Kangaroo, Mississippi was a "red-light district" and/or shantytown located just north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States, in a swampy spot where the Glass Bayou entered the Mississippi River. [1] The settlement took its name from its most famous brothel, but no one living knows how that house of ill repute got its name. [2]
Prior to the American Civil War, Kangaroo was notorious for its gambling halls and occasional instances of public disorder resulting from disputes between the players and/or local law enforcement. [3] According to a study of colonial and antebellum Warren County, "The Kangaroo was a constant source of embarrassment and fear for Vicksburg's established residents." [4]
Kangaroo was leveled by a fire in 1834, and "A hundred or so gathered to mourn the death, as one local wit put it, of their 'friend,' the 'celebrated KANGAROO." [4]
On July 5, 1835, the gamblers of Kangaroo shot and killed Rev. Dr. Hugh Bodley, a Presbyterian minister. [1] Another account says Bodley died "trying to blast the gamblers out of a coffee shop." [4] Consequent to this, the people of Vicksburg hanged a number of gamblers and affiliates, an instance of vigilante violence emblematic of the age of Jackson. This mass lynching is cited as an example of the tradition of "quasi-respectable violence in America. Vigilantes conceived of their violence as a supplement to, rather than a rebellion against the law." Southern authorities (compared to the North) showed a marked and measurable indifference to the repression of white mobs. [5]
Besides the gamblers, other denizens of Kangaroo included "prostitutes, and drunken brawlers." [6]
Vicksburg is a historic city in Warren County, Mississippi, United States. It is the county seat. The population was 21,573 at the 2020 census. Located on a high bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from Louisiana, Vicksburg was built by French colonists in 1719. The outpost withstood an attack from the native Natchez people. It was incorporated as Vicksburg in 1825 after Methodist missionary Newitt Vick. The area that is now Vicksburg was long occupied by the Natchez Native Americans as part of their historical territory along the Mississippi. The first Europeans who settled the area were French colonists who built Fort Saint Pierre in 1719 on the high bluffs overlooking the Yazoo River at present-day Redwood. They conducted fur trading with the Natchez and others, and started plantations. During the American Civil War, it was a key Confederate river-port, and its July 1863 surrender to Ulysses S. Grant, along with the concurrent Battle of Gettysburg, marked the turning-point of the war.
The siege of Vicksburg was the final major military action in the Vicksburg campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of maneuvers, Union Major General Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate Army of Mississippi, led by Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, into the defensive lines surrounding the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, leading to the successful siege and Confederate surrender.
John Andrews Murrell, known as "John A. Murrell", with his surname sometimes spelled as "Murel" or "Murrel", and called the "Great Western Land Pirate", was a 19th-century bandit and criminal operating along the Natchez Trace and Mississippi River, in the southern United States. His exploits were widely known at the time, and he became a noted figure in 20th century fiction.
The Natchez Trace, also known as the Old Natchez Trace, is a historic forest trail within the United States which extends roughly 440 miles (710 km) from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, linking the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers.
John Clifford Pemberton was a United States Army officer who fought in the Seminole Wars and with distinction during the Mexican–American War. He resigned his commission to serve as a Confederate lieutenant-general during the American Civil War. He led the Army of Mississippi from December 1862 to July 1863 and was the commanding officer during the Confederate surrender at the Siege of Vicksburg.
Juke joint is the African-American vernacular term for an informal establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, primarily operated by African Americans in the southeastern United States. A juke joint may also be called a "barrelhouse". The Jook was the first secular cultural arena to emerge among African-American freedmen.
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 states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
The Mississippi River campaigns, within the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War, were a series of military actions by the Union Army during which Union troops, helped by Union Navy gunboats and river ironclads, took control of the Cumberland River, the Tennessee River, and the Mississippi River, a main north-south avenue of transport.
Disharoon's Plantation was located in Tensas Parish, Louisiana and was used as a steamboat landing on the Mississippi River by Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War.
Peter Burwell Starke was an American politician who served as a Brigadier-General in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States.
George Boardman Boomer was a Union Army colonel who served as a brigade commander between February 12, 1863, and May 22, 1863, during the American Civil War. His principal service was during the heavy engagement of his brigade on May 16, 1863, at the Battle of Champion Hill during the Vicksburg campaign and in the second assault on Vicksburg on May 22, 1863. Colonel Boomer was killed near the Railroad Redoubt on the second day of major assaults on the City of Vicksburg on May 22, 1863.
The 42d Mississippi Infantry Regiment, also known as the "Forty-second Mississippi", was an infantry formation of the Confederate States Army in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War, and was successively commanded by Colonels Hugh R. Miller, William A. Feeney, and Andrew M. Nelson.
Landis's Missouri Battery, also known as Landis's Company, Missouri Light Artillery, was an artillery battery that served in the Confederate States Army during the early stages of the American Civil War. The battery was formed when Captain John C. Landis recruited men from the Missouri State Guard in late 1861 and early 1862. The battery fielded two 12-pounder Napoleon field guns and two 24-pounder howitzers for much of its existence, and had a highest reported numerical strength of 62 men. After initially serving in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, where it may have fought in the Battle of Pea Ridge, the unit was transferred east of the Mississippi River. The battery saw limited action in 1862 at the Battle of Iuka and at the Second Battle of Corinth.
Narrative of Henry Watson, a fugitive slave is a slave narrative by Henry Watson, an African-American slave and abolitionist. His work is autobiographical, characteristic of the slave narratives of fugitive slaves of the period before emancipation. It is written in a "polemical" style typical of fugitive slave narratives and details the abuses he experienced while enslaved. Unlike most fugitive slave narratives, however, Watson's memoir recounts his self-doubt rather than projecting an image of heroism.
The Mississippi River was an important military highway that bordered ten states, roughly equally divided between Union and Confederate loyalties.
Steele's Greenville expedition took place from April 2 to 25, 1863, during the Vicksburg campaign of the American Civil War. Union forces commanded by Major General Frederick Steele occupied Greenville, Mississippi, and operated in the surrounding area, to divert Confederate attention from a more important movement made in Louisiana by Major General John A. McClernand's corps. Minor skirmishing between the two sides occurred, particularly in the early stages of the expedition. Over 1,000 slaves were freed during the operation, and large quantities of supplies and animals were destroyed or removed from the area. Along with other operations, including Grierson's Raid, Steele's Greenville expedition distracted Confederate attention from McClernand's movement. Some historians have suggested that the Greenville expedition represented the Union war policy's shifting more towards expanding the war to Confederate social and economic structures and the Confederate homefront.
The Vicksburg massacre, sometimes referred to as the Vicksburg riot, was a freedmen massacre on December 7, 1874, that continued until around January 5, 1875, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States. An estimated 150–300 Black citizens, and 2 White citizens were killed during the violence. Sheriff Peter Crosby, an African American, was forcibly removed from office, reinstated, and then shot in the head.
Peter Crosby, was an American sheriff, tax collector, military officer, and businessperson. In 1873 during the Reconstruction-era, Crosby was the first African American to be elected as sheriff in Warren County, Mississippi. Crosby was forcibly removed from his office in December 1874 by an angry mob of White militia, the event is often referred to as the Vicksburg massacre.
In the history of slavery in the United States, a slave pass was a written document granting permission for an enslaved person to move around without escort by an enslaver.
Andrew Jackson bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for use on his plantations and for short-term gain through slave arbitrage. He was most active in the interregional slave trade, which he termed "the mercantile transactions," from the 1790s through the 1810s. Available evidence shows that speculator Jackson trafficked people between his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, and the slave markets of the lower Mississippi River valley.