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St. Joseph, often called St. Joe, is a town in and the parish seat of rural Tensas Parish in northeastern Louisiana, United States, in the delta of the Mississippi River. The population was 1,340 at the 2000 census, which declined by 12.2 percent to 1,176 in 2010. The town had an African-American majority of 77.4 percent in 2010.
Louisiana is a state in the Deep South region of the South Central United States. It is the 31st most extensive and the 25th most populous of the 50 United States. Louisiana is bordered by the state of Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. A large part of its eastern boundary is demarcated by the Mississippi River. Louisiana is the only U.S. state with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are equivalent to counties. The state's capital is Baton Rouge, and its largest city is New Orleans.
A county seat is an administrative center, seat of government, or capital city of a county or civil parish. The term is used in Canada, China, Romania, Taiwan and the United States. County towns have a similar function in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, and historically in Jamaica.
The Scottish people or Scots, are a nation and Celtic ethnic group native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged from an amalgamation of two Celtic-speaking peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. Later, the neighbouring Celtic-speaking Cumbrians, as well as Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons and Norse, were incorporated into the Scottish nation.
The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2018 population of 8,398,748 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Natchez is the county seat and only city of Adams County, Mississippi, United States. Natchez has a total population of 15,792. Located on the Mississippi River across from Vidalia in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, Natchez was a prominent city in the antebellum years, a center of cotton planters and Mississippi River trade.
In 1880, at the age of twenty-four, Davidson moved the short distance north to St. Joseph and became a merchant and planter. He married Carrie Moore (1866-1957), daughter of Joseph Moore, one of the wealthiest men in Tensas Parish. He moved with comfort and ease into the circle of the Tensas elite.[2]
Political and civic affairs
Davidson was a founder and the general manager of the powerful Panola Company, an agricultural entity based in St. Joseph which controlled at one point eleven thousand acres of valuable farmland. J. H. Netterville supervised three of its most valuable holdings, the Balmoral, Blackwater, and Wyoming plantations.[1] He sat on the board of the Bank of St. Joseph, the most stable financial institution in Tensas Parish. He worked to bring the USDA Agricultural Experiment Station to St. Joseph and lobbied for construction of the Mississippi River bridge at Natchez, which linked the lower delta country to one of it major trade cities.[2]
Lobbying, persuasion, or interest representation is the act of attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of officials in their daily life, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies. Lobbying is done by many types of people, associations and organized groups, including individuals in the private sector, corporations, fellow legislators or government officials, or advocacy groups. Lobbyists may be among a legislator's constituencies, meaning a voter or bloc of voters within their electoral district; they may engage in lobbying as a business. Professional lobbyists are people whose business is trying to influence legislation, regulation, or other government decisions, actions, or policies on behalf of a group or individual who hires them. Individuals and nonprofit organizations can also lobby as an act of volunteering or as a small part of their normal job. Governments often define and regulate organized group lobbying that has become influential.
Davidson was the first mayor of St. Joseph from its incorporation in 1901 until his death some twenty-nine years later.[3][4]
As the office of mayor in such small communities was and remains part-time, Davidson was also the Tensas Parish treasurer for some three decades.[1] He was heavily involved in partisan activities of both the parish and the state committees of the Democratic Party. He was a conservative Democrat, whose political views were shaped by the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He had managed to put the grief of Confederate defeat, known in history and literature as The Lost Cause, behind him, particularly with the arrival of the promise of the 20th century.[2]
The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party.
The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American historical negationist ideology that holds that, despite losing the American Civil War, the cause of the Confederacy was a just and heroic one. The ideology endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the war as a struggle primarily for the Southern way of life or "states' rights" in the face of overwhelming "Northern aggression". At the same time, the Lost Cause minimizes or denies outright the central role of slavery in the outbreak of the war.
Death of Lt. Joseph Moore Davidson
The community and parish had grown accustomed to Davidson's leadership. Then tragedy struck. His brilliant son, Joseph Moore "Jody" Davidson (1894-1918),[5] was killed in action in France shortly before the armistice ending World War I, then known as The Great War.[6]
Decades later, after desegregation and reorganization, the former Joseph Moore Davidson High School is now known as Tensas High School, one of only three schools still operated by the Tensas Parish School Board, which manages a decreasing pupil population in the smallest parish in Louisiana. Most of the minority of whites in the parish attend private schools, particularly Tensas Academy in St. Joseph.[7] Nearly all African Americans of school age are enrolled in public schools, which have struggled financially and with weak pupil performance for many years.[8]
Mayor Davidson's accidental death
In January 1930, some eleven years after his son's death, Davidson died from an accidental fall. He slipped on an icy patch of sidewalk outside his office, fell, and fractured his skull. He was carried into his Bank of St. Joseph, of which he was the president, and there he lapsed into unconsciousness and died a few minutes later. Davidson's sudden demise brought an outpouring of emotion from all races and classes, "on every face of every color of every age," as the editor of the Tensas Gazette described the tragedy.[2]
The 1930 census, conducted three months after Davidson's death showed Tensas Parish with a population of 10,795 blacks (72 percent) and 4,301 whites (28 percent); by contrast in 1920, there were about the same number of African Americans, 10,314 (85 percent), but only 1,771 whites (15 percent) in the parish.[9]
A. H. Jackson, then the principal of the all-black Tensas Parish Training School in St. Joseph, later known as Tensas Rosenwald High School, described Davidson as "always straightforward, full of advice and sympathy," and supportive of "movements which he felt were good for all the people irrespective of race or color."[2] The Natchez Democrat described Davidson as a "man of sterling character, honest and upright in his dealings with his fellow man, possessing all of the attributes of a true Christian gentleman."[2]
For the Tensas planter class, small in number but powerful in influence, Davidson's death signaled the quick passing of the old order. Davidson personally epitomized the Victorian ideals of the old planter aristocracy unaccustomed to much social, political, or economic change but always in expectation of the periodic soaring of its profits based on agricultural market conditions.[2]
William and Carrie Davidson are interred together at Natchez City Cemetery in Natchez, Mississippi.[10][11]
1 2 3 Frederick W. Williamson and George T. Goodman, eds. Eastern Louisiana: A History of the Watershed of the Ouachita River and the Florida Parishes, 3 vols. Monroe: Historical Record Association, 1939, pp. 982-983, 985-986
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