Natchez to New Orleans: Norman's chart of the lower Mississippi River by A. Persac (1858) showing cotton plantations of Mississippi along the Mississippi River, Natchez to state line

1860 US census, Mississippi, number of slaves per owner

Former slave quarters at Jefferson Davis' plantation Brierfield in Mississippi, drawn by A.R. Waud, etching published 1866 in Harper's Weekly

The history of slavery in Mississippi began when the region was still Mississippi Territory and continued until abolition in 1865. The U.S. state of Mississippi had one of the largest populations of enslaved people in the Confederacy, third behind Virginia and Georgia.^[1] There were very few free people of color in Mississippi the year before the American Civil War: the ratio was one freedman for every 575 slaves.^[2]

Legal history

When the United States took over Mississippi as a consequence of the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, importing slaves from other regions was initially prohibited under territorial law. However, wealthy planters argued "we need more slaves" and the federal government relented, and before long any prohibition on interregional trading was all but forgotten.^[3] The first decades of the 19th century in Mississippi were defined by a continuous rolling action of Indian removal—in which Choctaw and Chickasaw people were forcibly removed from their traditional lands.^[3] And then, as Walter Johnson puts it, "African-American slaves were brought in to cultivate the land expropriated from Native Americans."^[4]

The Mississippi slave code, first passed into law by the Mississippi Legislature in 1823, prohibited groups of five or more enslaved people gathering as unlawful assembly, and leaving a plantation without a handwritten slave pass was prohibited, even to attend religious services.^[3] Under antebellum Mississippi law, the standard penalty for a slave convicted of carrying a gun, petty larceny, or attending a class where reading or writing were taught, was 39 lashes.^[2]

Economic history

Land in Mississippi was river bottomland rich in organic matter— "the Mississippi and Yazoo, the Tombigbee, Big Black, and the Pearl covered an area of over one-sixth of the entire state and offered unrivalled soil"^[5]—and this land was primarily used to grow the highly valuable cash crop cotton produced with the labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved American laborers of African descent. According to David Walker Howe in What Hath God Wrought, overseas cotton sales in 1836 exceeded US$71,000,000 (equivalent to $1,892,042,424 in 2022), and by 1840, the cotton crop was 59 percent of the total value of U.S. exports.^[6] Mississippi cotton was a strain produced by crossing a large-bolled variety from Mexico with a green-seed variety from Tennessee that "grew better on piedmont and interior lands" than sea island cotton.^[3] The land clearance and plowing necessary to create thousands of acres of monocrop cotton plantations was ultimately debilitating to the soil, the river, and the native ecosystem.^[7]

Population growth in Mississippi in the years 1830–1860 was overwhelmingly due to the interstate slave trade. Enslaved people were imported from the slave states of the upper south and sold at Mississippi slave markets including the Forks of the Road at Natchez, at Vicksburg, and at a number of other smaller trading sites.^[8]

In Issaquena County, 92.5 percent of population in 1860 were slaves, the highest concentration anywhere in the United States.^[9][10] The U.S. census that year showed 7,244 slaves in Issaquena County, and of 115 slave owners, 39 held 77 or more.^[11] Stephen Duncan of Issaquena County held 858 slaves, second only to Joshua John Ward of South Carolina.^[12] This large "value of slave property" made Issaquena County the second richest county in the United States, with "mean total wealth per freeman" at $26,800 in 1860 (equivalent to $715,000 in 2022).^[13] By 1880—15 years after the abolition of slavery—the county had developed "a strong year-round market for wage labor", and Issaquena was the only county in Mississippi to report "no sharecropping or sharerenting whatsoever".^[13]

Defending Slavery

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

Slavery Laws

There were laws that regulated slavery in Mississippi from the colonial era to the Civil War, but the laws were inconsistent and often violated by the slaveholders. The laws granted limited rights and protection to enslaved people in Mississippi, including the right to an impartial trial by jury, the prohibition of killing enslaved people, and the duty of the slaveholders to treat enslaved people with humanity and provide them with basic needs, such as clothing. In 1846, a wealthy man fled the country to avoid trial for murdering one of his enslaved people.^[14]

However, enslaved people also faced harsh and extreme punishments for various offenses, such as using abusive language, lifting a hand in opposition to a white person, or stealing from a white person. The punishments were discretionary and depended on the owner’s or the judge's decision. The treatment of enslaved people and white people for the same crimes were also very different. For instance, an enslaved person was whipped and released for stealing money, while a white man was sent to jail for the same crime.^[14]

Slavery and Agriculture

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

Cotton production introduced a gang system of labor, where enslaved people worked in groups, with less autonomy than traditional task systems. These groups were assigned specific tasks, with white overseers monitoring the progress of the gangs. Work pace was often enforced through public whippings, which introduced an element of cruelty to the gang labor system.^[15]

Cotton production also involved year-round labor for seed removal from lint, which lead to resistance and gin fires during harvesting and ginning seasons. However, from the 1830s, the cotton gin became normalized as plantation equipment, and resistance lessened.^[15]

Native Americans

The French, who settled in Mississippi in 1699, fought with the Natchez (Native American people who lived in the Natchez Bluffs) over control of the land near modern-day Natchez for their agriculture interests. In the Natchez War of 1729–33, the French enslaved many Natchez, most of whom had been captured by the Choctaw, another group of indigenous people, and sold them to the West Indies. French colonists continued to buy Indian enslaved people from the Southwest and Missouri Country even after the slaving wars in the Southeast came to an end.^[16]

Abolishment

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

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

See also

• History of slavery in the United States by state
• History of Mississippi § Slavery

References

Further reading

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