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Natchez to New Orleans: Norman's chart of the lower Mississippi River by A. Persac (1858) showing cotton plantations of Mississippi along the Mississippi River, Natchez to state line
1860 US census, Mississippi, number of slaves per owner
Former slave quarters at Jefferson Davis' plantation Brierfield in Mississippi, drawn by A.R. Waud, etching published 1866 in Harper's Weekly

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 slaves. [2]

Legal history

When the United States took over Mississippi as a consequence of the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, importing slaves from other regions was initially prohibited under territorial law. However, wealthy planters argued "we need more slaves" and the federal government relented, and before long any prohibition on interregional trading was all but forgotten. [3] The first decades of the 19th century in Mississippi were defined by a continuous rolling action of Indian removal—in which Choctaw and Chickasaw people were forcibly removed 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 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 a slave convicted of carrying a gun, petty larceny, or attending a class where reading or writing were taught, was 39 lashes. [2]

Economic history

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 $1,892,042,424 in 2022), 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 monocrop 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 a number of 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 slaves in Issaquena County, and of 115 slave owners, 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 large "value of slave property" made Issaquena County the second richest county in the United States, with "mean total wealth per freeman" at $26,800 in 1860 (equivalent to $715,000 in 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]

Defending Slavery

Slavery was common and divisive in all of the Thirteen Colonies, but the numbers were fewer in the North because African-American labor was less needed. Therefore, the gradual abolition of slavery in the North did not require much sacrifices. Differently, in Mississippi, slavery played a significant role in the state's agricultural development and was the basis of the economy and society, so it was defended and insisted by many Mississippian slaveholders. [14]

Benefits for enslaved people

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." [14] 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. [14]

Benefits for the country

The slaveholders of Mississippi also tried to portray slavery as a positive and progressive force for the country. They emphasized the economic, social, and military advantages of slavery for the nation, especially for the South. 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 even Europe. They also said that slavery added security and strength to the South in case of war, since the enslaved people would be loyal and obedient to their masters. [14]

Slavery Laws

There were laws that regulated slavery in Mississippi from the colonial era to the Civil War, but the laws were inconsistent and often violated by the slaveholders. The laws granted limited rights and protection to enslaved people in Mississippi, including the right to an impartial trial by jury, the prohibition of killing enslaved people, and the duty of the slaveholders 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. [14]

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 owner’s or the judge's decision. The treatment of enslaved people and white people for the same crimes were 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. [14]

Slavery and Agriculture

Slavery in Mississippi during the antebellum era was deeply intertwined with agriculture, and in particular cotton production. Agricultural slaves in Mississippi also produced corn and vegetables for plantations, but for most of the time they focused on cotton production since cotton made the most money. [15]

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. Work pace was often enforced through public whippings, which introduced an element of cruelty to the gang labor system. [15]

Cotton production also involved year-round labor for seed removal from lint, which lead 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. [15]

Native Americans

The French, who settled in Mississippi in 1699, fought with the Natchez (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 had been captured by the Choctaw, another group of indigenous people, and sold them to the West Indies. French colonists continued to buy Indian enslaved people from the Southwest and Missouri Country even after the slaving wars in the Southeast came to an end. [16]

Abolishment

Even after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, slavery remained in Mississippi. The proclamation said that all enslaved people in the rebel states "shall then, thenceforward, and forever free,” [17] [18] but it did not include the Confederate territories ruled by the Union, including Mississippi. Additionally, the proclamation depended on the Union’s victory to be enforced, and Mississippi remained a stronghold of the Confederacy until the end of the war. [19] [18] As a result, the proclamation did not end slavery in Mississippi, and many enslaved people remained in slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment. [18]

Slavery was abolished in Mississippi by the Thirteenth Amendment, an Amendment ratified in December 1865 to abolish slavery. Mississippi was the only state in the Lower Mississippi Valley that did not abolish slavery during the Civil War. [18] However, the state did not officially notify the U.S. archivist of its ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment until 2013. [20]

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ "Slavery in Antebellum Mississippi". Mississippi Humanities Council. Retrieved 2023-09-03.
  2. ^ a b Currie, James T. (1980). "From Slavery to Freedom in Mississippi's Legal System". The Journal of Negro History. 65 (2): 112–125. doi: 10.2307/2717050. ISSN  0022-2992.
  3. ^ a b c d Jewett, Clayton E.; Allen, John O. (2004). Slavery in the South: a state-by-state history. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. pp. 160–162. ISBN  978-0-313-32019-4.
  4. ^ Johnson (2013), p. 5.
  5. ^ Hawes, Ruth B. (1913). "Slavery in Mississippi". The Sewanee Review. 21 (2): 223–234. ISSN  0037-3052.
  6. ^ Coates, Ta-Nehisi (2010-07-30). "What Cotton Hath Wrought". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2023-09-03.
  7. ^ Johnson (2013), p. 8.
  8. ^ "The Forks of the Road Slave Market at Natchez - 2003-02". www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov. Retrieved 2023-09-03.
  9. ^ "Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860". Library of Congress.
  10. ^ Blake, Tom (2001). "Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules". Ancestry.com.
  11. ^ Franks, Bob (2010). "Issaquena County Slave Research". Issaquena Genealogy and History Project.
  12. ^ Blake, Tom (2004). "THE SIXTEEN LARGEST AMERICAN SLAVEHOLDERS FROM 1860 SLAVE CENSUS SCHEDULES". Ancestry.com. Archived from the original on 2013-07-19. Retrieved 2013-06-09.
  13. ^ a b Cobb, James C. (1992). The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. Oxford. ISBN  9780199762439. - Read at Google Books
  14. ^ a b c d e f Hawes, Ruth B. (1913). "Slavery in Mississippi". The Sewanee Review. 21 (2): 223–234. ISSN  0037-3052. Retrieved 2023-01-11 – via JSTOR.
  15. ^ a b c Libby, David (2017-07-11). "Slavery and Agriculture". Mississippi Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2024-01-12.
  16. ^ Gallay, Alan (2017-07-11). "Slavery, Native American". Mississippi Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2024-01-11.
  17. ^ "Emancipation Proclamation - Definition, Dates & Summary". HISTORY. 2023-03-29. Retrieved 2024-01-12.
  18. ^ a b c d Rodrigue, John C. (2017). ""Repudiating the Emancipation Proclamation, and Re-establishing Slavery": The Abolition of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the United States". Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association. 58 (4): 389–403. ISSN  0024-6816. Retrieved 2023-01-11 – via JSTOR.
  19. ^ "Emancipation Proclamation (1863)". National Archives. 2021-08-16. Retrieved 2024-01-12.
  20. ^ Nuwer, Rachel (2013-02-23). "Mississippi Officially Ratifies Amendment to Ban Slavery, 148 Years Late". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2024-01-11.

Sources

Further reading

  • Sydnor, Charles Sackett (2013) [1933]. Slavery in Mississippi. Southern Classics Series. Introduction by John David Smith. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN  978-1-61117-332-1. OCLC  841893857.