History of slavery in Mississippi

[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 enslaved person.

[2] When the United States took over Mississippi due to the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, importing enslaved people from other regions was initially prohibited under territorial law.

[3] The first decades of the 19th century in Mississippi featured a continuous rolling action of Indian removal—in which settlers forcibly removed Choctaw and Chickasaw people from their traditional lands.

[3] Under antebellum Mississippi law, the standard penalty for an enslaved person convicted of carrying a gun, petty theft, or attending a reading or writing class was 39 lashes.

[2] 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.

[3] The land clearance and plowing necessary to create thousands of acres of mono-crop cotton plantations was ultimately debilitating to the soil, the river, and the native ecosystem.

It was all take and no give.Slavery was common and divisive in all of the Thirteen Colonies, but the numbers were fewer in the free states because their economies were structured not to depend upon forced labor.

Conversely, slavery played a significant role in Mississipii's agricultural development and was the basis of the economy and society, so many Mississippi enslavers defended it and insisted upon it.

In 1846, a writer in Columbus, Mississippi, wrote that "habits of industry, improves the physical man, tames wild propensities and passions."

They argued that slavery enabled the exploitation of large tracts of fertile land, which would otherwise go to waste since no white man could endure the labor in the marshes and ponds.

Enslavers often enforced work pace through public whippings, which introduced an element of cruelty to the gang labor system.

French colonists continued to buy enslaved Native American peoples from the Southwest and Missouri Country even after the slave wars in the southeastern United States came to an end.