History of Mississippi
fourth President James Madison (1751-1836, served 1809-1817), 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 1803 treaty with Napoleonic France.
The postwar flood was catalyzed by various factors: high prices for cotton, the elimination of Native Americans (Indian) titles to much land, new and improved roads, and the acquisition of new direct water outlets to the Gulf of Mexico.
Some Protestant ministers won converts and often promoted education, although there was no state public school system until it was authorized after the Civil War by the Reconstruction-era biracial legislature.
[12][13] William C. C. Claiborne (1775–1817), a lawyer and former Republican congressman from Tennessee (1797–1801), was appointed by President Thomas Jefferson as governor and superintendent of Indian affairs in the Mississippi Territory from 1801 through 1803.
The threat of abolition troubled planters, but they believed that if needed, the cotton states could secede from the Union, form their own country, and expand to the south in Mexico and Cuba.
The typical division of labor on a large plantation 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.
In 1822 planters decided it was too awkward to have free blacks living near slaves and passed a state law forbidding emancipation except by special act of the legislature for each manumission.
[citation needed] Mississippi was a stronghold of Jacksonian democracy, which glorified the independent farmer; the legislature named the state capital in Andrew Jackson's honor.
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 January 9, 1861.
The fall of the city to General 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.
Grant forced the Confederates to fall back to new defensive positions several times during the day; they could not stop the Union onslaught and left the field in the early evening.
[29] In April–May 1863 Union colonel Benjamin H. Grierson led a major cavalry raid that raced through Mississippi and Louisiana, destroying railroads, telegraph lines, and Confederate weapons and supplies.
But soon enough they were losing brothers, sons and husbands to battlefield deaths and disease, lost their incomes and luxuries, and had to deal with chronic shortages and poor ersatz substitutes for common items.
He enabled all black men of age to enroll as voters (not just veterans), and temporarily prohibited about a thousand or so former Confederate leaders to vote or hold state offices.
In speeches to the Senate, Alcorn urged the removal of the political disabilities of white southerners and rejected Radical Republican proposals to enforce social equality by federal legislation.
Such paramilitary terrorist organizations as the White League, the Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, and associated rifle clubs raised the level of violence at every election, attacking blacks to suppress the freedmen's vote.
[57] 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 that imposed a poll tax of $2 a year, which the great majority of blacks and poor whites could not pay to register to vote; they were effectively excluded from the political process.
Almost half a million people, three-quarters of them black, left Mississippi in the second migration, many seeking jobs in the burgeoning wartime defense industry on the West Coast, particularly in California.
Jim Crow and disenfranchisement persisted in Mississippi for decades, sometimes enforced by violence and economic blackmail, particularly as African Americans organized to achieve civil rights.
It had a one-party government dominated by white Democrats who emphasized not raising taxes, resulting in no paved roads; residents suffered widespread illiteracy and regular epidemics of contagious diseases, the latter spread in part because of the lack of sanitation infrastructure, endemic hookworm; this was the nadir of race relations, marked by a high rate of lynchings of blacks, especially when sharecrop accounts were due to be settled and cotton prices were low; local affairs were controlled by courthouse rings; and the state had few natural assets besides prime cotton land and once important cities on the Mississippi River.
Finally was the "Dream of Novelty", in which ever-changing fashions, new models, and unexpected new products broadened the consumer experience and challenged the conservatism of traditional society and culture, and politics.
[65][page needed] Other historians have attributed the migration decisions to the poor schools for blacks, a high rate of violence, social oppression, and political disenfranchisement in Mississippi.
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.
Federal farm payments and improvements in mechanical cotton pickers made modernization economically possible by 1940, but most planters feared loss of racial and social control and simply shifted their workers from sharecropping to wage labor.
[70] During their long disenfranchisement, white state legislators had consistently underfunded segregated schools and services for African Americans, created programs that did not represent their interests, and passed laws that discriminated against them systematically.
[73] Following the murder of three civil rights workers in the early summer, 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.
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 ideological shift on the question of nonviolence within CORE and SNCC occurred primarily because of the effect of white violence in Mississippi, such as the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in Neshoba County.
