mississippi

Located in the heart of the South, Mississippi is one of five southern states that border the Gulf of Mexico. Its total area consists of 47,689 square miles, ranking it the second smallest Gulf-South state and the thirty-first in population nationally. Despite its size, the region has been blessed with perhaps the South's most fertile soil, though there are marked contrasts in several infertile belts. Its brown loam soil region in the central interior, its loess soil in the southwestern corridor, and its rich east-central prairie have continued to be productive cotton and grazing lands and, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, were dominant economic centers before major development of the even more fertile Yazoo-Mississippi Delta in the decades surrounding the Civil War.

Long before the arrival of Europeans and Africans, numerous native groups made Mississippi their home. Three tribes dominated, however: the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and the Natchez. While their worlds were hardly tranquil or their civilizations as technologically developed as that of the Europeans, they lived in harmony with nature and, even as the Europeans intruded, continued to develop their culture. In both positive and negative ways, life would never be the same for them thereafter. For example, after the early 1730s, the Natchez, with one of the most complex and highly developed civilizations north of Mexico, no longer existed in Mississippi following a long period of confrontations with the colonial French.

European interest in Mississippi began soon after New World discovery. The Spaniard Hernando de Soto, seeking to reclaim the glory and increase the wealth that he had achieved with Francisco Pizarro in Peru, was the first European explorer of Mississippi. He failed in his efforts, eventually dying in his quest. But the conquistador left an enduring legacy of his journey through Mississippi's wilderness when, in 1541, he happened upon the Mississippi River to become the first known white man to approach its banks overland. Other aspects of his expedition through the Southeast are far less admirable because of the inhumane tolls that he inflicted on Native peoples along the way, including the Chickasaws with whom he quartered during the winter of 1540–1541.

It was, however, the French who first laid substantive claims to Mississippi. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, an ambitious French explorer and fur trader interested in both personal gain and French expansion in North America, claimed the Mississippi countryside in 1682 for King Louis XIV as an integral part of the Louisiana colony. Thirteen years later, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, led a group of settlers to the Gulf Coast, where he constructed Fort Maurepas (later named Ocean Springs), the first permanent white settlement on Mississippi soil.

France's settlements in Mississippi soon expanded to included Natchez on the Mississippi and Biloxi near Ocean Springs. Its colonial experience in the Lower Mississippi Valley, however, proved an immense failure. A misguided imperial policy, punctuated by a weak economy, an inadequate immigration flow, and poor Indian relations influenced its regional instability. A rivalry with England for colonial domination culminated with the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and eventually led to France's expulsion from North America. For nearly two decades thereafter, England controlled Mississippi as part of its West Florida province and sought to develop a tobacco culture in the Natchez region, but it, too, met only limited success. Although the Mississippi region did not revolt against England in the American Revolution, England lost West Florida to Spain soon after Spain entered the conflict. It was a propitious situation for Spain, which added the east bank of the Mississippi to its west bank holdings, an area acquired prior to the French and Indian War.

An American dispute with Spain over West Florida's northern boundary remained a diplomatic issue until the 1795 signing of Pinckney's Treaty. The agreement ceded to the United States the coveted Yazoo Strip and resulted in the establishment of the Mississippi Territory, ceremoniously declared in Natchez on 7 April 1798. Congress fixed the northern and southern boundaries at thirty-two degrees and twenty-eight minutes north latitude and thirty-one degrees north latitude, respectively. The Mississippi and Chattahoochee Rivers bounded the territory in the west and in the east. Excluding the Gulf Coast region, which remained in Spanish West Florida, southern Mississippi and Alabama lay essentially with in the territory. However, by 1804, the territory's northern limits had reached the Tennessee line; eight years later, expansion to the south incorporated the Gulf Coast, the result of presidential decree shortly after borderland inhabitants successfully revolted against Spanish authority. Natchez, with its advantageous location, great economic potential, and larger population was the clear choice over Alabama settlements to seat the territorial government.

Mississippi's government was established under guidelines similar to legislation that organized the Old Northwest Territories in 1787. A federally appointed governor, with the assistance of a secretary and three judges, comprised the initial structure until the territory met higher population standards. With slavery long established in the area, however, provisions in the Northwest Ordinance that banned the institution there could not apply to Mississippi. Winthrop Sargent served as the first governor, a contentious tenure that lasted until President Thomas Jefferson replaced him in 1801. Sargent was a Federalist appointee and, like three of his four Democratic-Republican Party successors, governed during a period when politics in Mississippi was extremely partisan. Eastern Mississippi's yeoman farmers found much to differ over with the Mississippi River area's aristocratic planters and creditor classes, who dominated governmental and economic affairs. Political turmoil was so disruptive that it influenced Governor W. C. C. Claiborne, Sargent's successor, to seek a solution by moving the territorial capital to Washington, a small village several miles north of Natchez. Only under the administration of the more tractable Virginian David Holmes, the last territorial governor, did Mississippi find relief from the political infighting, prompting a unity certainly influenced by exigencies from the War of 1812 and the volatile Creek War of 1813.

The peace that followed sparked a period of massive population growth, particularly in the eastern areas. Rapidly upon the heels of this great migration of 1816, Mississippi successfully lobbied Congress for statehood. On 10 December 1817, President James Monroe signed legislation that admitted Mississippi to the Union as the twentieth state. By then, the Alabama settlements had gone their separate way and soon followed Mississippi into statehood.

It was clear from the outset that Mississippi's constitutional framers were uninterested in establishing a broad-based democracy. Persistent sectional problems had disrupted the constitutional convention, and eastern territorial delegates could not prevent westerners from maintaining their political dominance over the state. Only men of considerable real property were eligible to hold office and vote, though militia service could qualify one for the franchise. Occasionally, the backcountry commoners' pleas for a greater voice were heard, as they were in 1822, when efforts to end a long-standing grievance moved the capital to the centrally located and politically neutral site that became Jackson. Universal white manhood suffrage and other democratic changes resulted from a new constitution in 1832, inspired by the widening national influence of Jacksonian democracy; yet constitutional reform hardly negated the power of the wealthy ruling class of planters and businessmen.

The 1830s—Mississippi's "flush times"—were also years of unparalled prosperity. Much of this stimulation came at the expense of Native Americans, who, after experiencing years of territorial shrinkage, lost title to all of their remaining lands. Removal of the Mississippi Choctaws and Chickasaws to Indian Territory opened vast new fertile lands to white exploitation. Banks proliferated through easy credit policies and paper currency and helped to fuel the boom. Speculators prospered through high land prices. Land-hungry farmers and planters poured into Mississippi and rapidly filled the empty spaces, primarily the state's northern half. The 1840 census revealed a ten-year white population increase of 175 percent and of black, 197 percent, almost entirely slaves. But a change in federal monetary and credit policies ended this golden age, prompting the panic of 1837. Unable to meet their obligations, many Mississippians lost their possessions and suffered through the depression; numerous others sought to escape by migrating to Texas.

Some Mississippians certainly benefited from the cyclical upswing that began in the mid-1840s. The spread of the cotton culture into Indian cession lands increased the size and power of the planter elite. Corn, not cotton, was the largest crop in acreage, but it neither generated the income nor enhanced the image and prestige of its producers as "white gold" did for planters. The disparity between the affluent and poor naturally increased. None were, of course, more impoverished than the thousands of slaves, who by 1840 comprised a 52 percent population majority. They toiled in virtually every capacity, but cotton and fieldwork were their major calling and, by 1860, their labor had helped to make Mississippi one of the five richest states in the nation.

More than any other, it was the slave issue that proved to be the most decisive in Mississippi's justification for secession. To be sure, disunion was hardly endorsed enthusiastically everywhere, but even for Mississippians in areas with fewer slaves, such as the Piney Woods and the Northeastern Hills, Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 and the Republican Party's opposition to slavery's expansion seemed threatening to a familiar way of life. Consequently, the state left the union by a large majority on 9 January 1861.

The enthusiasm and optimism that Mississippians expressed at the onset of Southern nationhood soon gave way to the realities of war. Food, materials, and labor shortages affected both the military and civilian populations. Numerous battles occurred in Mississippi, but none compared to Vicksburg and the significance it held for the Confederacy as a railway supply center for the Deep South, and for the Union's goal to control the strategically important Mississippi River. For the Confederacy and Mississippi, Vicksburg's loss on 4 July 1863 was costly in human life and morale and certainly influenced the war's outcome. The siege at Vicksburg severely damaged the town, but Mississippi as a whole did not experience the extensive physical devastation that occurred elsewhere. Few communities, and fewer families, however, were left untouched in some way by the war. More than 78,000 white men went off to fight; 27,000 never returned, and, for many who did, disability was often a reminder of their commitment and sacrifice. A year after the war, Mississippi devoted one-fifth of its budget to purchase artificial limbs for veterans.

Black Mississippians, too, saw activity in the war; 17,000 fought to help save the Union and free their people. Months into the conflict, slavery's fate seemed sealed; by war's end, emancipation was assured. In Mississippi, 436,000 former slaves would join more than 3 million from other states in freedom. At the outset, however, it was unclear exactly what their status would be, beyond legal freedom. In the years that followed emancipation, their challenges proved formidable, as federal and state officials sought to define African American citizenship, while simultaneously wrestling with the politics and economics of Reconstruction (1865–1877) and North–South reconciliation.

Federal policy gave Mississippi freedmen no land and only a fleeting opportunity to experience citizenship. But they responded enthusiastically. They influenced a temporary return to Mississippi's two-party system by helping the newly formed Republican Party. They voted, helped to shape and implement constitutional reform, and served in offices at all government levels, including both houses of Congress. The seating of Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce as U.S. senators, for example, represented unprecedented nineteenth-century accomplishments. Not until 1986 would another Mississippian, Mike Espy, become the second African American to follow John R. Lynch into the House of Representatives.

Reconstruction gains were short-lived for freedmen, however. This was largely because the Republican Party's ascendancy was brief. Democrats regained elective hegemony in 1875 through their "Mississippi plan," a counterrevolution campaign of widespread violence, economic intimidation of freedmen, and balloting fraud. Thereafter, through impeachment they quickly purged most remaining Republicans from state offices.

The outcome proved crucial to the former slaves and, like elsewhere, they fell victim to an insidious political and racial backlash that relegated them to less than second class citizens. To be sure, the overthrow of Republican rule—a period that hardly equaled the Reconstruction excesses in some former Confederate states—and its replacement with the redemption (1876–1900) did not immediately submerge the freedmen into near total subordination, but by the end of the century, such results were certainly evident.

Demand for their suppression came from white farmers in the hills counties. These common men were dissatisfied with conservative democrats—so-called Bourbons, or Redeemers—because of their promotion and alliance with the railroad and industrial establishment. Railroading and timber production dramatically increased but afforded economic opportunity for only a small minority. Tied ever more to "king cotton" and one-crop agriculture, with its farm tenancy, crop lien credit system, farmers had sweltered economically in an agriculturally depressed postwar period, largely dominated by the success of northern industrial expansion. From their perspective, federal economic and monetary policies exacerbated agrarian woes. The white majority, seeking greater empowerment and believing it possible only through ousting the Bourbons and the black vote they controlled, supported a Democratic party leadership that insisted on a new constitution in 1890, which would legally deprive blacks of the vote. This disfranchisement coalesced with rigid Jim Crowism and a stifling sharecropping system that pushed blacks ever deeper into impoverishment and ensured white supremacy well beyond the mid-twentieth century.

The 1902 Primary Election Law helped propel James K. Vardaman—representative of this new "redneck" faction—into the governorship in 1903. Vardaman was popularly known as the "white chief" because of his white supremacy views, and, along with his demagogue successors, he championed white commoners' elevation through a progressive agenda of social justice, limitations on business and industry, and adherence to white supremacy and classism. Medical and juvenile care, prison reform, and transportation all progressed; improvements in education occurred only minimally. Although these leaders enjoyed immense popularity, they had their detractors, and perhaps none aroused as much controversy and criticism as did Theodore Bilbo, twentieth-century Mississippi's most rabid race baiter, who was elected governor in 1915 and 1927 and three times to the U.S. Senate.

The influence of the redneck leadership waned after the onset of the Great Depression during the 1930s and with the emergence of business-oriented governors such as Martin Sennett Conner (1932–1936) and Hugh White (1936–1940, 1952–1956). Motivated as much by the need to lessen the effects of the depression on the nation's poorest state as they were to create a more diversified economy, these leaders instituted creative measures such as the sales tax and lucrative state incentives to attract industry. Light industrial expansion in furniture and clothing manufacturing could not compare to the arrival of a major shipbuilding corporation on the Gulf Coast in 1938—which was still the state's largest private employer in the early 2000s—but collectively they added promise to the prospects of Mississippi's economic future.

Much needed to be done. Federal depression-era measures certainly helped, but conditions hardly improved for most landless farmers, black or white, who were further affected adversely by mechanization and a declining need for manual labor. For many, migration to northern industrial states or nearby cities like Memphis, Mobile, and New Orleans held the greatest promise. One result was that, by 1940, blacks had become a minority, a downward spiral that continued into the 1960s. World War II sparked a similar intrastate "pull" factor for Jackson, which assumed a distinctively urban character, and for Hattiesburg and the Gulf Coast, attractive because of demands from recently established military installations.

War put 23,700 Mississippians into military uniforms. Their service exposed them to a world that was very different from Mississippi. Veterans' benefits provided them opportunities for college and better housing. The farm and rural life appealed less to them as cities and towns continued their slow but steady growth. Some veterans had certainly been influenced by one of the war's goals—to end Nazi racism—but Mississippi found it difficult to break from its past. Opposed to black Mississippians' demands for equal rights and the national Democratic Party's increasingly liberal support of civil rights, between 1948 and 1970 the state was frequently a center of attention because of its determined stand to maintain racial orthodoxy.

Governor Hugh White's unrealistic proposals to equalize black and white schools in the early 1950s inevitably failed and forecast the historic 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision. Mississippi was perhaps the South's most segregated state, and many certainly believed they had much to defend; others understood the importance of cracking the monolith, for success there might make gains easier to achieve elsewhere. Forces such as the White Citizens Council—the so-called Uptown Klan—first emerged in Mississippi before its regional spread to fight "race-mixers" through political and economic intimidation. But change was inevitable, though it occurred grudgingly and not without frequent bloody consequences. In 1962, rioting erupted over the black student James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi, and beatings of civil rights workers by both citizens and law officials occurred throughout the state. Nothing, however, equaled the international revulsion that resulted from the manhunt and grave discovery of three young activists, two of whom were white college students, brutally murdered in the 1964 Freedom Summer voting rights campaign. By the end of the 1960s, however, nearly all white colleges and universities enrolled black students; the federal courts ordered statewide public school desegregation in the early 1970s; and, a decade after its passage, the 1965 Voting Rights Act had resulted in more African Americans in Mississippi government offices than in any other state in the nation. Undeniably, disparities endured, as revealed by a 2002 state settlement of a twenty-seven year black plaintiffs college funding discrimination suit. At the end of the twentieth century, however, the race question was no longer the political, social, and economically divisive issue that had retarded Mississippi's development throughout much of its history.

Other adjustments also appeared in the last third of the twentieth century. A viable two-party system functioned for the first time since Reconstruction, as Republicans won elective offices to all levels of government, including the governorship and Congress. The state ended its dependence on cotton as soybean production rivaled it. The early vision of governors such as Hugh White, Paul Johnson Sr. (1940–1943), and Paul Johnson Jr. (1964–1968), all of whom had worked to achieved a more balanced economy, showed remarkable fruition as industry, for the first time, provided Mississippians with more jobs and wages than did agriculture. Opportunities in extracting and developing Mississippi's major natural resources of oil, timber, coal, bauxite, sand, and gravel expanded. Oil refining, furniture and paper manufacturing, and diverse service-related jobs joined with tourism and the new casino industry to invigorate Mississippi's economy. Employment from a major automobile manufacturing plant would open in 2003 and add further economic growth in central Mississippi. A massive ongoing highway building program, initiated in the 1980s, has significantly improved the infrastructure and quality of transportation. Finally, education reform in the establishment of kindergartens, smaller classrooms, and teacher aides and the institution of more equitable funding through the Adequate Education Program have improved an education system that long lagged behind other states.

Progress not with standing, in 2000 Mississippi remained one of the nation's poorest states, its citizens earning 71 percent of the national median income. For every tax dollar that Mississippi sent to the federal government in the early 2000s it received three back through various programs. With a relatively small population of 2.8 million people as of 2002, the state's modest growth in the previous decade would result in the loss of one of five congressional seats and, perhaps accordingly, the loss of substantive influence in ensuring Mississippi's continued receipt of vital federal dollars.

Bibliography

Bartley, Numan V. The New South, 1945–1980: The Story of the South's Modernization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Bettersworth, John K. Confederate Mississippi: The People and Politics of a Cotton State in Wartime. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1978.

Bond, Bradley. Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South: Mississippi, 1830–1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Carpenter, Barbara, ed. Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. New York: Perennial Classics, 2002.

Harris, William C. The Day of the Carpetbagger. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

James, D. Clayton. Antebellum Natchez. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

Kirwan, Albert D. Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876– 1925. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964.

McLemore, Richard A., ed. A History of Mississippi. 2 vols. Hattiesburg: University Press of Mississippi. 1973.

McMillen, Neil. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

———. The Citizen's Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–1964. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Miles, Edwin A. Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi. New York: Da Capo Press, 1970.

Moore, John Hebron. The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

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