner conversations in Mississippi, he wrote, had a "smack of manslaughter about them."(31)
Outsiders could never quite fathom the casual nature of these assaults. Killing seemed easy in Mississippi, and natural to all classes of "The heart is sickened . . . with the frequency of life taken suddenly and by violence," a Northerner lamented. "Two neighbors, life-long friends, perhaps members of the same church, have a slight difference; high words pass; instead of giving reason sway, or referring the subject to the courts, or to friends, one rushes for his pistol or shot gun." A presidential emissary offered this observation to Andrew Johnson after traveling through the South on an inspection tour in 1865: Mississippians have been shooting and cutting each other . . . to a greater extent than in all the other states of the Union put together."(32)
With emancipation, the focus clearly changed. Violence--and vigilante. action--took on a distinctly racial air. The ex-slaves could no longer count on the "protection" that went along with being the master's valuable property. And their new rights and freedoms made them natural targets for angry, fearful whites. A federal official noted that blacks of Mississippi were now more vulnerable than mules, because the "breaking of the neck of the free negro is nobody's loss." A Southern editor put it crudely but well: "When detected in his frequent delinquencies, Sambo will have no 'maussa' to step in between him and danger."(33)
Now danger was everywhere. Northern senators charged that "two or three black men" were being lynched in Mississippi every day. The true numbers will never be known, because local authorities did not bother to investigate "nigger killings." and the newspapers carefully played them down. The only evidence came from federal authorities in Mississippi and from the intended victims themselves. One Union officer wrote to his superiors that freedmen in his area were being whipped and murdered for offenses more imagined than real. A suspected horse thief, he said, "was beheaded, skinned, and nailed to the barn." In Vicksburg, a group of "colored citizens" begged the governor for help. "The rebels are turbulent," they wrote, "and are arming themselves . . . to murder poor negroes. Gov., ain't there no pertiction?"(34)
The answer, increasingly, was no. There were never enough soldiers to prevent race violence in Mississippi, and the mobs grew bolder as federal troops were cut back over time. Besides, Northern officers did not always oppose vigilante action, particularly when 16 sexual" crimes were said to be involved. In one instance a general told mob leaders that they "had done right" to lynch a Negro charged with insulting a white woman. In another, a captain allowed a freedman accused of rape to be run to death by"hounds.(35)
Much of this violence was the work of local rifle clubs like White Rose, Seventy-six, and Sons of the South. But the biggest group by far was the "invisible empire: known as the Ku Klux Klan, comprising white men from all classes and regions of Mississippi. Its local anthem went like this:
Niggers and [Republicans], get out of the way. We're born of the night and we vanish by day. No rations have we, but the flesh of man-- And love niggers best--the Ku Klux Klan. We catch 'em alive and roast 'em whole. And hand 'em around with a sharpened pole.(36)
Klan violence was often random, spontaneous, and poorly planned, but it spread quickly and took every imaginable form. There were attacks on freedmen who voted, ran for office, sat on juries, and testified against whites. In hard-scrabble Monroe County, a Klan mob made "fried nigger meat" of a Republican leader by disemboweling him in front of his wife. In the fertile cotton lands, Klansmen enforced plantation discipline by whipping "lazy" workers and detaining ex-slaves who tried to move on. A freedman from Marion County recalled his "old massa" telling him, "Now you show up t'morrer an' get your-self behind a mule or I'll land you in de chain gang for stealin,' or set the Klu Klux on you." The freedman added: "That's how come I ain't stole f'om dat day to this un."(37)
Among the Klan's favorite targets were Northern white teachers who had traveled south to instruct black children about the rights and responsibilities of freedom. Local white opinion of these teachers was very harsh. The historian of Oktibbeha County described them as "obnoxious agitators" who "Incited the darkeys against their old friends, the Southern whites." How? By teaching blacks that freedom meant thinking for themselves.(38)
For the most part, native whites viewed the very idea of black education as a contradiction in terms. Why confuse the Negro by raising false hopes about his naturally humble station in life? "These country niggers are like monkeys"' a white woman explained to a local teacher. "You can't learn them to come in when it rains."(39)
Most Klan attacks took place in the poor hill country, where white farmers were struggling with crop failures, fears of black competition, and the numbing losses of war. It was here that teachers were threatened, beaten, and sometimes killed. "The violence centered on the schools of the Negroes . . .," wrote one historian. "By the summer of 1871, in a number of counties, not a school remained in operation."(40)
The worst Klan violence occurred in Meridian, near the Alabama line. Badly damaged by Sherman's troops in 1863, Meridian, a railroad center, had become a magnet for ex-slaves fleeing the cotton fields in search of better jobs and simple adventure. This influx had led white residents to form vigilante groups for "self-protection," with mixed results. One mob action in 1865 was triggered by the disappearance of a planter named William Wilkinson. Local whites, assuming that Wilkinson had been robbed and murdered by his own field hands, formed a posse to round up the suspects. The mob surrounded Wilkinson's plantation, roughed up several freedmen, and was preparing to lynch them when federal troops intervened. The next morning, a lonely soldier came upon Wilkinson in a Meridian brothel, "quite alive, though somewhat disheveled by the two days he had spent celebrating his cotton sale."(41)
As Meridian's black population expanded in the late 1860s, tensions increased between local Republicans, who ran the town government, and local vigilantes, who vowed to bring it down. Both groups formed their own militias; both held emotional rallies and parades. In 1870, two black county supervisors were assassinated. An explosion seemed inevitable.
It came in the spring of 1871, at the trial of three blacks charged with inciting arson in the town. Almost everyone came to the courtroom well armed, as Mississippians had been doing for years. This time shots rang out, killing the white Republican judge and several black spectators. The crowd surged forward, chasing down one defendant, whose body they riddled with bullets, and hurling another from the roof. ("When this failed to kill him," a witness reported, "his throat was cut.") For the next three days, local Klansmen rampaged through Meridian, murdering "all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions." Despite frantic pleas for help, federal troops in Mississippi did not arrive in time. When the slaughter finally ended, more than twenty-five blacks were dead. So, too, was Republican rule in this hill country town.(42)
The Meridian riot demonstrated that the black community--poorly armed, economically dependent, and new to freedom--could not effectively resist white violence without federal help. And it showed that such help might be lacking at the very moment it was needed most. By 1871, Northern sympathy for the freedman's troubles had begun to wane. Military occupation was simply not working in the South; even General Sherman, the US. Army commander, despaired of propping up weak and provocative state governments with more federal troops. As black Meridian buried its dead that spring, the failure of Reconstruction was clear. The freedman stood dangerously alone.(43)
Meridian set the stage for a full-blown epidemic of racial violence in the South. And Mississippi, with its vigilante tradition and vulnerable black majority, would lead the region in every imaginable kind of mob atrocity: most lynchings, most multiple lynchings, most lynchings of women, most lynchings without an arrest, most lynchings of a victim in police custody, and most public support for the process itself. Widely defended as the only effective deterrent against the murder and rape of white women by Negro men, mob violence would be directed at burglars, arsonists, horse thieves, grave robbers, peeping toms, and "trouble-makers"--virtually all of them black.(44)
For the victims of mob violence, there was no hope of redress. The traditional protections of slavery were gone. In a perverse way, emancipation had made the black population more vulnerable than before. It now faced threats from two directions: white mobs and white courts. Like the Ku Klux Klan, the criminal justice system would also become a dragnet for the Negro. The local jails and state prisons would grow darker by the year. And a new American gulag, known as convict leasing, would soon disgrace Mississippi, and the larger South, for decades to come.

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Native Americans[edit]

Choctaw Village near the Chefuncte by Giovanni Bernard, 1869, Peabody Museum Harvard University. The women are preparing dye to color cane strips for making baskets.
At the end of the last Ice Age Native American or Paleo-Indians appeared in what today is theSouth.[1] Paleo Indians in the South were hunter-gatherers who pursued the mega fauna that became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene age. A variety of indignenous cultures arose in the region, including some that built great earthwork mounds more than 2,000 years ago. About 950 CE theMississippian culture developed along the Mississippi and its tributaries. These people also built mounds and complex settlements that were densely inhabited.[2]
Although the Mississippian culture disappeared in many places before European encounter, archeological and linguistic evidence has shown their descendants are the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Other tribes who inhabited the territory of Mississippi (and whose names were given to local towns and features) include the Natchez, the Yazoo, the Pascagoula, and the Biloxi.
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European colonial period[edit]
The first major European expedition into the territory that became Mississippi was that of Hernando de Soto who passed through in 1540. The French claimed the territory that included Mississippi as part of their colony of New France and started settlement. They created the first Fort Maurepas under Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville on the site of modern Ocean Springs (or Old Biloxi) in 1699.[2]
In 1716, the French founded Natchez as Fort Rosalie; it became the dominant town and trading post of the area. In the early 18th century, the Roman Catholic Churchcreated pioneer parishes at Old Biloxi/Ocean Springs and Natchez. The church also established seven pioneer parishes in Louisiana and two in Alabama, which was also part of New France.[3]
The French and later Spanish colonial rule influenced early social relations of the settlers who held enslaved Africans. As in Louisiana, for a period there grew a third class of free people of color, whose origin was chiefly as descendants of white planters and enslaved African or African-American mothers. The planters often had formally supportive relationships with their mistresses of color and arranged for freedom for them and their multiracial children. The fathers sometimes passed on property or arranged for the apprenticeship or education of children so they could learn a trade. Free people of color often migrated to New Orleans, where there was more opportunity for work and a bigger community.[2]
Like Louisiana as part of New France, Mississippi was alternately ruled by Spanish, and British. In 1783 the Mississippi area was deeded by Great Britain to the United States after the American Revolution under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Historical populations | Census year | Population | | 1800 | 7,600 | 1810 | 31,306 | 1820 | 75,448 | 1830 | 136,621 | 1840 | 375,651 | 1850 | 606,526 | 1860 | 791,305 | 1870 | 827,922 | 1880 | 1,131,597 | 1890 | 1,289,600 | 1900 | 1,551,270 | 1910 | 1,797,114 | 1920 | 1,790,618 | 1930 | 2,009,821 | 1940 | 2,183,796 | 1950 | 2,178,914 | 1960 | 2,178,141 | 1970 | 2,216,912 | 1980 | 2,520,638 | 1990 | 2,573,216 | 2000 | 2,844,658 |
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Territory and statehood[edit]
Before 1798 the state of Georgia claimed the entire region between the Mississippi and Chattahoochee rivers and tried to sell lands there, most notoriously in the Yazoo land scandal of 1795. Georgia finally ceded the disputed area in 1802 to the national government; in 1804 the northern part of the cession was added to Mississippi Territory.

The Mississippi Territory was sparsely populated and suffered initially from a series of difficulties that hampered its development. Pinckney's Treaty of 1795 ended Spanish control over Mississippi, but Spain continued to hamper the territory's growth by harassing commercial traders. Winthrop Sargent, governor in 1798, proved unable to impose a code of laws. Not until the emergence of cotton as a profitable staple crop after the invention of the cotton gin, and the development of plantations with slave labor, did the riverfront areas of Mississippi begin to flourish.[4]
There were continuing land disputes with the Spanish. In 1810 the settlers in parts of West Florida rebelled and declared their freedom from Spain. President James Madisondeclared that the region between the Mississippi and Perdido rivers, which included most of West Florida, had already become part of the United States under the terms of theLouisiana Purchase. The section of West Florida between the Pearl and Perdido rivers, known as the District of Mobile, was annexed to Mississippi Territory in 1812; Americans occupied Kiln, Mississippi in 1813.
Settlement[edit]
The attraction of vast amounts of high-quality, inexpensive cotton land attracted hordes of settlers, mostly from Georgia and the Carolinas, and from former tobacco areas of Virginia and North Carolina. By this time, many planters had switched to mixed crops, as tobacco was barely profitable. From 1798 through 1820, the population in the territory rose dramatically, from less than 9,000 to more than 222,000, with the vast majority enslaved African Americans. Migration came in two fairly distinct waves - a steady movement until the outbreak of the War of 1812, and a flood after it was ended, from 1815 through 1819. The postwar flood was caused by various factors including high prices for cotton, the elimination of Indian titles to much land, new and improved roads, and the acquisition of new direct outlets to the Gulf of Mexico. The first migrants were traders and trappers, then herdsmen, and finally farmers. The Southwest frontier produced a relatively democratic society.[5]
Cotton[edit]
Expansion of cultivation of cotton into the Deep South was made possible by the invention of the cotton gin that made short-staple cotton profitable. Americans pressed to gain more land for cotton and caused conflicts with the several tribes of Native Americans who historically occupied this territory. Americans forced the Civilized Tribes to cede their lands, and various leaders developed proposals for Indian Removal to west of the Mississippi River, which took place following passage of an act by Congress. As Indians ceded their lands to whites, they moved west and became more isolated from the American planter society, where many African Americans were enslaved. The state sold off the ceded lands, and white migration into the state continued. Some families brought slaves with them; most slaves were transported into the area from the Upper South in a forced migration through the domestic slave trade.[6]
Statehood[edit]
In 1817 elected delegates wrote a constitution and applied to Congress for statehood. On Dec. 10, 1817, the western portion of Mississippi Territory became the State of Mississippi, the 20th state of the Union. Natchez, long established as a river port, was the first state capital. In 1822 the capital was moved to a more central location at Jackson.[7]

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AnteBellum[edit]
The exit of most the Native Americans meant that vast new lands were open to settlement, and tens of thousands of immigrant Americans poured in. Men with money brought slaves and purchased the best cotton lands in the "Delta" region along the Mississippi River. Poor men took up poor lands in the rest of the state.
Cotton[edit]
By the 1830s Mississippi was a leading cotton producer, increasing its demand for enslaved labor. Some planters considered slavery a "necessary evil" to make cotton production profitable. for the survival of the cotton economy, and were brought in from the border states and the tobacco states where slavery was declining.[12] The 1832 state constitution forbade any further importation of slaves by the domestic slave trade, but the provision was found to be unenforceable, and it was repealed.
As planters increased their holdings of land and slaves, the price of land rose, and small farmers were driven into less fertile areas. An elite slave-owning class arose that wielded disproportionate political and economic power. By 1860, of the 354,000 whites, only 31,000 owned slaves and two thirds of these held fewer than 10. Fewer than 5,000 slaveholders had more than 20 slaves; 317 possessed more than 100. These 5000 planters controlled the state. In addition a middle element of farmers owned land but no slaves. A small number of businessmen and professionals lived in the villages and small towns. The lower class, or "poor whites," occupied marginal farm lands remote from the rich cotton lands and grew food for their families, not cotton. Whether they owned slaves or not, however, most white Mississippians supported the slave society; all whites were considered above blacks in social status. They were both defensive and emotional on the subject of slavery. A slave insurrection scare in 1836 resulted in the hanging of a number of slaves and several white northerners suspected of being secret abolitionists.[13]
When cotton was king during the 1850s, Mississippi plantation owners—especially those in the old Natchez District, as well as the newly emerging Delta and Black Beltregions—became increasingly wealthy due to the great fertility of the soil and the high price of cotton on the international market. The severe wealth imbalances and the necessity of large-scale slave populations to sustain such income played a strong role in state politics and political support for secession.[14] Mississippi was among the six states in the Deep South with the highest proportion of slave population; they were the first to secede the from the Union.
Mississippi's population grew rapidly, reaching 791,000 in 1860. Cotton production grew from 43,000 bales in 1820 to more than one million bales in 1860, as Mississippi became the leading cotton-producing state. The textile factories of Britain, France and New England demanded more and more cotton, and at the time, the Deep South was the major supplier. In Mississippi some modernizers spoke of crop diversification, and production of vegetables and livestock increased, but King Cotton prevailed. Cotton's ascendancy was seemingly justified in 1859, when Mississippi planters were scarcely touched by the financial panic in the North. They were concerned by inflation of the price of slaves but were in no real distress. Mississippi's per capita wealth was well above the U.S. average. Planters made very large profits, but they invested it on buying more cotton lands and more slaves, which pushed up prices even higher. The threat of abolition troubled them, but they reassured themselves that if need be the cotton states could secede from the Union, form their own country, and expand to the south in Mexico and Cuba. Until late 1860 they never expected a war.[15]
The relatively low population of the state before the Civil War reflected the fact that much of the state was still frontier and needed many more settlers for development. Except for riverside settlements and plantations, 90% of the Mississippi Delta bottom lands were still undeveloped and covered mostly in mixed forest and swampland. These areas were not developed until after the war, and for a time, most of the owners were freedmen, who bought the land by clearing it and selling off timber.[16]
Slavery[edit]
At the time of the Civil War, the great majority of blacks were slaves living on plantations with 20 or more fellow slaves. Many had been transported to the Deep South in a forcible migration through the domestic slave trade from the Upper South.
The division of labor included an elite of house slaves, a middle group of overseers, drivers (gang leaders) and skilled craftsmen, and a "lower class" of unskilled field workers whose main job was hoeing and picking cotton. The owners hired white overseers to direct the work. Some slaves resisted by work slowdowns and by breaking tools and equipment. There were no slave revolts of any size, although whites often circulated fearful rumors that one was about to happen. Most of those who tried to escape were captured and returned, though a handful made it to northern states and eventual freedom. Most slaves endured the harsh routine of plantation life, though some with special skills attained a quasi-free status.
By 1820, 458 former slaves had been freed, but they were forbidden to have weapons and had to carry identification. In 1822 planters decided it was too awkward to have free blacks living near slaves and passed a state law forbidding emancipation except by special act of the legislature.[13][17] By 1860 only 1,000 of the 437,000 blacks in the state were free.[18] Most of these lived in wretched conditions near Natchez.they were beaten up
Politics[edit]
Mississippi was a stronghold of Jacksonian Democracy, which glorified the independent farmer; they even named their state capital in Jackson's honor. But dishonor was also rampant. Corruption and land speculation caused a severe blow to state credit in the years preceding the Civil War. Federally allocated funds were misused, tax collections embezzled, and finally, in 1853, two state-supported banks collapsed when their debts were repudiated. In the Second Party System (1820s to 1850s) Mississippi moved politically from a divided Whig and Democratic state to a one-party Democratic state bent on secession. Criticism from Northern abolitionists escalated after the Mexican War ended in 1848, causing an intense countercrusade that tried to identify and eliminate all dangerous abolitionist influences. White Mississippians became outspoken defenders of the slave system. An abortive secession attempt in 1850 was followed by a decade of political agitation during which the protection and expansion of slavery became their major goal. When Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 with the goal seeking an eventual end of slavery, Mississippi followed South Carolina and seceded from the Union on January 9, 1861. Mississippi's U.S. senator Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederate States.
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Civil War[edit]
See the main article Mississippi in the Civil War.
More than 80,000 Mississippians fought in the Civil War, and casualties were extremely heavy. Thousands of ex-slaves were enlisted in the Union Army.[19] Fear that white supremacy might be lost, among a plethora of other reasons, motivated men to join the Confederate Army. The amount of personal property owned, including slaves, increased the likelihood that a man would volunteer. However, men in Mississippi's river counties, regardless of their wealth or other characteristics, were less likely to join the army than were those living in the state's interior. The river made its neighbors especially vulnerable, and river-county residents apparently left their communities (and often the Confederacy) rather than face invasion.[20] The major military operations came in the Shiloh and Corinth campaigns and the siege of Vicksburg, from the spring of 1862 to the summer of 1863.[21] The most important was the Vicksburg Campaign, fought for control of the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. The fall of the city to General Ulysses S. Grant on July 4, 1863, gave the Union control of the Mississippi River, cut off the western states, and made the Confederate cause in the west hopeless.
At the Battle of Grand Gulf Admiral Porter led seven Union ironclads in an attack on the fortifications and batteries at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, with the intention of silencing the Confederate guns and then securing the area with troops of McClernand's XIII Corps who were on the accompanying transports and barges. The Confederates managed to win a hollow victory; the loss at Grand Gulf caused just a slight change in Grant's offensive.[22] Grant won the Battle of Port Gibson. Advancing towards Port Gibson, Grant's army ran into Confederate outposts after midnight. Union forces advanced on the Rodney Road and a plantation road at dawn, and was met by Confederates. Grant forced the Confederates to fall back to new defensive positions several times during the day but they could not stop the Union onslaught and left the field in the early evening. This defeat demonstrated that the Confederates were unable to defend the Mississippi River line and the Federals had secured their beachhead.[23] William Tecumseh Sherman's march from Vicksburg to Meridian was designed to destroy the railroad center of Meridian. The campaign was Sherman's first application of total war tactics, prefiguring his March to the Sea in Georgia in 1864. The Confederates had no better luck at the Battle of Raymond. On May 10, 1863, Pemberton sent troops from Jackson to Raymond, 20 miles (32 km) to the southwest. Brig. Gen. over-strength brigade, having endured a grueling march from Port Hudson, Louisiana, arrived in Raymond late on May 11 and the next day tried to ambush a small Union raiding party. The raiding party turned out to be Maj. Gen. John A. Logan's Division of the XVII Corps. Gregg tried to hold Fourteen Mile Creek and a sharp battle ensued for six hours, but the overwhelming Union force prevailed and the Confederates retreated, exposing the Southern Railroad of Mississippi to Union forces, thus severing the lifeline of Vicksburg.[24]

Battle of Brice's Crossroads
In April–May 1863 a major cavalry raid by Union colonel Benjamin H. Grierson raced through Mississippi and Louisiana, that destroying railroads, telegraph lines, and Confederate weapons and supplies. The raid also served as a diversion for Grant's moves toward Vicksburg.
A Union expedition commanded by General Samuel D. Sturgis was opposed by Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. They clashed at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads on 10 June 1864, as Forrest routed the Yankees in his greatest battlefield victory.
Homefront[edit]
After each battle there was increased economic chaos and societal breakdown. State government during the course of the war was forced to move from Jackson to Enterprise, to Meridian and back to Jackson, to Meridian again and then to Columbus, Macon, and finally back to what was left of Jackson. The two wartime governors were fire-eaterJohn J. Pettus, who carried the state into secession, whipped up the war spirit, began military and domestic mobilization, and prepared to finance the war.[25] His successor, General Charles Clark, elected in 1863, although facing a deteriorating military and economic situation, remained committed to continuing the fight regardless of the cost. The war presented both men with enormous challenges in providing an orderly, stable government for Mississippi.[26]
There were no slave insurrections, as plantations turned to food production. The Union presence made it possible for planters to sell their cotton to Union Treasury agents for high prices, a sort of treason the Confederates were unable to stop.[27]
Most whites supported the Confederacy, but there were holdouts. The two most vehemently anti-Confederate areas in were Jones County in the southeastern corner of the state, where the "Knight Company" originated, and Tishomingo in the northeastern corner. Among the most influential Mississippi Unionists was Presbyterian minister John Aughey, whose sermons and book The Iron Furnace or Slavery and Secession (1863) became hallmarks of the anti-secessionist cause in the state.[28]
The war shattered the lives of all classes, high and low. Upper class ladies replaced balls and parties with bandage-rolling sessions and fund-raising efforts. But soon enough they found their world shattering as they lost brothers, sons and husbands to battlefield deaths and disease, lost their incomes and luxuries and instead had to deal with chronic shortages and poor ersatz substitutes for common items. They took on unexpected responsibilities, including the chores always left to slaves; they coped by focusing on survival. They maintained their family honor by upholding Confederate patriotism to the bitter end, and after the war became the champions of the "Los Cause." Less privileged white women were less wedded to honor and patriotism and in even more trouble as they immediately were forced to do double and triple work with the men gone; many became refugees in camps or fled to Union lines.[29]
Black women and children had an especially hard time as the plantation regime collapsed and the only option was to find a refugee camp operated by the Union Army. Tens of thousands of freedmen died from cholera, yellow fever, diphtheria, dysentery, pneumonia, phthisis, convulsions, and other fevers. Death rates were especially high in informal refugee camps, and somewhat lower in the better-organized camps funt by the Freedmen's Bureau of the U.S. Army[30]
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Reconstruction[edit]
After the defeat of the Confederacy, new 17th President, President Andrew Johnson, (1808-1875), (a former U.S. Senator from the Democratic Party for Tennesseeand the previous war-time military governor of Union Army-occupied Tennessee), appointed a temporary state government under provisional governor, Judge William Lewis Sharkey, (1798-1873). It repealed the 1861 Ordinance of Secession and wrote new "Black Codes" defining and limiting the civil rights of the former slaves now African American "freedmen" as a sort of third-class status without citizenship or voting rights. Johnson was following the previously expressed policies of his predecessor, 16th President Abraham Lincoln, who had planned a generous and tolerating Reconstruction policy towards the former Confederates and southerners, but allowing former Black soldiers to be citizens and vote and slowly integrating them into the political and economic life in the nation and hopefully the "new South". The Black Codes never took effect, however, since the legal affairs of the freedmen came under the control of the sympathetic Freedmen's Bureau representatives, a new agency created to help, educate and assist the former slaves, in the U.S. War Department by Radical Republican representatives in the Congress, with the support of President Lincoln. Most of them were former Union Army officers from the North. Many stayed in the state and became political and business leaders (scornfully known as "carpetbaggers"). The Black Dodes outraged northern opinion and apparently were never put into effect in any state. The Black Codes established by the provisional Mississippi legislature in 1866 demonstrate how white Mississippians, following the Civil War, remained committed to circumscribing the legal, civil, political, and social rights of the freed people or ex-slaves.
Congress, now under the control of more Radical Republicans from the North, responded in September 1865 by refusing to seat the newly elected delegation and support the President's policies on Reconstructing the former rebellious southern states, such as Lincoln's policy of the fact that they never legally seceded and therefore were never "out of the Union". In 1867, however the increasingly dominating Congress, put Mississippi's state governing under the U.S. Army's military rule as part of their more substantial and hostile Reconstruction policies until the legal status of ex-Confederates and freedmen could be worked out. The military Governor-General, and Union Army Gen. Edward O.C. Ord, (1818-1883), (commander of the Mississippi/Arkansas District, later Fort Ord, (Monterey, California) is named for him) received the task of registering the state's electorate so a new state constitution could be written. In a contested election, the state's voters rejected the proposal of a new state constitution, and as a result Mississippi remained and continued under martial law. Union Gen. Adelbert Ames, (1835-1933), of Maine, under direction from the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, deposed the provisional civil government (appointed by President Johnson), immediately enrolled black men as voters (not just former soldiers), and temporarily prohibited about a thousand or so former Confederate leaders to vote or hold state offices. Then they later enacted their own revisions and had a more radical reformed constitution for the state adopted in another referendum in 1868.[31]
The 1868 constitution had major elements that lasted for 22 years. The Constitutional Convention was the first political organization in the state's history to include African American (then referred to as "Negro" or "Colored") representatives, who numbered 17 among the 100 members (about one quarter of the total Black population [which totaled over half] of the state then). Although 32 counties had Negro majorities, they elected whites as well as Negroes to represent them. The Convention adopted universal male suffrage, (no property qualifications, educational requirements or poll taxes); created the framework for the state's first public schoolsystem (which Northern and Border states had begun over forty years earlier); forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property; and prohibited limiting of civil rights in travel; allowed the Governor to have a greater amount of time to enact his policies by serving a four-year term instead of two years; provided the Governor with the power to appoint judges (taking judicial elections out of the corrupt elections before the war); required legislative reapportionment; and repudiated the ordinances and powers of secession. Since 17 of the 100 delegates were blacks, the body was called the "Black and Tan Convention" by its enemies. Mississippi was readmitted to the Union on Jan. 11, 1870 and its representatives and senators were seated in Congress on Feb. 23, 1870.[32]
Black Mississippians, participating in the political process for the first time ever, formed a coalition with some locals whites (called "Scalawags") and newly arrived Northerners (called "Carpetbaggers") in a Republican party that controlled the state. Most of its votes came from blacks, several of whom held important state offices.A. K. Davis served as lieutenant governor, Hiram Revels, (1827-1901), and Blanche K. Bruce, (1841-1898), were elected by the Legislature to the U.S. Senate, andJohn R. Lynch, (1847-1939), served as a representative ("congressman"). The Republican radical regime faced the determined opposition of the "unreconstructed" white population. Blacks who attempted to exercise their new rights were terrorized by such groups as the Ku Klux Klan.
The planter James Lusk Alcorn, (1816-1894), a Confederate general, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865 but, like other Southerners who had been loyal to theConfederacy, was not allowed to take a seat. He supported suffrage for freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment, as required by the Republicans in Congress. Alcorn became the leader of the "scalawags", who comprised about a third of the Republican party in the state, in coalition with "carpetbaggers" and freedmen.
Alcorn was elected as governor in 1869 and served from 1870 to 1871. As a modernizer, he appointed many like-minded former "Whigs", even if they had become"Democrats". He strongly supported education, including segregated public schools, and a new college for freedmen, now known as Alcorn State University(established 1871 in Lorman, Mississippi). He maneuvered to make his ally Hiram Revels its president. Radical Republicans opposed Alcorn as they were angry about his patronage policy. One complained that Alcorn's policy was to see "the old civilization of the South "modernized"" rather than lead a total political, social and economic revolution.[33]
Alcorn resigned the governorship to become a U.S. Senator (1871–1877), replacing his ally Hiram Revels, the first African-American/Black U.S. Senator. Senator Alcorn urged the removal of the political disabilities of white southerners and rejected Radical Republican proposals to enforce social equality by Federal legislation. Further, he denounced the Federal cotton tax as robbery, and defended separate schools for both races (later termed "segregation") in Mississippi. Although a former slaveholder, he characterized slavery as "a cancer upon the body of the Nation" and expressed gratification which he felt over its destruction.[34]
In 1870, former military governor Adelbert Ames, (1835-1933), was elected by the Legislature (as was the process at the time) to the U.S. Senate. Ames and Alcornbattled for control of the Republican party in Mississippi; their struggle ripped apart the Republican party. In 1873 they both sought a decision by running for governor. Ames was supported by the Radicals and most African Americans, while Alcorn won the votes of conservative whites and most of the scalawags. Ames won by a vote of 69,870 to 50,490. A riot broke out in Vicksburg in December 1873, which resulted in white Democratic reprisals against many Republican supporters, the vast majority of them black.
There was factionalism within the Democratic Party between the Regulars and New Departures, but as the state election of 1875 approached, the Democrats united and worked on the "Mississippi Plan," to organize whites to defeat the black Republicans. Armed attacks by the Red Shirts, White League and the Ku Klux Klan on Republican activists proliferated, as in the September 1875 "Clinton Riot," and Governor Ames appealed to the federal government for armed assistance, which was refused. That November, Democrats gained firm control of both houses of the legislature. Ames requested the intervention of the U.S. Congress since the election had been aubject to voter intimidation and fraud. The state legislature, convening in 1876, drew up articles of impeachment against him and all statewide officials. He resigned and fled the state, "marking the end of Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi."[35][36]

Blacks: 1877-1940[edit]
See also: Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era (United States)
Mississippi has been thought to typify the Deep South during the era of Jim Crow.
But, it had an enormous frontier of undeveloped land in the backcountry of the Mississippi Delta. Tens of thousands of black and white migrants came to the Delta seeking the chance to buy and work land, cut timber and make lives for themselves and their families. Because the Mississippi Delta contained so much fertile bottomland which had not been farmed, away from the river settlements, African Americans achieved unusually high rates of land ownership from 1870 to 1900. Two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Delta were black.
As the Panic of 1893 brought another depression and very low cotton prices, many farmers had to sell their land to pay off debts and become sharecroppers.[43] The sharecropping system, as Cresswell (2006) shows, functioned as a compromise between white landowners' desire for a reliable supply of labor and black workers' refusal to work in gangs.
In 1890 the state adopted a new constitution that imposed a poll tax of $2 a year that the great majority of blacks and poor whites could not pay; they were effectively excluded from the political process. These requirements, with additions in legislation of 1892, resulted in a 90% reduction in the number of blacks who voted. In every county a handful of prominent black ministers and local leaders were allowed to vote.[40]
As only voters could serve on juries, disfranchisement meant blacks could not serve on juries, and lost all chance at local and state offices, as well as representation in Congress. When these provisions survived a Supreme Court challenge in 1898 in Williams v. Mississippi, other southern state legislatures rapidly incorporated them into new constitutions or amendments, effectively extending disfranchisement to every southern state. In 1900 the population of Mississippi was nearly 59% African American, but they were virtually excluded from public life.
The Jim Crow system became total after 1900, with disfranchisement, coupled with increasingly restrictive racial segregation laws, and increased lynchings. Economic disasters always lurked, such as failure of the cotton crop due to boll weevil infestation, and successive severe flooding in 1912 and 1913. By 1920, the third generation after freedom, most African Americans in the state were landless sharecroppers or laborers facing inescapable poverty.[43]
Racial segregation began in Mississippi following the Civil War, with a handful of state laws requiring separate facilities for black and white school children in addition to statutes requiring three restroom facilities in public buildings: one for white males, one for white females, and one for black males and females. Otherwise, segregation arose by local custom more than it did by state or municipal law. Since segregation was a customary practice, historians consider it to be one that mandated social distance between whites and blacks rather than physical distance. In most Mississippi communities from the late 1800s until the 1970s, blacks and whites lived in relative proximity to one another, and whites depended on the labor of blacks either as agricultural or domestic workers. White and black children often played together until they reached puberty, at which time parents began instructing their children about the racial status quo.
White children learned that they were superior to their black counterparts while black children learned the vacillating and arbitrary customs of Jim Crow, which often differed from community to community. By 1900, racial segregation had become more rigid and the customary nature of the practice made it difficult for African Americans to challenge it legally. Jim Crow became the mainstay of the Mississippi social order until it ended by virtue of federal law in 1964 and local customs began to break down by 1970.[44][45]
Tens of thousands of African Americans left Mississippi by train, foot, or boat to migrate north starting in the 1880s; migration reached its pinnacle during World War I. In the Great Migration, they went north to leave a society that had been steadily closing off opportunity.[46] Another wave of migration came in the 1940s and 1950s. Almost half a million people, three-quarters of them black, left Mississippi in the second migration. Many sought jobs in the burgeoning wartime defense industry on the West Coast.

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1945-2000[edit]
Mississippi was a center of the American Civil Rights Movement and especially captured the national stage in 1963 and 1964. Few white leaders in the state supported the effort to secure voting and exercise of other civil rights for African Americans.
According to the 1960 census, the state had a population of 2,178,141, of which 915,743, or 42% of the residents, were black.[55] Their long disfranchisement meant that white state legislators had consistently underfunded segregated schools and services for African Americans, and passed laws that worked against their interests. African Americans had no representation in local governments, juries or law enforcement.
The Ole Miss riot of 1962 erupted as a white mob attacked 500 United States marshals deployed by PresidentJohn F. Kennedy to ensure the safety of James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Segregationist rioters assaulted the marshals with bricks, bottles, and gunfire before the marshals responded with tear gas. The fighting which ensued claimed the lives of two men and seriously injured dozens more, and polarized race relations and politics, as whites assumed they were under attack from the federal government.[56]
In September 1964, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a secretive and extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This covert action program sought to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize Ku Klux Klan groups in Mississippi whose violent vigilante activities alarmed the national government. The program succeeded in creating an atmosphere of paranoia that turned many Klan members against each other. The effect on Klan groups between 1964 and 1971 helped destroy many of them. Some members of the Klan groups subsequently joined other white supremacist organizations, including Christian Identity.[57]
Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964[edit]
Main article: Freedom Summer
Meanwhile black activists had been increasing their local work throughout the South. In Mississippi in 1962, several activists formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), to coordinate activities in voter registration and education of civil rights groups in Mississippi: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1963 COFO organized a Freedom Vote in Mississippi to demonstrate the desire of black Mississippians to vote. They had been disfranchised since statutory and constitutional changes in 1890 and 1892. More than 80,000 people quickly registered and voted in mock elections which pitted candidates from the "Freedom Party" against the official state Democratic Party candidates.[58]
In the summer of 1964, the COFO brought more than one hundred college students, many from outside the state, to Mississippi to join with local activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Many white residents deeply resented the outsiders and attempts to change their society. The work was dangerous. Activists were threatened.
On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two Jewish volunteers from New York, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker, were murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department. With the national uproar caused by their disappearance, President Johnson forced J. Edgar Hoover to have the FBI to investigate.
The FBI found the bodies of the civil rights workers on August 4 in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. During its investigation, the FBI also discovered the bodies of several other Mississippi blacks whose murders and disappearances over the past several years had not gained attention outside their local communities.
The case of the young murdered activists captured national attention. President Johnson used the outrage over their deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2. It banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment and education. It also had a section about voting, but voting protection was addressed more substantially by passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964[edit]
Main article: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
In 1964, civil rights organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all-white slate from the state party, based as it was on disfranchisement of blacks. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, the MFDP held its own primary. They selected Fannie Lou Hamer,Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray to run for Congress, and a slate of delegates to represent Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
The presence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was inconvenient for national leaders. Democratic Party organizers had planned a triumphant celebration of the Johnson Administration’s achievements in civil rights, rather than a fight over racism within the party. Johnson was also worried about inroads that Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was making in what had been the Democratic stronghold of the "Solid South", as well as the support which Independent candidate George Wallace had gained in the North during the Democratic primaries. The all-white delegations from other Southern states threatened to walk out if the official slate from Mississippi was not seated.
Johnson could not prevent the MFDP from taking its case to the Credentials Committee. There Fannie Lou Hamer testified eloquently about the beatings which she and others endured, and the threats they faced, all for trying to register to vote and exercise their constitutional rights. Turning to the television cameras, Hamer asked, "Is this America?"
Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise" under which it would receive two non-voting, at-large seats, while the white delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would retain its seats. The MFDP angrily rejected the compromise. The MFDP kept up its agitation within the convention, even after it was denied official recognition. The 1964 convention disillusioned many within the MFDP and the Civil Rights Movement, but it did not destroy the MFDP. The new party invited Malcolm X, head of the Black Muslims, to speak at its founding convention and issued a statement opposing the war in Vietnam.
Armed self-defense became an integral part of the Southern planning strategy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) after 1964. The ideological shift on the question of nonviolence within CORE and SNCC occurred primarily because of the effect of white violence in Mississippi, such as the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in Neshoba County. The shift marked the beginning of the end of nonviolence as the philosophy and method of the Southern freedom movement.
Southern blacks had a tradition of armed resistance to white violence that had become more organized and intense as the struggle accelerated and federal protection failed to appear. Moreover, it was the armed protection by local blacks and the haven provided by Mississippi's black farming communities that allowed SNCC and CORE to operate effectively in the state.[59]
After 1966 the blacks moved into the Democratic party, where they organized politically to vote, to nominate candidates for office, and win their elections. They struggled to get candidates elected to office, particularly in the Delta, where they were a majority of the population and had long been oppressed by white officials.

Slave Grown Cotton in a Global Economy: Mississippi (1800-1860)

Mississippi History Now published an article in 2006 entitled, "Cotton in a Global Economy: Mississippi (1800-1860)," by Eugene R. Dattel that states, "William Faulkner, Mississippi’s most famous novelist, once said, “To understand the world, you have to understand a place like Mississippi.”

To the world, Mississippi was the epicenter of the cotton production phenomenon during the first half of the 19th century. The state was swept along by the global economic force created by its cotton production, the demand by cotton textile manufacturing in Europe, and New York’s financial and commercial dealings. Mississippi did not exist in a vacuum. So, in a sense, Faulkner’s words could be reversed: “To understand Mississippi, you have to understand the world.”

Mississippi’s social and economic histories in early statehood were driven by cotton and slave labor, and the two became intertwined in America. Cotton was a labor-intensive business, and the large number of workers required to grow and harvest cotton came from slave labor until the end of the American Civil War. Cotton was dependent on slavery and slavery was, to a large extent, dependent on cotton. After emancipation, African Americans were still identified with cotton production.

THE SLAVERY COMPROMISE

This particular chapter of the story of slavery in the United States starts at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When the delegates wrote and agreed upon the Constitution, cotton production was virtually nonexistent in America. There were approximately 700,000 slaves in the United States at the time of the signing of the Constitution. The slave states of South Carolina and Georgia were adamant about having slavery protected by the Constitution. Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, one of the delegates who brokered the slavery compromise, assumed that the evil of slavery was “dying out … and would by degrees disappear.” He also thought that it was best to let the individual states decide about the legality of slavery. Thus, the delegates faced the question: should there be a United States with slavery, or no United States without slavery? The delegates chose a union with slavery.

Soon after the signing of the Constitution, cotton unexpectedly intervened in the 1790s and changed the course of America’s economic and racial future because of the simultaneous occurrence of two events: the mass production of textiles and the mass production of cotton. In the late 18th century, the process started in Great Britain where several inventions — the spinning jenny, Crompton’s spinning mule, and Cartwright’s power loom — revolutionized the textile industry. The improvements allowed cotton fabrics to be mass produced and, therefore, affordable to millions of people.

THE COTTON GIN

At the same time, Eli Whitney, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed recent graduate of Yale University, journeyed to the South to become a tutor on a plantation. He soon became obsessed with the bottleneck in cotton production on his employer’s Georgia plantation. In 1793, the fledgling mechanic soon found a solution to the problem of cleaning cotton and the separation of the seed from the fiber. After a few months, he wrote the now-famous letter to his father in which he described his discovery: “I involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject [of cleaning cotton] and struck out a plan of a Machine [to remove the cotton seed]…I concluded to relinquish my school and turn my attention to perfecting the Machine.” That machine was the cotton gin.

Whitney gave up his career as a teacher to devote full time to manufacturing cotton gins andmaking money. Sadly for Whitney, the cotton gin generated no profits because other manufacturers copied his design without paying him fees. He had obtained a patent on the cotton gin but it proved to be unenforceable. Whitney’s priorities, henceforth, were money and manufacturing. Whitney never seemed, as one historian noted, to care about slavery “one way or the other.”

DEMAND FOR COTTON

Whitney is given credit for unleashing the explosion of American cotton production which was, in turn, propelled by the seemingly insatiable appetite for cotton from the British cotton textile mills. A quick glance at the numbers shows what happened. American cotton production soared from 156,000 bales in 1800 to more than 4,000,000 bales in 1860 (a bale is a compressed bundle of cotton weighing between 400 and 500 pounds). This astonishing increase in supply did not cause a long-term decrease in the price of cotton. The cotton boom, however, was the main cause of the increased demand for slaves – the number of slaves in America grew from 700,000 in 1790 to 4,000,000 in 1860. A materialistic America was well aware of the fact that the price of a slave generally correlated to the price of cotton. Thus, the cotton economy controlled the destiny of African slaves.

Mill workers

By 1860, Great Britain, the world’s most powerful country, had become the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and a significant part of that nation’s industry was cotton textiles. Nearly 4,000,000 of Britain’s total population of 21,000,000 were dependent on cotton textile manufacturing. Nearly forty percent of Britain’s exports were cotton textiles. Seventy-five percent of the cotton that supplied Britain’s cotton mills came from the American South, and the labor that produced that cotton came from slaves.

Textile mill workers

Because of British demand, cotton was vital to the American economy. The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Douglass C. North, stated that cotton “was the most important proximate cause of expansion” in the 19th century American economy. Cotton accounted for over half of all American exports during the first half of the 19th century. The cotton market supported America’s ability to borrow money from abroad. It also fostered an enormous domestic trade in agricultural products from the West and manufactured goods from the East. In short, cotton helped tie the country together.

COTTON AND POPULATION

From the time of its gaining statehood in 1817 to 1860, Mississippi became the most dynamic and largest cotton-producing state in America. The population and cotton production statistics tell a simple, but significant story. The growth of Mississippi’s population before its admission to statehood and afterwards is distinctly correlated to the rise of cotton production. The white population grew from 5,179 in 1800 to 353,901 in 1860; the slave population correspondingly expanded from 3,489 to 436,631. Cotton production in Mississippi exploded from nothing in 1800 to 535.1 million pounds in 1859; Alabama ranked second with 440.5 million pounds.

MISSISSIPPI POPULATION

White “Free Colored” Slave Total
1800* 5,179 182 3,489 8,850
1810* 23,024 240 17,088 40,352
1830 70,443 519 65,659 136,621
1840 179,074 1,366 195,211 375,651
1850 295,718 930 309,878 606,526
1860 353,901 773 436,631 791,305
*Mississippi Territory (present-day Mississippi and Alabama)

MISSISSIPPI COTTON PRODUCTION
(Source: Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy: 1790-1860)

* 1800 0 (millions of pounds) * 1833 70 (millions of pounds) * 1839 193.2 (millions of pounds) * 1849 194 (millions of pounds) * 1859 535.1 (millions of pounds)

Cotton Gin

Mississippi and its neighbors – Alabama, western Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas – provided the cheap land that was suitable for cotton production. Cotton provoked a “gold rush” by attracting thousands of white men from the North and from older slave states along the Atlantic coast who came to make a quick fortune. Slaves were transported in a massive forced migration over land and by sea from the older slave states to the newer cotton states. In 1850, twenty-five percent of the population of New Orleans, Louisiana, was from the North and ten percent of the population in Mobile, Alabama, was former New Yorkers.

Mississippi attracted investors as well as residents. Auctions of cheap Indian lands as a result of cessions of land by the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations drew bidders from the South and East. For example, in the 1830s, the largest purchasers of Chickasaw land in Mississippi were the American Land Company and the New York Land Company. The two companies represented investors or speculators from New York, Boston, and other New Englanders.

New York City, not just Southern cities, was essential to the cotton world. By 1860, New York had become the capital of the South because of its dominant role in the cotton trade. New York rose to its preeminent position as the commercial and financial center of America because of cotton. It has been estimated that New York received forty percent of all cotton revenues since the city supplied insurance, shipping, and financing services and New York merchants sold goods to Southern planters. The trade with the South, which has been estimated at $200,000,000 annually, was an impressive sum at the time.

New York Cotton Exchange

COMPLICITY OF WHITE AMERICA

Most New Yorkers did not care that the cotton was produced by slaves because for them it became sanitized once it left the plantation. New Yorkers even dominated a booming slave trade in the 1850s. Although the importation of slaves into the United States had been prohibited in 1808, the temptation of the astronomical profits of the international slave trade was too strong for many New Yorkers. New York investors financed New York-based slave ships that sailed to West Africa to pick up African captives that were then sold in Cuba and Brazil.

In addition to dominating the slave trade, New York denied voting rights to its small free black population, which comprised only one percent of the population. New York accomplished this by imposing property ownership requirements for its free black residents, while white New Yorkers had no such restriction. New York's poor black population was effectively disfranchised. In 1857, seventy-five percent of Connecticut voters elected to deny suffrage to blacks, and even after the Civil War, voters there again denied black male residents the right to vote. Some western states, such as Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, tried to exclude blacks at the same time they were aggressively recruiting millions of white European immigrants. White America, not just white southerners, helped determine that the destiny of black America would be in the cotton fields of the South for many decades to come.

On the eve of the Civil War, cotton provided the economic underpinnings of the Southern economy. Cotton gave the South power — both real and imagined. Cotton dictated the South’s huge role in a global economy that included Europe, New York, other New England states, and the American west. This economic growth exacted a severe and tragic human price through slavery and the prejudicial treatment of free blacks.

Mississippi was, therefore, both a captive of the cotton world and a major player in the 19th century global economy. (Posted October 2006 in the Mississippi Now).

Eugene R. Dattel, a Mississippi native and economic historian, is a former international investment banker. His first book, The Sun That Never Rose, predicted Japan's economic stagnation in the 1990s. His next book, Cotton and Race in America (1787-1930): The Human Price of Economic Growth, will be published in 2007.