The agriculturally productive lands were divided by a straight line running south from the northwest corner of Washington County (as it was defined at the time) to the Gulf of Mexico.

The postwar flood was caused by various factors, including high prices for cotton, the elimination of Indian titles to much of the land, new and improved roads, and the acquisition of new direct outlets to the Gulf of Mexico.

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.

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).

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.

Holmes was generally successful in dealing with a variety of matters, including expansion, land policy, Indians, the War of 1812, and the constitutional convention of 1817 (of which he was elected president).

Ignored by the territorial government, the inhabitants were beset by hostile neighbors, militant Indians, and the usual frontier problems of competing land claims and establishment of law.

In 1798, Sargent wrote to Timothy Pickering, Secretary of State, that this was his "great source of uneasiness"; he was anxiously awaiting the arrival of a new judge, William McGuire—but McGuire, who did not get to the territory in the fall of 1799, went back to his home in Virginia after only a couple of weeks.

"Aside from his innocence of legal knowledge, [he] was so often drunk or absent or both" (and had to resign to avoid impeachment), according to the reviewer of a 1954 study by William Baskerville Hamilton on Thomas Rodney, the federal judge who arrived in the territory in 1803 and helped organize it until his death in 1811.

Several judicial reorganization acts followed in 1805, 1809, and 1814, though a modified form of Sargent's county court system and the considerable power held by judges continued.

[20] While the Roman Catholic Church, planted during the French and Spanish colonial periods, was active along the coast, after 1799 more American Protestants entered the territory, bringing their religious varieties with them.

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.

However, problems of land claims, Indians, internal improvements, and statehood issues continued to excite more local interest than the coming of war.

Poor scouting, an attack at noon when most of the garrison was eating, seizure of the portholes by the Indians, and inability to close the main gates were all elements in the defeat on August 30, 1813.

It triggered a major Indian war that involved a substantial build-up of American military force in the area – which probably prevented the British from occupying an undefended Gulf coast in 1814.

Brigadier General Ferdinand L. Claiborne, commander of the Mississippi militia, was not to blame for the massacre, but Major Daniel Beasley was guilty of gross negligence.

At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, American forces and Indian allies under General Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Sticks, killing most of the warriors and sending the rest fleeing to Florida, where they joined the Seminole tribe.