The history of slavery in Mississippi began when the region was still Mississippi Territory and continued until abolition in 1865. The U.S. state of Mississippi had one of the largest populations of enslaved people in the Confederacy, third behind Virginia and Georgia. [1] There were very few free people of color in Mississippi the year before the American Civil War: the ratio was one freedman for every 575 enslaved person. [2]
When the United States took over Mississippi due to the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, importing enslaved people from other regions was initially prohibited under territorial law. However, wealthy planters argued "We need more slaves" and the federal government relented; before long any prohibition on interregional trading was all but forgotten. [3] The first decades of the 19th century in Mississippi featured a continuous rolling action of Indian removal—in which settlers forcibly removed Choctaw and Chickasaw people from their traditional lands. [3] And then, as Walter Johnson puts it, "African-American slaves were brought in to cultivate the land expropriated from Native Americans." [4]
The Mississippi slave code, first passed into law by the Mississippi Legislature in 1823, prohibited groups of five or more enslaved people from gathering as unlawful assembly and leaving a plantation without a handwritten slave pass was prohibited, even to attend religious services. [3] Under antebellum Mississippi law, the standard penalty for an enslaved person convicted of carrying a gun, petty theft, or attending a reading or writing class was 39 lashes. [2]
Land in Mississippi was river bottomland rich in organic matter— "the Mississippi and Yazoo, the Tombigbee, Big Black, and the Pearl covered an area of over one-sixth of the entire state and offered unrivalled soil" [5] —and this land was primarily used to grow the highly valuable cash crop cotton produced with the labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved American laborers of African descent. According to David Walker Howe in What Hath God Wrought, overseas cotton sales in 1836 exceeded US$71,000,000(equivalent to $1,969,927,273 in 2023), and by 1840, the cotton crop was 59 percent of the total value of U.S. exports. [6] Mississippi cotton was a strain produced by crossing a large-bolled variety from Mexico with a green-seed variety from Tennessee that "grew better on piedmont and interior lands" than sea island cotton. [3] The land clearance and plowing necessary to create thousands of acres of mono-crop cotton plantations was ultimately debilitating to the soil, the river, and the native ecosystem. [7]
Population growth in Mississippi in the years 1830–1860 was overwhelmingly due to the interstate slave trade. Enslaved people were imported from the slave states of the upper south and sold at Mississippi slave markets, including the Forks of the Road at Natchez, at Vicksburg, and at some other smaller trading sites. [8]
In Issaquena County, 92.5 percent of population in 1860 were slaves, the highest concentration anywhere in the United States. [9] [10] The U.S. census that year showed 7,244 enslaved people in Issaquena County, and of 115 enslavers, 39 held 77 or more. [11] Stephen Duncan of Issaquena County held 858 slaves, second only to Joshua John Ward of South Carolina. [12] This considerable "value of slave property" made Issaquena County the second wealthiest county in the United States, with "mean total wealth per freeman" at $26,800 in 1860 (equivalent to $741,000in 2023). [13] By 1880—15 years after the abolition of slavery—the county had developed "a strong year-round market for wage labor", and Issaquena was the only county in Mississippi to report "no sharecropping or sharerenting whatsoever". [13]
There can be little doubt that the system was bad for the economy of the state. The question of profits for the individual is another matter, and of that more in a moment, but if he was making profits, very little of them were being reinvested in enterprises that would in the long run benefit the society as a whole, such as banks, reforestation, fertilizer and soil conservation, drainage, manufacturies, ships, roads, schools, public health, and insurance companies. It was all take and no give.
— "Mississippi 1817: A Sociological and Economic Analysis" (2016) [14]
Slavery was common and divisive in all of the Thirteen Colonies, but the numbers were fewer in the free states because their economies were structured not to depend upon forced labor. Therefore, the gradual abolition of slavery in the Northern United States required little economic transition. Conversely, slavery played a significant role in Mississipii's agricultural development and was the basis of the economy and society, so many Mississippi enslavers defended it and insisted upon it. [15]
Mississippians defended slavery in speech and through the press, arguing that slavery improved the physical and moral conditions of the enslaved people, who were otherwise "ignorant". In 1846, a writer in Columbus, Mississippi, wrote that "habits of industry, improves the physical man, tames wild propensities and passions." Additionally, a planter reasoned how enslaved people are "peculiarly fitted for his station in life." [15] He said that enslaved peoples' skin allows them to bask in a semi-tropical sun, and unlike other people, they are content when they in an enslaved situation unless mistreated. [15]
Mississippi enslavers also tried to portray slavery as a positive good in the United States. They emphasized the economic, social, and military advantages of slavery for the nation, especially for slavery states. They argued that slavery enabled the exploitation of large tracts of fertile land, which would otherwise go to waste since no white man could endure the labor in the marshes and ponds. They also claimed that slavery produced valuable crops, such as cotton, which enriched the country and Europe. They also said that slavery added security and strength to slavery states in case of war since the enslaved people would be loyal and obedient to their enslavers. [15]
Some laws regulated slavery in Mississippi from the colonial era to the Civil War. Still, enslavers often violated the laws, which were inconsistently enforced. The laws nominally granted limited rights and protection to enslaved Mississippians, including the right to an impartial trial by jury, prohibiting the killing of enslaved people, and imposing a duty upon enslavers to treat enslaved people with humanity and provide them with basic needs, such as clothing. In 1846, a wealthy man fled the country to avoid trial for murdering one of his enslaved people. [15]
However, enslaved people also faced harsh and extreme punishments for various offenses, such as using abusive language, lifting a hand in opposition to a white person, or stealing from a white person. The punishments were discretionary and depended on the enslaver's or the judge's decision. The treatment of enslaved people and white people for the same crimes was also very different. For instance, an enslaved person was whipped and released for stealing money, while a white man was sent to jail for the same crime. [15]
Slavery in Mississippi during the antebellum era was deeply intertwined with agriculture and, in particular, cotton production. Enslaved farmers in Mississippi also produced corn and vegetables for plantations, but they mostly focused on cotton production since cotton made the most money. [16]
Cotton production introduced a gang system of labor, where enslaved people worked in groups with less autonomy than traditional task systems. These groups were assigned specific tasks, with white overseers monitoring the progress of the gangs. Enslavers often enforced work pace through public whippings, which introduced an element of cruelty to the gang labor system. [16]
Cotton production also involved year-round labor for seed removal from lint, which led to resistance and gin fires during harvesting and ginning seasons. However, from the 1830s, the cotton gin became normalized as plantation equipment, and resistance lessened. [16]
The French, who settled in Mississippi in 1699, fought with the Natchez people (Native American people who lived in the Natchez Bluffs) over control of the land near modern-day Natchez for their agriculture interests. In the Natchez War of 1729–33, the French enslaved many Natchez, most of whom the Choctaw captured, another group of indigenous people, and sold them to the West Indies. French colonists continued to buy enslaved Native American peoples from the Southwest and Missouri Country even after the slave wars in the southeastern United States came to an end. [17]
Even after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Mississippians continued to engage in slavery. The proclamation said that all enslaved people in the rebel states "shall then, thenceforward, and forever free". [18] [19] Enforcement of the Proclamation in Mississippi only became possible after the United States government regained control of the state. [20] [19] As a result, the proclamation did not immediately result in an end of slavery in Mississippi, and many people remained enslaved until the Thirteenth Amendment. [19]
Slavery was effectively abolished in Mississippi by the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865. Mississippi was the only state in the Lower Mississippi Valley that did not abolish slavery during the American Civil War. [19] The state did not officially notify the U.S. archivist of its ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment until 2013. [21]
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
The Antebellum South era was a period in the history of the Southern United States that extended from the conclusion of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. This era was marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and the associated societal norms it cultivated. Over the course of this period, Southern leaders underwent a transformation in their perspective on slavery. Initially regarded as an awkward and temporary institution, it gradually evolved into a defended concept, with proponents arguing for its positive merits, while simultaneously vehemently opposing the burgeoning abolitionist movement.
The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
The forced-labor farms of Leon County were numerous and vast. Leon County, Florida, was a hub of cotton production. From the 1820s through 1850s Leon County's fertile red clay soils and long growing season attracted cotton planters from Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, among other states as well as countries abroad.
Mississippi was the second southern state to declare its secession from the United States, doing so on January 9, 1861. It joined with six other southern states to form the Confederacy on February 4, 1861. Mississippi's location along the lengthy Mississippi River made it strategically important to both the Union and the Confederacy; dozens of battles were fought in the state as armies repeatedly clashed near key towns and transportation nodes.
Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. In 1830, enslaved African Americans represented 24 percent of Kentucky's population, a share that declined to 19.5 percent by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase. Other enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties, where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky, where they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
The African slave trade was first brought to Alabama when the region was part of the French Louisiana Colony.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners systematically forcing slaves to have children to increase their wealth. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women and girls due to forced inter inbreeding with fellow slaves in hopes of producing relatively stronger future slaves. The objective was for slave owners to increase the number of people they enslaved without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
Lakeport Plantation is a historic antebellum plantation house located near Lake Village, Arkansas. It was built around 1859 by Lycurgus Johnson with the profits of slave labor. The house was restored between 2003 and 2008 and is now a part of Arkansas State University as a Heritage site museum.
The role of African Americans in the agricultural history of the United States includes roles as the main work force when they were enslaved on cotton and tobacco plantations in the Antebellum South. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863-1865 most stayed in farming as very poor sharecroppers, who rarely owned land. They began the Great Migration to cities in the mid-20th century. About 40,000 are farmers today.
David Hunt was an American planter based in the Natchez District of Mississippi. From New Jersey in approximately 1800, he took a job in his uncle Abijah Hunt's Mississippi business. After his uncle's untimely 1811 death, as a beneficiary and as the executor of the estate, he began to convert the estate into his plantation empire. By the time of the 1860 slave census, Hunt owned close to 800 slaves. This was after ensuring that each of his five adult children had at least one plantation and had an approximate minimum of 100 slaves apiece. In fact, Hunt and his five adult children and their spouses owned some 1,700 slaves by 1860. He became a major philanthropist in the South, contributing to educational institutions in Mississippi, as well as the American Colonization Society and Mississippi Colonization Society, the latter of which he was a founding member.
Homochitto was an 800-acre (320 ha) plantation located directly on the Mississippi River in Issaquena County, Mississippi, United States. According to one source, Homochitto is a Choctaw name likely meaning "big red", and was earlier applied to the Homochitto River in Mississippi.
Following Robert Cavelier de La Salle establishing the French claim to the territory and the introduction of the name Louisiana, the first settlements in the southernmost portion of Louisiana were developed at present-day Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702), Natchitoches (1714), and New Orleans (1718). Slavery was then established by European colonists.
Slavery in Florida occurred among indigenous tribes and during Spanish rule. Florida's purchase by the United States from Spain in 1819 was primarily a measure to strengthen the system of slavery on Southern plantations, by denying potential runaways the formerly safe haven of Florida. Florida became a slave state, seceded, and passed laws to exile or enslave free blacks. Even after abolition, forced labor continued.
The city of Natchez, Mississippi, was founded in 1716 as Fort Rosalie, and renamed for the Natchez people in 1763.
The history of slavery in Arkansas began in the 1790s, before the Louisiana Purchase made the land territory of the United States. Arkansas was a slave state from its establishment in 1836 until the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1865. Slaveholders were initially clustered in the eastern and southern sections of Arkansas Territory closer to the Mississippi River Delta. Topography was more varied in the north and west, so there were fewer slaves in those sections. Enslaved people would live in rural or urban antebellum Arkansas. Development of Arkansas caused rapid growth in the slave population. In 1810, 188 of the total population were slaves, and by 1820 it had risen to 1,617. The number of enslaved people continued to grow through the territorial period and up to the Civil War. By 1830, the enslaved population reached 4,576, 19,935 by 1840, 47,100 by 1850 and 111,115 by 1860. As the enslaved population grew, it constituted a larger and larger portion of the total population, growing from 11% in 1820 to 25% in 1860.
Pierre Michel La Pice de Bergondy, generally known as P. M. Lapice, sometimes Peter Lapice, was a merchant, sugar planter, and owner of a large number of slaves in 19th-century Mississippi and Louisiana in the United States. He was credited with Louisiana sugar-industry firsts, including producing the first white sugar, erecting the first cane-mill with five rollers, and building the first successful bagasse burner.
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