History of Mississippi
Encyclopedia
The state of Mississippi
's history goes back beyond American statehood to ancient Native American times.
At the end of the last Ice Age Native American
or Paleo-Indians appeared in what today is the South
. Paleo Indians in the South were hunter-gatherers who pursued the mega fauna that became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene
age. After thousands of years, the Paleo Indians developed a rich agricultural society. Archeologists called these people the Mississippians of the Mississippian culture
.
Descendant Native American
tribes include the Chickasaw
and Choctaw
. Other tribes who inhabited the territory of Mississippi (and whose names became those of local towns) include the Natchez
, the Yazoo
, the Pascagoula
, and the Biloxi
.
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.
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 Church created 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.
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.
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
.
of 1795. Georgia finally ceded the disputed area in 1805 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 and the accompanying rise of slave labor did Mississippi begin to flourish.
There were land disputes with the Spanish, and in 1810 the settlers in parts of West Florida rebelled and declared their freedom from Spain. President James Madison
declared 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 the Louisiana 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, MS in 1813.
was the first state capital; the capital was moved to Jackson in 1822.
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 Belt
regions—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 heavy role in both state politics and in the support for secession.
Mississippi's population grew rapidly, reaching 791,000 in 1860. Cotton production grew from 43,000 bales in 1820 to over 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 little was grown outside the United States. In Mississippi some modernizers spoke of diversification, and vegetable and livestock production did increase, 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 lage profits, but they invested it on buying more cotton lands and more slaves, which pushed up prices even higher. They did not feel at all guilty about holding slaves. 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.
, 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 Jan. 9, 1861. Mississippi's U.S. senator Jefferson Davis
became president of the onfederate St
.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. Brett Favre
's 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.
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.
, who carried the state into secession, whipped up the war spirit, began military and domestic mobilization, and prepared to finance the war. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Freedman's Bureau of the U.S. Army
appointed a temporary government under Judge William Lewis Sharkey. It repealed secession and wrote new Black Codes defining and limiting the civil rights of the African American freedmen as a sort of third class status without citizenship or voting rights. The Black Codes never took effect, however, since the legal affairs of the freedmen came under the control of sympathetic Freedman's Bureau representatives. Most of them were former Army officers from the North. Many stayed in the state and became political and business leaders (scornfully known as "carpetbaggers"). The Black codes outraged northern opinion and apparently were never put into effect in any state.
Congress responded in September 1865 by refusing to seat the newly elected delegation. In 1867 it put Mississippi under U.S. Army rule as part of Reconstruction until the legal status of ex-Confederates and freedmen could be worked out. The military governor general Adelbert Ames
deposed the civil government, enrolled black men as voters, and prohibited for a period of time 1000 or so former Confederate leaders to vote or hold office. The 1868 constitution had major elements that lasted for 22 years. The convention was the first political organization to include African American representatives, who numbered 17 among the 100 members. Although 32 counties had Negro majorities, they elected whites as well as Negroes to represent them. The convention adopted universal male suffrage; did away with property qualifications for suffrage or for office, which benefited poor whites, too; created the state's first public school system; forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property; and prohibited limiting of civil rights in travel. Since 17 of the 100 delegates were blacks, the body was called the Black and Tan convention by its enemies. Mississippi was readmitted to Congress on Feb. 23, 1870.
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 and Blanche K. Bruce were elected by the legislature to the U.S. Senate, and John R. Lynch
served as a congressman. The Republican 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, a Confederate general, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865 but, like other Southerners who had been loyal to the Confederacy, 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.
On 1869 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 were now Democrats. He strongly supported education, including segregated public schools, and a new college for freedmen, now known as Alcorn State University
. 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.
Alcorn resigned the governorship to become a U.S. Senator
(1871–1877), replacing his ally Hiram Revels, the first African American 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 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.
In 1870 former military governor Adelbert Ames
was elected to the U.S. Senate. Ames and Alcorn battled 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 that started a series of 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 untied and brought out the "Mississippi Plan
" which called for the systematic organization of all whites to defeat the Republicans. Armed attacks by the Red Shirts and White League
on Republican activists proliferated, and Governor Ames appealed to the federal government for 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 he believed that the election was full of voter intimidation and fraud. The state legislature, convening in 1876, drew up articles of impeachment against him and all statewide officials. He resigned a few months after the legislature agreed to drop the articles against him.
The state remained rural, but the railroad system, which had been destroyed in the war, was rebuilt; a few more towns appeared, as well as small-scale industry. Everyone was now growing cotton, not just the rich Delta lands worked by black sharecroppers but also the poorer lands in other districts where poor whites operated their farms. The "crop-lien system
involved local merchants who lent money for food and supplies all year, and then split the cotton crop to pay the debts and perhaps leave a little cash left over for the farmer—or often leave him further in debt to the merchants.
In 1878 the worst yellow fever epidemic Mississippi had seen ravaged the state. The disease, sometimes known as 'Yellow Jack,' and 'Bronze John,' devastated Mississippi socially and economically. Entire families were wiped out while others fled their homes in panic for the presumed safety of other parts of the state. Quarantine regulations, passed to prevent the spread of the disease, brought trade to a stop. Some local economies never recovered. Beechland, near Vicksburg, became a ghost town because of the epidemic. By the end of the year, 3,227 people had died from the disease.
The farmers resented the Bourbon control of politics and the credit lein system that seemed to keep them forever in debts. Efforts to fight the system politically went nowhere. The Populist movement failed to attract the large following in Mississippi that it did in Alabama, Georgia and other Southern states. Mississippi did put forward a few articulate Populist spokesmen, such as newspaper editor Frank Burkitt, but poor farmers, white and black, refused to follow the leadership of the Farmers' Alliance
. Few farmers were willing to support the subtreasury plan, the Alliance plan of aiding farmers by providing low-cost federal loans secured by crops. The Democratic Party machine, the increasing activism of the National Grange, and fear of black political domination also contributed to the failure of Mississippi populism. By the birth of the People's Party in 1892, Mississippi populism was too weak to play a major role.
Whitecapping
, a violent, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro dirt farmer movement, arose in the Piney Woods region of southern Mississippi in response to low prices, rising costs, and increasing tenancy brought about by the crop lien system. Whitecaps resented Negro tenancy on lands acquired by merchants –some of them Jewish—through foreclosures. Whitecap Clubs, resembling fraternal and military organizations, attempted to intimidate Negro laborers and landowners, and to prevent mercantile land acquisition. Whitecaps came from the rural poor; their leaders from a higher social strata.
during the era of Jim Crow
. 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 during the 1870s and 1880s.
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. 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 with stiff restrictions on voting, and especially a poll tax
of $2 a year that the great majority of blacks did not pay, and thus could not vote. These requirements, with additions in legislation of 1892, resulted in a 90% reduction in numbers of blacks who voted. In every county a handful of prominent black ministers and local leaders were allowed to vote.
As only voters could serve on juries, the disfranchisement meant that blacks did not get to 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 Delta were landless sharecroppers or laborers facing inescapable poverty. As a result tens of thousands of African Americans left Mississippi by train to migrate north starting during World War I
. In the Great Migration
, they went north to leave a society that had been steadily closing off opportunity. 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.
. By the 1940s, the Jeanes program changed its emphasis from industrial education to academic subjects. Other major northern foundations also helped, especially the General Education Board
(funded by the Rockefeller Foundation
and the Rosenwald Fund
, while northern churches supported denominational colleges.
, jazz music, blues
, and rock and roll
, all were invented, promulgated, or heavily developed by Mississippi musicians.
John Lomax
recorded some of the Delta's rich musical tradition for the Library of Congress
. He recorded a very young Muddy Waters
, and also convict blues songs and field chants at Mississippi State Penitentiary
at Parchman.
The Progressive Era
reached Mississippi. Governor Theodore Bilbo (1916–20) had the most successful administration of all the governors who served between 1877 and 1917, putting state finances in order and supporting such Progressive measures as passing a compulsory school attendance law, founding a new charity hospital, and establishing
a board of bank examiners. But Bilbo became intensely racist after moving on to the Senate in 1934.
A renewed surge of patriotism during World War I swept away most of the remaining bitterness from the Civil War and helped end Mississippi's physical and psychological isolation.
. Ownby (1999) in his in-depth study of the state identifies four American dreams that the new consumer culture addressed. The first was the "Dream of Abundance," offering a cornucopia of material goods to all Americans, making them proud to be the richest society on earth. The second was the "Dream of a Democracy of Goods," whereby everyone had access to the same products regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or class, thereby challenging the aristocratic norms of the rest of the world whereby only the rich or well-connected are granted access to luxury. The "Dream of Freedom of Choice," with its ever expanding variety of good allowed people to fashion their own particular life style. Finally, the "Dream of Novelty," in which ever-changing fashions, new models, and unexpected new products broadened the consumer experience in terms of purchasing skills and awareness of the market, and challenged the conservatism of traditional society and culture, and even politics. Ownby acknowledges that the dreams of the new consumer culture radiated out from the major cities, but notes that they quickly penetrated the most rural and most isolated areas, such as rural Mississippi. With the arrival of the model T after 1910, consumers in rural America were no longer locked into local general stores with their limited merchandise and high prices, and to comparison shop and in towns and cities. Ownby demonstrates that poor black Mississippians shared in the new consumer culture, both inside Mississippi, and it motivated the more ambitious to move to Memphis or Chicago.
Not all Mississippi was doing well. In the Pearl River country in the south central region, the 1920s was a decade of persistent poverty and new interest in antimodernist politics and culture. The timber companies that had employed up to half of all workers were running short of timber so payrolls dwindled. Farming was hard-scrabble. Governor Theodore G. Bilbo
, a native of the region, won widespread support among the poor white farmers and loggers with his attacks on the elites, the big cities, and the blacks. Dry laws were but one aspect of a pervasive prohibitionism that included laws against business or recreation on Sunday as well as attacks on Catholics and immigrants. Baptist and some other denominations embraced fundamentalism and rejected newfangled liberal ideas such as evolution along with the Social Gospel
.
After 1928, the pressure to build roads motivated politicians to talk up the cause. They enacted massive bond issues, create excise taxes, and centralize control to create a genuine state highway system, with a system of main highways designed by engineers, using a common system of signage and nomenclature.
s made modernization economically possible by 1940, but most planters feared loss of racial and social control and simply shifted from sharecropping to wage labor. As workers left the farm for military service or defense jobs, farm wages rose. By 1944, wages had tripled. In 1945 the newly established Delta War Wage Board provided planters temporary relief by setting a maximum wage for farm workers, but President Harry S. Truman lifted wartime economic controls in 1946.
Beginning in the 1930s, the ravages of the boll weevil and federal crop restrictions and conservation programs encouraged many farmers to turn from cotton farming to growing other crops, such as soybeans; to sowing grasses for livestock; and to planting trees for timber. Agricultural productivity increased, and as an added bonus the soils were improved by crop rotation, strip planting, terracing, contour plowing, and the use of improved fertilizers, insecticides, and seeds. After 1945 , farm mechanization advanced rapidly, especially in the cotton belt, and small farms were consolidated, as small farmers who could not afford the new machinery and sharecroppers left the land. Planters rapidly mechanized. It now took only a few operators of cotton picking machines to do the work of hundreds. There was no other farm work for the sharecroppers, so the entire sharecropping system collapsed as the croppers moved to the cities, often in the North. By 1950 whites were a majority of the population, statewide and in every region outside the Delta.
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. 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 President John 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.
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
.
(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.
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.
The presence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was inconvenient. 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 support which Independent candidate George Wallace had received in the North during the Democratic primaries. 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 for trying to register to vote. 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 opposed 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 impact of events in Mississippi such as the murder 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 that became 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.
After 1966 the blacks moved into the Democratic party, where the fought for control of local government, especially in the Delta.
members and sympathizers gave Mississippi a reputation as a reactionary state. The state was the last to repeal prohibition
and to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment
, in 1966 and 1995 respectively.
's severe damage to several riverboat casino
s in August 2005. Gambling towns in Mississippi include the Gulf coast towns of Gulfport
and Biloxi
and the river towns of Vicksburg
and Tunica
. Prior to Katrina, Mississippi was the second largest gambling state in the Union, after Nevada
and ahead of New Jersey
.
Hurricane Camille
hit the Mississippi coast killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage.
September 12, 1979 - Hurricane Frederic
September 2, 1985 - Hurricane Elena
September 28, 1998 - Hurricane Georges
August 29, 2005 - Hurricane Katrina
caused even greater destruction across the entire 90 miles (144.8 km) of Mississippi Gulf coast from Louisiana to Alabama.
, as well as William Alexander Percy
, Walker Percy
, Shelby Foote
, Stark Young
, Eudora Welty
and Anne Moody
.
Roberts, Bobby and Moneyhon, Carl. Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War, (1992). 396 pp.
Smith, Timothy B. Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) 265 pages; $Documents the declining morale of Mississippians as they witnessed extensive destruction and came to see victory as increasingly improbable
Span, Christopher M. From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875 (2009)
Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi. (1933).
Thompson, Julius E. Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865–1965. (2007). 253 pp. isbn 978-0-7864-2722-2.)
Wayne, Michael. The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860–1880 (1983)
Weaver, Herbert. Mississippi Farmers, 1850-1860 (1945)
Wharton, Vernon Lane. The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (1947)
Willis, John C. Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta After the Civil War (2000)
Wynne, Ben. Mississippi's Civil War: A Narrative History. (2006). 243 pp. isbn 978-0-88146-039-1.
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
's history goes back beyond American statehood to ancient Native American times.
Native Americans
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
or Paleo-Indians appeared in what today is the South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
. Paleo Indians in the South were hunter-gatherers who pursued the mega fauna that became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
age. After thousands of years, the Paleo Indians developed a rich agricultural society. Archeologists called these people the Mississippians of the Mississippian culture
Mississippian culture
The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American culture that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1500 CE, varying regionally....
.
Descendant Native American
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
tribes include the Chickasaw
Chickasaw
The Chickasaw are Native American people originally from the region that would become the Southeastern United States...
and Choctaw
Choctaw
The Choctaw are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States...
. Other tribes who inhabited the territory of Mississippi (and whose names became those of local towns) include the Natchez
Natchez people
The Natchez are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi. They spoke a language isolate that has no known close relatives, although it may be very distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek...
, the Yazoo
Yazoo tribe
The Yazoo were a tribe of the Native American Tunica people historically located on the lower course of Yazoo River, Mississippi. It was closely connected to other Tunica peoples, especially the Tunica, Koroa, and possibly the Tioux....
, the Pascagoula
Pascagoula
The Pasacagoula were an indigenous group living in coastal Mississippi on the Pascagoula River....
, and the Biloxi
Tunica-Biloxi
The modern Tunica-Biloxi tribe live in Mississippi and east central Louisiana. The modern tribe is composed of descendants of Tunica, Biloxi , Ofo , Avoyel , and Muskogean Choctaw. They speak mostly English and French...
.
European colonial period
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 FranceNew France
New France was the area colonized by France in North America during a period beginning with the exploration of the Saint Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Spain and Great Britain in 1763...
and started settlement. They created the first Fort Maurepas
Fort Maurepas
Not to be confused with the Fort Maurepas built in 1699 by Bienville and Iberville in present-day Ocean Springs, Mississippi.Fort Maurepas was one of the first forts built by Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye and his men. In 1733, they traveled from Fort St. Charles, which was...
under Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville pronounced as described in note] Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville pronounced as described in note] Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville pronounced as described in note] (16 July 1661 – 9 July 1702 (probable)was a soldier, ship captain, explorer, colonial administrator, knight of...
on the site of modern Ocean Springs
Ocean Springs, Mississippi
Ocean Springs is a city in Jackson County, Mississippi, United States, about east of Biloxi. It is part of the Pascagoula, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 17,225 at the 2000 census...
(or Old Biloxi) in 1699.
In 1716, the French founded Natchez
Natchez, Mississippi
Natchez is the county seat of Adams County, Mississippi, United States. With a total population of 18,464 , it is the largest community and the only incorporated municipality within Adams County...
as Fort Rosalie
Fort Rosalie
Fort Rosalie was a French fort built in 1716 in the territory of the Natchez Native Americans. The present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi developed at this site. As part of the peace terms that ended the Natchez War of 1716, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville required the Natchez to...
; it became the dominant town and trading post of the area. In the early 18th century, the Roman Catholic Church created 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.
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.
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
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
under the terms of the Treaty of Paris
Treaty of Paris (1783)
The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, ended the American Revolutionary War between Great Britain on the one hand and the United States of America and its allies on the other. The other combatant nations, France, Spain and the Dutch Republic had separate agreements; for details of...
.
| 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 |
Territory and statehood
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 scandalYazoo land scandal
The Yazoo land scandal, Yazoo fraud, Yazoo land fraud, or Yazoo land controversy was a massive fraud perpetrated from 1794 to 1803 by several Georgia governors and the state legislature. They sold large tracts of land in what is now the state of Mississippi to political insiders at very low prices...
of 1795. Georgia finally ceded the disputed area in 1805 to the national government; in 1804 the northern part of the cession was added to Mississippi Territory
Mississippi Territory
The Territory of Mississippi was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from April 7, 1798, until December 10, 1817, when the final extent of the territory was admitted to the Union as the state of Mississippi....
.
Pinckney's Treaty
Pinckney's Treaty, also known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo or the Treaty of Madrid, was signed in San Lorenzo de El Escorial on October 27, 1795 and established intentions of friendship between the United States and Spain. It also defined the boundaries of the United States with the Spanish...
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 and the accompanying rise of slave labor did Mississippi begin to flourish.
There were land disputes with the Spanish, and in 1810 the settlers in parts of West Florida rebelled and declared their freedom from Spain. President James Madison
James Madison
James Madison, Jr. was an American statesman and political theorist. He was the fourth President of the United States and is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for being the primary author of the United States Constitution and at first an opponent of, and then a key author of the United...
declared 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 the Louisiana Purchase
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition by the United States of America of of France's claim to the territory of Louisiana in 1803. The U.S...
. 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, MS in 1813.
Settlement
The attraction of vast amounts of high quality, inexpensive cotton land attracted hordes of settlers, mostly from Georgia and the Carolinas and from tobacco areas of Virginia and North Carolina at a time when growing tobacco barely made a profit. From 1798 through 1820 the population soared from less than 9,000 to more than 222,000. Migration came in two fairly distinct waves - a steady movement until the outbreak of the War of 1812 and a flood 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.Cotton
After 1800 the development of a cotton economy in the South changed the economic relationship of native Indians with whites and slaves in Mississippi Territory. As Indians ceded their lands to whites, they became more isolated from whites and blacks. A great wave of public sales of former Indian land plus white migration (with slaves) into Mississippi Territory guaranteed the dominance of the developing cotton agriculture.Statehood
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. NatchezNatchez, Mississippi
Natchez is the county seat of Adams County, Mississippi, United States. With a total population of 18,464 , it is the largest community and the only incorporated municipality within Adams County...
was the first state capital; the capital was moved to Jackson in 1822.
Religion
While the Catholic Church was active along the coast, Protestant religious activities began inland in the Mississippi Territory after 1799. Free thought, skepticism, deism or indifference to religion were characteristic of the wealthy planters and land speculators, as newcomers were far more interested in seeking riches in this world than in the next. Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians formed the three leading denominations in the territory. Protestant ministers won converts, often promoted education, and had some influence in improving the treatment of slaves.Government
William C. C. Claiborne (1775–1817), a lawyer and former Republican Congressman from Tennessee (1797–1801), was governor and superintendent of Indian affairs in the Mississippi Territory from 1801 through 1803. Although he favored acquiring some land from the Choctaw and Chicasaw, Claiborne was generally sympathetic and conciliatory toward Indians. He worked long and patiently to iron out differences that arose, and to improve the material well-being of the Indians. He was also partly successful in promoting the establishment of law and order, as when his offering of a two thousand dollar reward helped destroy a gang of outlaws headed by Samuel Mason (1750–1803). His position on issues indicated a national rather than regional outlook, though he did not ignore his constituents. Claiborne expressed the philosophy of the Republican Party and helped that party defeat the Federalists. When a smallpox epidemic broke out in the spring of 1802, Claiborne's actions resulted in the first recorded mass vaccination in the territory and saved Natchez from the disease.Indian lands
Land was purchased from Chickasaw and Choctaw Native American tribes from 1801 to about 1830. After 1800 the development of a cotton economy in the South changed the economic relationship of native Indians with whites and slaves in Mississippi Territory. As Indians ceded their lands to whites, they became more isolated from whites and blacks. The following table illustrates ceded land in acres:| Treaty | Year | Signed with | Where | Purpose | Ceded land |
| San Lorenzo | 1795 | Between Spain and United States | San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain | The treaty, also known as Pinckney's Treaty, put Choctaw & Chickasaw country under U.S. control | n/a |
| Fort Adams | 1801 | Choctaw | Mississippi Territory | Redefined Choctaw cession to England and permission for Natchez Trace | 2641920 acres (10,691.5 km²) |
| Fort Confederation | 1802 | Choctaw | Mississippi Territory | n/a | 10000 acres (40.5 km²) |
| Hoe Buckintoopa | 1803 | Choctaw | Choctaw Nation | Small cession of Tombigbee River and redefined English treaty of 1765 | 853760 acres (3,455 km²) |
| Mount Dexter Treaty of Mount Dexter The Treaty of Mount Dexter was signed between the United States and the Choctaws. The treaty was signed November 16, 1805. The area ceded was from the Natchez District to the Tombigbee Alabama River watershed, mostly in present-day Mississippi.-Terms:... |
1805 | Choctaw | Choctaw Nation | Large cession from Natchez District to the Tombigbee Alabama River watershed | 4142720 acres (16,765 km²) |
| Fort St. Stephens Treaty of Fort St. Stephens The Treaty of Fort St. Stephens or Treaty of Choctaw Trading House was signed between the United States and the Choctaws. The treaty was signed at the Choctaw trading house on October 24, 1816. It ceded of Choctaw land east of the Tombigbee River. The land was exchanged for 6,000 US dollars... |
1816 | Choctaw | Fort Confederation | Ceded all Choctaw land east of Tombigbee River | 10000 acres (40.5 km²) |
| Doak's Stand Treaty of Doak's Stand The Treaty of Doak's Stand was signed on October 18, 1820 between the United States and the Choctaw Indian tribe. Based on the terms of the accord, the Choctaw agreed to give up approximately one-half of their remaining Choctaw homeland... |
1820 | Choctaw | Natchez Trace, Choctaw Nation | Exchanged cession in Mississippi for parcel in Arkansas | 5169788 acres (20,921.4 km²) |
| Washington City Treaty of Washington City The Treaty of Washington City was a treaty signed on January 20, 1825 between the Choctaw and the United States Government.-Overview:... |
1825 | Choctaw | Exchanged Arkansas land for Oklahoma parcel | 2000000 acres (8,093.7 km²) | |
| Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was a treaty signed on September 27, 1830 between the Choctaw and the United States Government. This was the first removal treaty carried into effect under the Indian Removal Act... |
1830 | Choctaw | Choctaw Nation | Removal and granting U.S. citizenship to Choctaws | 10523130 acres (42,585.6 km²) |
| Pontotoc | 1832 | Chickasaw | Pontitock Creek | Seek a home in the west | 6283804 acres (25,429.7 km²) |
Ante-Bellum
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
By the 1830s Mississippi was a leading cotton producer, and demands for slaves, on whom the crop depended, increased. They were considered a "necessary evil" for the survival of the cotton economy, and were brought in from the border states and the tobacco states where slavery was declining. The 1832 constitution forbade the further importation of slaves, 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 there was a middle element composed of farmers who owned land but no slaves, together with a small number of businessmen and professionals who 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 became 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 northerers suspected of being secret abolitionists.When cotton was king
King Cotton
King Cotton was a slogan used by southerners to support secession from the United States by arguing cotton exports would make an independent Confederacy economically prosperous, and—more important—would force Great Britain and France to support the Confederacy because their industrial economy...
during the 1850s, Mississippi plantation owners—especially those in the old Natchez District
Natchez District
The Natchez District was one of two areas, the other being the Tombigbee District, that were the first to be colonized by British subjects from the Thirteen Colonies and elsewhere in what was West Florida and would later become the Mississippi Territory. The district was recognized to be the area...
, as well as the newly emerging Delta
River delta
A delta is a landform that is formed at the mouth of a river where that river flows into an ocean, sea, estuary, lake, reservoir, flat arid area, or another river. Deltas are formed from the deposition of the sediment carried by the river as the flow leaves the mouth of the river...
and Black Belt
Black Belt (region of Alabama)
The Black Belt is a region of the U.S. state of Alabama, and part of the larger Black Belt Region of the Southern United States, which stretches from Texas to Maryland. The term originally referred to the region underlain by a thin layer of rich, black topsoil developed atop the chalk of the Selma...
regions—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 heavy role in both state politics and in the support for secession.
Mississippi's population grew rapidly, reaching 791,000 in 1860. Cotton production grew from 43,000 bales in 1820 to over 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 little was grown outside the United States. In Mississippi some modernizers spoke of diversification, and vegetable and livestock production did increase, 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 lage profits, but they invested it on buying more cotton lands and more slaves, which pushed up prices even higher. They did not feel at all guilty about holding slaves. 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.
Slavery
From the black perspective, the majority were slaves living on plantations with 20 or more fellow slaves. 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 north to Illinois and 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 the awkwardness of free blacks living near slaves prompted a state law forbidding emancipation except by special act of the legislature. By 1860 only 1,000 of the 437,000 blacks were free, and most of these lived in wretched conditions near Natchez. The relatively low population of the state before the Civil War reflected the fact that much of the state was still wilderness and needed more settlers for development. Except for riverside settlements and plantations, 90% of the Mississippi Delta bottomlands was still undeveloped and covered mostly in mixed forest and swampland.Politics
Mississippi was a stronghold of Jacksonian DemocracyJacksonian democracy
Jacksonian democracy is the political movement toward greater democracy for the common man typified by American politician Andrew Jackson and his supporters. Jackson's policies followed the era of Jeffersonian democracy which dominated the previous political era. The Democratic-Republican Party of...
, 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
Second Party System
The Second Party System is a term of periodization used by historians and political scientists to name the political party system existing in the United States from about 1828 to 1854...
(1820s to 1850s) Mississippi moved politically from a divided Whig
Whig Party (United States)
The Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy. Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from the early 1830s to the mid-1850s, the party was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson and his Democratic...
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
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
was elected president in 1860 with the goal seeking an eventual end of slavery, Mississippi followed South Carolina and seceded from the Union on Jan. 9, 1861. Mississippi's U.S. senator Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Finis Davis , also known as Jeff Davis, was an American statesman and leader of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, serving as President for its entire history. He was born in Kentucky to Samuel and Jane Davis...
became president of the onfederate St
Civil War
See the main article Mississippi in the Civil WarMississippi in the Civil War
Mississippi was the second state to declare secession from the Union, on January 9, 1861. In February, it joined with six other Cotton States to form the Confederate States of America...
.
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. 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.
The major military operations came in the Shiloh and Corinth
Siege of Corinth
The Siege of Corinth was an American Civil War battle fought from April 29 to May 30, 1862, in Corinth, Mississippi.-Background:...
campaigns and the siege of Vicksburg, from the spring of 1862 to the summer of 1863. The most important was the Vicksburg Campaign
Vicksburg Campaign
The Vicksburg Campaign was a series of maneuvers and battles in the Western Theater of the American Civil War directed against Vicksburg, Mississippi, a fortress city that dominated the last Confederate-controlled section of the Mississippi River. The Union Army of the Tennessee under Maj. Gen....
, fought for control of the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. The fall of the city to General Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant was the 18th President of the United States as well as military commander during the Civil War and post-war Reconstruction periods. Under Grant's command, the Union Army defeated the Confederate military and ended the Confederate States of America...
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
Battle of Grand Gulf
The Battle of Grand Gulf was fought on April 29, 1863, during the American Civil War. In the Vicksburg Campaign of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Union naval forces under Rear Adm. David D. Porter led seven ironclads in an attack on the Confederate fortifications and batteries at Grand Gulf, downriver...
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.
Grant won the Battle of Port Gibson
Battle of Port Gibson
The Battle of Port Gibson was fought near Port Gibson, Mississippi, on May 1, 1863, between Union and Confederate forces during the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. The Union Army was led by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S...
. 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. William Tecumseh Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War , for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the "scorched...
'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
Battle of Raymond
The Battle of Raymond was fought on May 12, 1863, near Raymond, Mississippi, during the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. The bitter fight pitted elements of Union Army Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee against Confederate forces of Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton's...
. On May 10, 1863, Pemberton sent troops from Jackson to Raymond
Raymond, Mississippi
Raymond is a city in Hinds County, Mississippi, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 1,664. Raymond is one of the two county seats of Hinds County and is the home of the main campus of Hinds Community College....
, 20 miles (32 km) to the southwest. Brig. Gen. Brett Favre
Brett Favre
Brett Lorenzo Favre is a former American football quarterback who spent the majority of his career with the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League . He was a 20-year veteran of the NFL, having played quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons , Green Bay Packers , New York Jets and Minnesota...
's over-strength brigade, having endured a grueling march from Port Hudson, Louisiana
Port Hudson, Louisiana
Port Hudson is a small unincorporated community in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, United States. Located about northwest of Baton Rouge, it is most famous for an American Civil War battle known as the Siege of Port Hudson.-Geography:...
, 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
John A. Logan
John Alexander Logan was an American soldier and political leader. He served in the Mexican-American War and was a general in the Union Army in the American Civil War. He served the state of Illinois as a state senator, congressman and senator and was an unsuccessful candidate for Vice President...
'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.
A Union expedition commanded by General Samuel D. Sturgis
Samuel D. Sturgis
Samuel Davis Sturgis was an American military officer who served in the Mexican-American War, as a Union general in the American Civil War, and later in the Indian Wars.-Early life:...
was opposed by Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. He is remembered both as a self-educated, innovative cavalry leader during the war and as a leading southern advocate in the postwar years...
. They clashed at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads
Battle of Brice's Crossroads
The Battle of Brice's Crossroads was fought on June 10, 1864, near Baldwyn in Lee County, Mississippi, during the American Civil War. It pitted a 4,787-man contingent led by Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest against an 8,100-strong Union force led by Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis...
on 10 June 1864, as Forrest routed the Yankees in his greatest battlefield victory.
Homefront
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-eater John J. PettusJohn J. Pettus
John Jones Pettus was a United States politician. A member of the Democratic party, he was Governor of the state of Mississippi from January 5, 1854 to January 10, 1854, and later was elected to a full term, from 21 November 1859 - 16 November 1863...
, who carried the state into secession, whipped up the war spirit, began military and domestic mobilization, and prepared to finance the war. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Freedman's Bureau of the U.S. Army
Reconstruction
After the defeat of the Confederacy, President Andrew JohnsonAndrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson was the 17th President of the United States . As Vice-President of the United States in 1865, he succeeded Abraham Lincoln following the latter's assassination. Johnson then presided over the initial and contentious Reconstruction era of the United States following the American...
appointed a temporary government under Judge William Lewis Sharkey. It repealed secession and wrote new Black Codes defining and limiting the civil rights of the African American freedmen as a sort of third class status without citizenship or voting rights. The Black Codes never took effect, however, since the legal affairs of the freedmen came under the control of sympathetic Freedman's Bureau representatives. Most of them were former Army officers from the North. Many stayed in the state and became political and business leaders (scornfully known as "carpetbaggers"). The Black codes outraged northern opinion and apparently were never put into effect in any state.
Congress responded in September 1865 by refusing to seat the newly elected delegation. In 1867 it put Mississippi under U.S. Army rule as part of Reconstruction until the legal status of ex-Confederates and freedmen could be worked out. The military governor general Adelbert Ames
Adelbert Ames
Adelbert Ames was an American sailor, soldier, and politician. He served with distinction as a Union Army general during the American Civil War. As a Radical Republican and a Carpetbagger, he was military governor, Senator and civilian governor in Reconstruction-era Mississippi...
deposed the civil government, enrolled black men as voters, and prohibited for a period of time 1000 or so former Confederate leaders to vote or hold office. The 1868 constitution had major elements that lasted for 22 years. The convention was the first political organization to include African American representatives, who numbered 17 among the 100 members. Although 32 counties had Negro majorities, they elected whites as well as Negroes to represent them. The convention adopted universal male suffrage; did away with property qualifications for suffrage or for office, which benefited poor whites, too; created the state's first public school system; forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property; and prohibited limiting of civil rights in travel. Since 17 of the 100 delegates were blacks, the body was called the Black and Tan convention by its enemies. Mississippi was readmitted to Congress on Feb. 23, 1870.
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 and Blanche K. Bruce were elected by the legislature to the U.S. Senate, and John R. Lynch
John R. Lynch
John Roy Lynch was the first African-American Speaker of the House in Mississippi. He was also one of the first African-Americans elected to the U.S House of Representatives during Reconstruction, the period in United States history after the Civil War.-Biography:Lynch was born a slave near...
served as a congressman. The Republican 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, a Confederate general, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865 but, like other Southerners who had been loyal to the Confederacy, was not allowed to take a seat. He supported suffrage for freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...
, as required by the Republicans in Congress. Alcorn became the leader of the scalawags, who comprised about a third of the Republican party
History of the United States Republican Party
The United States Republican Party is the second oldest currently existing political party in the United States after its great rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas Nebraska Act which threatened to extend slavery into the territories, and to promote more vigorous...
in the state, in coalition with carpetbaggers and freedmen.
On 1869 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 were now Democrats. He strongly supported education, including segregated public schools, and a new college for freedmen, now known as Alcorn State University
Alcorn State University
Alcorn State University is an historically black university comprehensive land-grant institution in Lorman, Mississippi. It was founded in 1871-History:...
. 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.
Alcorn resigned the governorship to become a U.S. Senator
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
(1871–1877), replacing his ally Hiram Revels, the first African American 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 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.
In 1870 former military governor Adelbert Ames
Adelbert Ames
Adelbert Ames was an American sailor, soldier, and politician. He served with distinction as a Union Army general during the American Civil War. As a Radical Republican and a Carpetbagger, he was military governor, Senator and civilian governor in Reconstruction-era Mississippi...
was elected to the U.S. Senate. Ames and Alcorn battled 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
Vicksburg, Mississippi
Vicksburg is a city in Warren County, Mississippi, United States. It is the only city in Warren County. It is located northwest of New Orleans on the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and due west of Jackson, the state capital. In 1900, 14,834 people lived in Vicksburg; in 1910, 20,814; in 1920,...
in December 1873 that started a series of 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 untied and brought out the "Mississippi Plan
Mississippi Plan
The Mississippi Plan of 1875 was devised by the Democratic Party to overthrow the Republican Party in the state of Mississippi by means of organized threats of violence and suppression or purchase of the black vote, in order to regain political control of the legislature and governor's office...
" which called for the systematic organization of all whites to defeat the Republicans. Armed attacks by the Red Shirts and White League
White League
The White League was a white paramilitary group started in 1874 that operated to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and political organizing. Its first chapter in Grant Parish, Louisiana was made up of many of the Confederate veterans who had participated in the...
on Republican activists proliferated, and Governor Ames appealed to the federal government for 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 he believed that the election was full of voter intimidation and fraud. The state legislature, convening in 1876, drew up articles of impeachment against him and all statewide officials. He resigned a few months after the legislature agreed to drop the articles against him.
Gilded age: 1877-1900
Not much was gold plated in Mississippi, but there was steady economic and social progress, despite the low prices for cotton. Politically the state was controlled by the conservative whites, called "Bourbons" by their critics. The bourbons represented the planters, landowners and merchants, and used coercion and cash to control enough black votes to control the Democratic party conventions, and thus state government.The state remained rural, but the railroad system, which had been destroyed in the war, was rebuilt; a few more towns appeared, as well as small-scale industry. Everyone was now growing cotton, not just the rich Delta lands worked by black sharecroppers but also the poorer lands in other districts where poor whites operated their farms. The "crop-lien system
Crop-lien system
The crop-lien system is a credit system that became widely used by farmers in the United States in the South from the 1860s to the 1920sAfter the American Civil War, farmers in the South had little cash. The crop-lien system was a way for farmers to get credit before the planting season by...
involved local merchants who lent money for food and supplies all year, and then split the cotton crop to pay the debts and perhaps leave a little cash left over for the farmer—or often leave him further in debt to the merchants.
In 1878 the worst yellow fever epidemic Mississippi had seen ravaged the state. The disease, sometimes known as 'Yellow Jack,' and 'Bronze John,' devastated Mississippi socially and economically. Entire families were wiped out while others fled their homes in panic for the presumed safety of other parts of the state. Quarantine regulations, passed to prevent the spread of the disease, brought trade to a stop. Some local economies never recovered. Beechland, near Vicksburg, became a ghost town because of the epidemic. By the end of the year, 3,227 people had died from the disease.
The farmers resented the Bourbon control of politics and the credit lein system that seemed to keep them forever in debts. Efforts to fight the system politically went nowhere. The Populist movement failed to attract the large following in Mississippi that it did in Alabama, Georgia and other Southern states. Mississippi did put forward a few articulate Populist spokesmen, such as newspaper editor Frank Burkitt, but poor farmers, white and black, refused to follow the leadership of the Farmers' Alliance
Farmers' Alliance
The Farmers Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement amongst U.S. farmers that flourished in the 1880s. One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers after the American Civil War...
. Few farmers were willing to support the subtreasury plan, the Alliance plan of aiding farmers by providing low-cost federal loans secured by crops. The Democratic Party machine, the increasing activism of the National Grange, and fear of black political domination also contributed to the failure of Mississippi populism. By the birth of the People's Party in 1892, Mississippi populism was too weak to play a major role.
Whitecapping
Whitecapping
Whitecapping is a violent lawless movement among farmers that occurred specifically in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was originally a ritualized form of enforcing community standards, appropriate behavior and traditional rights...
, a violent, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro dirt farmer movement, arose in the Piney Woods region of southern Mississippi in response to low prices, rising costs, and increasing tenancy brought about by the crop lien system. Whitecaps resented Negro tenancy on lands acquired by merchants –some of them Jewish—through foreclosures. Whitecap Clubs, resembling fraternal and military organizations, attempted to intimidate Negro laborers and landowners, and to prevent mercantile land acquisition. Whitecaps came from the rural poor; their leaders from a higher social strata.
Blacks: 1877-1940
Mississippi typified the Deep SouthDeep South
The Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...
during the era of Jim Crow
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
. 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 during the 1870s and 1880s.
As the Panic of 1893
Panic of 1893
The Panic of 1893 was a serious economic depression in the United States that began in 1893. Similar to the Panic of 1873, this panic was marked by the collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures...
brought another depression and very low cotton prices, many farmers had to sell their land to pay off debts and become sharecroppers. 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 with stiff restrictions on voting, and especially a poll tax
Poll tax
A poll tax is a tax of a portioned, fixed amount per individual in accordance with the census . When a corvée is commuted for cash payment, in effect it becomes a poll tax...
of $2 a year that the great majority of blacks did not pay, and thus could not vote. These requirements, with additions in legislation of 1892, resulted in a 90% reduction in numbers of blacks who voted. In every county a handful of prominent black ministers and local leaders were allowed to vote.
As only voters could serve on juries, the disfranchisement meant that blacks did not get to 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
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
challenge in 1898 in Williams v. Mississippi
Williams v. Mississippi
Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 is a United States Supreme Court case that reviewed provisions of the state constitution that set requirements for voter registration...
, 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 Delta were landless sharecroppers or laborers facing inescapable poverty. As a result tens of thousands of African Americans left Mississippi by train to migrate north starting during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. In the Great Migration
Great Migration (African American)
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
, they went north to leave a society that had been steadily closing off opportunity. 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.
Schools
Public school funding was poor for whites and very poor for blacks. However, northern philanthropy helped a great deal. The Anna T. Jeanes Foundation, begun in 1907 and also known as the Negro Rural School Fund, aimed to provide rudimentary education for rural Southern blacks. Jeanes supervisors, all experienced teachers personally implemented physical and academic improvements in rural schools. Early Jeanes supervisors brought vocational education into their classrooms, based on the Hampton and Tuskegee Institute models promoted by Booker T. WashingtonBooker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
. By the 1940s, the Jeanes program changed its emphasis from industrial education to academic subjects. Other major northern foundations also helped, especially the General Education Board
General Education Board
The General Education Board was a philanthropy created by John D. Rockefeller and Frederick T. Gates in 1902. Rockefeller gave it $180 million, which was used primarily to support higher education and medical schools in the United States, and to help rural white and black schools in the South, as...
(funded by the Rockefeller Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
and the Rosenwald Fund
Rosenwald Fund
The Rosenwald Fund was established in 1917 by Julius Rosenwald and his family for "the well-being of mankind."...
, while northern churches supported denominational colleges.
Jazz
Mississippi became a center of rich, quintessentially American music traditions: gospel musicGospel music
Gospel music is music that is written to express either personal, spiritual or a communal belief regarding Christian life, as well as to give a Christian alternative to mainstream secular music....
, jazz music, blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
, and rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
, all were invented, promulgated, or heavily developed by Mississippi musicians.
John Lomax
John Lomax
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist and folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk songs...
recorded some of the Delta's rich musical tradition for the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
. He recorded a very young Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield , known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered the "father of modern Chicago blues"...
, and also convict blues songs and field chants at Mississippi State Penitentiary
Mississippi State Penitentiary
Mississippi State Penitentiary , also known as Parchman Farm, is the oldest prison and the only maximum security prison for men in the state of Mississippi, USA....
at Parchman.
Progressive Era
By 1900 the state had no paved highways, a one-party government, regular epidemics of contagious diseases, endemic hookworm, routine lynchings, local affairs controlled by courthouse rings, widespread illiteracy, and few assets besides prime cotton land, Mississippi failed to attract much outside investment or European immigration.The Progressive Era
Progressive Era
The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of social activism and political reform that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. One main goal of the Progressive movement was purification of government, as Progressives tried to eliminate corruption by exposing and undercutting political...
reached Mississippi. Governor Theodore Bilbo (1916–20) had the most successful administration of all the governors who served between 1877 and 1917, putting state finances in order and supporting such Progressive measures as passing a compulsory school attendance law, founding a new charity hospital, and establishing
a board of bank examiners. But Bilbo became intensely racist after moving on to the Senate in 1934.
A renewed surge of patriotism during World War I swept away most of the remaining bitterness from the Civil War and helped end Mississippi's physical and psychological isolation.
1920s and 1930s
Mississippians saw more prosperity in the 1920s than they had known for two generations, although the state was still poor and rural by national standards. The people nevertheless had a slice of the American DreamAmerican Dream
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes a promise of the possibility of prosperity and success. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each...
. Ownby (1999) in his in-depth study of the state identifies four American dreams that the new consumer culture addressed. The first was the "Dream of Abundance," offering a cornucopia of material goods to all Americans, making them proud to be the richest society on earth. The second was the "Dream of a Democracy of Goods," whereby everyone had access to the same products regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or class, thereby challenging the aristocratic norms of the rest of the world whereby only the rich or well-connected are granted access to luxury. The "Dream of Freedom of Choice," with its ever expanding variety of good allowed people to fashion their own particular life style. Finally, the "Dream of Novelty," in which ever-changing fashions, new models, and unexpected new products broadened the consumer experience in terms of purchasing skills and awareness of the market, and challenged the conservatism of traditional society and culture, and even politics. Ownby acknowledges that the dreams of the new consumer culture radiated out from the major cities, but notes that they quickly penetrated the most rural and most isolated areas, such as rural Mississippi. With the arrival of the model T after 1910, consumers in rural America were no longer locked into local general stores with their limited merchandise and high prices, and to comparison shop and in towns and cities. Ownby demonstrates that poor black Mississippians shared in the new consumer culture, both inside Mississippi, and it motivated the more ambitious to move to Memphis or Chicago.
Not all Mississippi was doing well. In the Pearl River country in the south central region, the 1920s was a decade of persistent poverty and new interest in antimodernist politics and culture. The timber companies that had employed up to half of all workers were running short of timber so payrolls dwindled. Farming was hard-scrabble. Governor Theodore G. Bilbo
Theodore G. Bilbo
Theodore Gilmore Bilbo was an American politician. Bilbo, a Democrat, twice served as governor of Mississippi and later was elected a U.S. Senator . A master of filibuster and scathing rhetoric, a rough-and-tumble fighter in debate, he made his name a synonym for white supremacy...
, a native of the region, won widespread support among the poor white farmers and loggers with his attacks on the elites, the big cities, and the blacks. Dry laws were but one aspect of a pervasive prohibitionism that included laws against business or recreation on Sunday as well as attacks on Catholics and immigrants. Baptist and some other denominations embraced fundamentalism and rejected newfangled liberal ideas such as evolution along with the Social Gospel
Social Gospel
The Social Gospel movement is a Protestant Christian intellectual movement that was most prominent in the early 20th century United States and Canada...
.
Transportation
When the automobile arrived about 1910, the state had poorly constructed dirt roads used for wagon traffic, and an outdated system of taxation. Road improvement continued to be a local affair controlled by county supervisors and achieved few positive results. The Lindsey Wagon Company of Laurel built the famous Lindsey wagon after 1899. It was a heavy-duty eight-wheel wagon used to haul logs, timber, and other bulky and heavy material. Wagon production reached a peak in the 1920s, then fell off as better roads made it possible to use trucks built in Detroit, and the Great Depression after 1929 slowed reduced the need for new wagons.After 1928, the pressure to build roads motivated politicians to talk up the cause. They enacted massive bond issues, create excise taxes, and centralize control to create a genuine state highway system, with a system of main highways designed by engineers, using a common system of signage and nomenclature.
World War II
The war years brought prosperity as cotton prices soared and new war installations paid high wages. Many blacks headed to northern cities, and white farmers often headed to southern factory towns. Young men, white and black, were equally subject to the draft, but farmers were often exempt on occupational grounds. The World War II era marked a transition from labor-intensive agriculture to mechanized farming in the Delta region of Mississippi. Federal farm payments and improvements in mechanical cotton pickerCotton picker
The mechanical cotton picker is a machine that automates cotton harvesting in a way that reduces harvest time and maximizes efficiency.-History:...
s made modernization economically possible by 1940, but most planters feared loss of racial and social control and simply shifted from sharecropping to wage labor. As workers left the farm for military service or defense jobs, farm wages rose. By 1944, wages had tripled. In 1945 the newly established Delta War Wage Board provided planters temporary relief by setting a maximum wage for farm workers, but President Harry S. Truman lifted wartime economic controls in 1946.
Beginning in the 1930s, the ravages of the boll weevil and federal crop restrictions and conservation programs encouraged many farmers to turn from cotton farming to growing other crops, such as soybeans; to sowing grasses for livestock; and to planting trees for timber. Agricultural productivity increased, and as an added bonus the soils were improved by crop rotation, strip planting, terracing, contour plowing, and the use of improved fertilizers, insecticides, and seeds. After 1945 , farm mechanization advanced rapidly, especially in the cotton belt, and small farms were consolidated, as small farmers who could not afford the new machinery and sharecroppers left the land. Planters rapidly mechanized. It now took only a few operators of cotton picking machines to do the work of hundreds. There was no other farm work for the sharecroppers, so the entire sharecropping system collapsed as the croppers moved to the cities, often in the North. By 1950 whites were a majority of the population, statewide and in every region outside the Delta.
1945-2000
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. 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
Ole Miss riot of 1962
The Ole Miss riot 1962 was a riot fought between Southern segregationist civilians and federal and state forces as a result of the forced enrollment of black student James Meredith at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Mississippi.On October 1, 1962, James H...
erupted as a white mob attacked 500 United States marshals deployed by President John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
to ensure the safety of James Meredith
James Meredith
James H. Meredith is an American civil rights movement figure, a writer, and a political adviser. In 1962, he was the first African American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi, an event that was a flashpoint in the American civil rights movement. Motivated by President...
, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi
University of Mississippi
The University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss, is a public, coeducational research university located in Oxford, Mississippi. Founded in 1844, the school is composed of the main campus in Oxford, four branch campuses located in Booneville, Grenada, Tupelo, and Southaven as well as the...
. 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.
In September 1964, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
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
Christian Identity
Christian Identity is a label applied to a wide variety of loosely affiliated believers and churches with a racialized theology. Many promote a Eurocentric interpretation of Christianity.According to Chester L...
.
Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964
Meanwhile black activists had been increasing their local work throughout the South. In Mississippi in 1962, several activists formed the Council of Federated OrganizationsCouncil of Federated Organizations
The Council of Federated Organizations was formed in Mississippi in 1962.A coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement organizations operating in Mississippi, COFO was formed to coordinate and unite voter registration and other civil rights activities in the state and oversee the distribution of...
(COFO), to coordinate activities in voter registration and education of civil rights groups in Mississippi: Congress of Racial Equality
Congress of Racial Equality
The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE was a U.S. civil rights organization that originally played a pivotal role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement...
(CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
(NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC was closely associated with its first president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr...
(SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
(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.
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
In 1964, civil rights organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all-white slate from the state party. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, they held their 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. 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 support which Independent candidate George Wallace had received in the North during the Democratic primaries. 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 for trying to register to vote. 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
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...
, head of the Black Muslims, to speak at its founding convention and opposed the war in Vietnam.
Armed self-defense became an integral part of the Southern planning strategy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
(SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality
Congress of Racial Equality
The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE was a U.S. civil rights organization that originally played a pivotal role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement...
(CORE) after 1964. The ideological shift on the question of nonviolence within CORE and SNCC occurred primarily because of the impact of events in Mississippi such as the murder 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 that became 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.
After 1966 the blacks moved into the Democratic party, where the fought for control of local government, especially in the Delta.
National image
During the 1960s, the vocal opposition of many politicians and officials and the violent tactics of a few Ku Klux KlanKu Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
members and sympathizers gave Mississippi a reputation as a reactionary state. The state was the last to repeal prohibition
Repeal of Prohibition
The Repeal of Prohibition in the United States was accomplished with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 5, 1933.-Background:...
and to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment
Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished and continues to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, passed by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On...
, in 1966 and 1995 respectively.
Since 2000
Mississippi in recent years has been noted for its political conservatism, improved civil rights record, and increasing industrialization. In addition, a decision in the 1990s to permit riverboat gambling has led to economic gains for the state. However, an estimated $500,000 per day in tax revenue was lost following Hurricane KatrinaHurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
's severe damage to several riverboat casino
Riverboat casino
A riverboat casino is a type of casino found in several areas of the United States which use a riverboat as a casino. Several states authorized this type of casino to limit the areas where casinos could be constructed under a type of legal fiction.-History:...
s in August 2005. Gambling towns in Mississippi include the Gulf coast towns of Gulfport
Gulfport, Mississippi
Gulfport is the second largest city in Mississippi after the state capital Jackson. It is the larger of the two principal cities of the Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is included in the Gulfport-Biloxi-Pascagoula, Mississippi Combined Statistical Area. As of the...
and Biloxi
Biloxi, Mississippi
Biloxi is a city in Harrison County, Mississippi, in the United States. The 2010 census recorded the population as 44,054. Along with Gulfport, Biloxi is a county seat of Harrison County....
and the river towns of Vicksburg
Vicksburg, Mississippi
Vicksburg is a city in Warren County, Mississippi, United States. It is the only city in Warren County. It is located northwest of New Orleans on the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and due west of Jackson, the state capital. In 1900, 14,834 people lived in Vicksburg; in 1910, 20,814; in 1920,...
and Tunica
Tunica, Mississippi
Tunica is a town in Tunica County, Mississippi, United States, located near the Mississippi River. Until the early 1990s the town was one of the most impoverished places in the United States, semi-famous for the particularly deprived neighbourhood known as "Sugar Ditch Alley", named for the open...
. Prior to Katrina, Mississippi was the second largest gambling state in the Union, after Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...
and ahead of New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
.
Hurricanes
August 17, 1969 - Category 5Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale
The Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale , or the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale , classifies hurricanes — Western Hemisphere tropical cyclones that exceed the intensities of tropical depressions and tropical storms — into five categories distinguished by the intensities of their sustained winds...
Hurricane Camille
Hurricane Camille
Hurricane Camille was the third and strongest tropical cyclone and second hurricane during the 1969 Atlantic hurricane season. The second of three catastrophic Category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the United States during the 20th century , which it did near the mouth of the Mississippi River...
hit the Mississippi coast killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage.
September 12, 1979 - Hurricane Frederic
Hurricane Frederic
Hurricane Frederic was the sixth tropical cyclone, third hurricane and second major hurricane of the 1979 Atlantic hurricane season. Frederic was the costliest hurricane to ever hit the U.S. Gulf Coast at that particular time...
September 2, 1985 - Hurricane Elena
Hurricane Elena
Hurricane Elena was a category 3 major hurricane that produced heavy damage along the Gulf Coast of the United States in August and September of the 1985 Atlantic hurricane season. The fifth tropical storm, fourth hurricane, and first major hurricane of the season, Elena developed near Cuba from a...
September 28, 1998 - Hurricane Georges
Hurricane Georges
Hurricane Georges was a very destructive, powerful and long-lived Cape Verde-type Category 4 hurricane. Georges was the seventh tropical storm, fourth hurricane, and second major hurricane of the 1998 Atlantic hurricane season...
August 29, 2005 - Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
caused even greater destruction across the entire 90 miles (144.8 km) of Mississippi Gulf coast from Louisiana to Alabama.
Literature
Mississippi has been noted for its authors, including Nobel Prize-winner William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, as well as William Alexander Percy
William Alexander Percy
William Alexander Percy , was a lawyer, planter, and poet from Greenville, Mississippi. His autobiography Lanterns on the Levee became a bestseller. His father LeRoy Percy was the last United States Senator from Mississippi elected by the legislature...
, Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
, Shelby Foote
Shelby Foote
Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a massive, three-volume history of the war. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the...
, Stark Young
Stark Young
Stark Young was an American teacher, playwright, novelist, painter, literary critic and essayist.-Biography:Stark Young was born in Como, Mississippi to Mary Clark Starks and Alfred Alexander Young, a local physician....
, Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
and Anne Moody
Anne Moody
Anne Moody is an African-American author who has written about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, joining the Civil Rights Movement, and fighting racism against blacks in the United States beginning in the 1960s-Life:Born Essie Mae Moody, she was the oldest of nine...
.
See also
- History of the Southern United StatesHistory of the Southern United StatesThe history of the Southern United States reaches back hundreds of years and includes the Mississippian people, well known for their mound building. European history in the region began in the very earliest days of the exploration and colonization of North America...
Surveys
- Busbee, Westley F. Mississippi: A History (2005), good survey online edition
- Gonzales, Edmond, ed. A Mississippi Reader: Selected Articles from the Journal of Mississippi History (1980)
- Krane, Dale and Stephen D. Shaffer. Mississippi Government & Politics: Modernizers versus Traditionalists (1992), government textbook; online edition
- Loewen, James W. and Charles Sallis, eds. Mississippi: Conflict and Change (2nd ed. 1980), high school textbook
- McLemore, Richard, ed. A History of Mississippi 2 vols. (1973), thorough coverage by scholars
- Skates, John Ray. Mississippi: A Bicentennial History (1979), popular
- Sparks, Randy J. Religion in Mississippi (2001) 374 pp. online edition
- Swain, Martha H. ed. Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (2003). 17 short biographies
Indians and archaeology
- Barnett, James F., Jr. The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 (2007). 185 pp.
- Carson, James Taylor. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal, (1999) online edition
- Peacock, Evan. Mississippi Archaeology Q and A (2005) online edition
- Wells, Samuel J.. and Roseanna Tubby. After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi (1986)
- White, Douglas R., George P. Murdock, Richard Scaglion. Natchez Class and Rank Reconsidered. Ethnology 10:369- 388. (1971), study of the kingdom of the Natchez people before the French-Indian wars of the 1720s. online
Pre 1920
- Ballard, Michael B. Civil War Mississippi: A Guide (2000) online edition
- Barney, William L. The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (1974) 371 pp. statistical analysis of voting
- Bettersworth, John K. Confederate Mississippi: The People and Policies of a Cotton State in Wartime (1943). 386 pp.
- Cresswell, Stephen. Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 1877-1902 (1995) online edition
- Cresswell, Stephen. Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 1877-1902 (1995)
- Cresswell, Stephen. Rednecks, Redeemers, And Race: Mississippi After Reconstruction, 1877-1917 (2006)
- Donald, David H. "The Scalawag in Mississippi Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Nov., 1944), pp. 447–460 in JSTOR
- Ellem, Warren A. "The Overthrow of Reconstruction in Mississippi," Journal of Mississippi History 1992 54(2): 175-201
- Ellem, Warren A. "Who Were the Mississippi Scalawags?" Journal of Southern History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1972), pp. 217–240 in JSTOR
- Ferguson, James S. "The Grange and Farmer Education in Mississippi," Journal of Southern History 1942 8(4):497-512. in JSTOR
- Frankel, Noralee. Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (1999)
- Garner, James Wilford. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901) reflects Dunning SchoolDunning SchoolThe Dunning School refers to a group of historians who shared a historiographical school of thought regarding the Reconstruction period of American history .-About:...
historiography; online edition; full text online - Guice, John D. W. "The Cement of Society: Law in the Mississippi Territory," Gulf Coast Historical Review 1986 1(2): 76-99
- Halsell, Willie D. "The Bourbon Period in Mississippi Politics, 1875-1890," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Nov., 1945), pp. 519–537 in JSTOR
- Harris, William C. The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (1979) online edition
- Harris, William C. Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi (1967) online edition
- Haynes, Robert V. "Territorial Mississippi, 1798-1817," Journal of Mississippi History 2002 64(4): 283-305
- James, Dorris Clayton. Ante-Bellum Natchez' (1968)
- Johannsen, Robert W. "The Mind of a Secessionist: Social Conservatism or Romantic Adventure?" Reviews in American History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 354–360 in JSTOR on John A. QuitmanJohn A. QuitmanJohn Anthony Quitman was an American politician and soldier. He served as Governor of Mississippi from 1835 to 1836 as a Whig and again from 1850 to 1851 as a Democrat and one of the leading Fire-Eaters.-Early life:John A. Quitman studied Classics at Hartwick Seminary, graduating in 1816...
- Kirwan, Albert D. Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics: 1876-1925 (1965), classic political history; online edition
- Libby, David J. Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720-1835 (2004) online edition
- Logue, Larry M. "Who Joined the Confederate Army? Soldiers, Civilians, and Communities in Mississippi," Journal of Social History, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 611–623 in JSTOR
- Lowery, Charles D. "The Great Migration to the Mississippi Territory, 1798-1819," Journal of Mississippi History 1968 30(3): 173-192
- McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989)
- Miles, Edwin Arthur. Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi (1960) online edition
- Morris, Christopher. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (1995) online edition
- Olsen, Christopher J. Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (2000) online edition
- Pereyra, Lillian A. James Lusk Alcorn: Persistent Whig (1966), the standard scholarly biography
- Rainwater, P. L. "An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61." Mississippi Valley Historical Review Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jun., 1937), pp. 35–42 in JSTOR
- Rainwater, P. L. "Economic Benefits of Secession: Opinions in Mississippi in the 1850s," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Nov., 1935), pp. 459–474 in JSTOR
- Roberts, Giselle. "The Confederate Belle: the Belle Ideal, Patriotic Womanhood, and Wartime Reality in Louisiana and Mississippi, 1861-1865," Louisiana History 2002 43(2): 189-214
- Roberts, Giselle.
Since 1920
- Beito, David T., "'Let Down Your Bucket Where You Are: The Afro-American Hospital and Black Health Care in Mississippi, 1924–1966," Social Science History, 30 (Winter 2006), 551–69. in Project MUSEProject MUSEProject MUSE is an online database of current and back issues of peer-reviewed humanities and social sciences journals. It was founded in 1993 by Todd Kelley and Susan Lewis and is a project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. It had support from the Mellon...
- Bolton, Charles C. The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 (2005) online edition
- Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2009) 360 pages; examines the conservative backlash among white Mississippians after the state's leaders strategically accommodated themselves to federal and civil-rights demands
- Crespino, Joseph. Mississippi as Metaphor: State, Region, and Nation in Historical Imagination Southern Spaces, 2006.
- Cresswell, Stephen Edward. Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi after Reconstruction, 1877–1917 (2006)
- Danielson, Chris. "'Lily White and Hard Right': The Mississippi Republican Party and Black Voting, 1965-1980," Journal of Southern History Feb 2009, Vol. 75 Issue 1, pp 83–119
- Katagiri, Yasuhiro. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States' Rights (2001)
- Key, V.O. Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), has famous chapter on Mississippi, pp 229–53.
- Lesseig, Corey T. “ ‘Out of the Mud’: The Good Roads Crusade and Social Change in 20th-century Mississippi.” Journal of Mississippi History 60 (Spring 1998): 51–72.
- McLemore, Nannie Pitts. "James K. Vardaman, a Mississippi Progressive," Journal of Mississippi History 29 (1967): 1-11
- McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989)
- Namorato, Michael V. The Catholic Church in Mississippi, 1911-1984: A History (1998) 313pp. online edition
- Nash, Jere, and Andy Taggart. Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008 (2nd ed. 2010)
- Orey, Byron D'Andra. "Racial Threat, Republicanism, and the Rebel Flag: Trent Lott and the 2006 Mississippi Senate Race," National Political Science Review July 2009, Vol. 12, pp. 83–96, on Senator Trent LottTrent LottChester Trent Lott, Sr. , is a former United States Senator from Mississippi and has served in numerous leadership positions in the House of Representatives and the Senate....
- Osborn, George Coleman. James Kimble Vardaman: Southern Commoner (1981).
- Ownby, Ted. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty & Culture, 1830-1998 (1998) online edition
- Parker, Frank R. Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi After 1965 (1990)
- Peirce, Neal R. The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven Deep South States (1974) see chapter 4 on Mississippi in 1970s online edition
- Silver, James W. Mississippi: The Closed Society (1963)
- Smith, Lewis H. and Robert S. Herren, "Mississippi" in Richard P. Nathan, Fred C. Doolittle, eds. Reagan and the States (1987), pp. 208–30.
Local and regional histories
- Bolton, Charles C. Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (1994) online edition
- Brazy, Martha Jane. An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez And New York (2006)
- Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (1992) online edition
- Cosby, A.G. et al. A Social and Economic Portrait of the Mississippi Delta (1992) online
- Currie, James T. Enclave: Vicksburg and Her Plantations, 1863-1870 (1980)
- Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994)
- Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1957) sociological case study of race and class in 1930s
- Greenberg, Kenneth S. "The Civil War and the Redistribution of Land: Adams County, Mississippi, 1860-1870," Agricultural History, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 292–307 in JSTO
- Helferich, Gerry. High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta (2007), growing cotton in 21st century
- James, Dorris Clayton. Ante-Bellum Natchez (1968)
- Morris, Christopher. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (1995)
- Nelson, Lawrence J. "Welfare Capitalism on a Mississippi Plantation in the Great Depression." Journal of Southern History 50 (May 1984): 225–50. in JSTOR
- Owens, Harry P. Steamboats and the Cotton Economy: River Trade in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (1990).
- Polk, Noel. Natchez before 1830 (1989)
- Von Herrmann, Denise. Resorting to Casinos: The Mississippi Gambling Industry (2006) online edition
- Willis, John C. Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta After the Civil War (2000)
- Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (2003)
Environment
- Brinkley, Douglas G. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2007)
- Fickle, James E. Mississippi Forests and Forestry (2001). 384 pp.
- Hearn, Philip D. Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast, (2004) 233 pp
Primary sources
- Abbott, Dorothy. ed. Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth. Vol. 2: Nonfiction, (1986).
- Baldwin, Joseph G. The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853), on the boom times of the 1830s online edition
- Bond, Bradley G. ed. Mississippi: A Documentary History (2003) excerpt and text search; online edition
- Evers, Charles. Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story (1997), memoir of black politician
- Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. (1968) memoir of Black girlhood
- Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee; Recollections of a planter's son (1941) 347 pages excerpt and text search
- Rosengarten, Theodore. All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974) memoir of a Black Mississippian;
- Waters, Andrew, ed. Prayin' to Be Set Free: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Mississippi (2002) 196pp
External links
- Charts and data on farm production, 1911-201
- Reconstruction in Mississippi (by Professor Donald J. Mabry)
- The Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (by David M. Oshinsky)
- Mississippi Historical Society: Mississippi History Now