Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720-1835 (review)

If one had visited Natchez in the recent past, he would have found a relatively sleepy little town, almost a backwater, with lovely plantation homes and a pleasant waterfront but little hint that it was once the economic center of Mississippi. Riverboat gambling has restored a portion of its former aspect if not its former glory but the city is far from achieving its former prominence. Natchez is the focus of David Libby's story and from the time of Native American occupation, from one group of which it took its name, until the l820s it had a preeminent place in the Mississippi Valley. Indeed, it dominated economically long after the 1820s while the political center of the region shifted northward. As is the welcome trend among slavery studies in recent years, Libby's is a story of evolution and he traces development of the "plantation society and economy established in eighteenth-century Natchez as it expanded further into the Natchez district, the Mississippi Territory, and ultimately the State of Mississippi" (p. xiii). He begins with Native Americans and stops at the point that most other studies begin, where slavery has reached its antebellum stage though even then it was not static.

The conflict of polities and cultures is one of the themes of the book and Libby does a good job of considering and not just mentioning pre-Columbian and African peoples as well as of course the Europeans—French, Spanish, English, and Americans—who claimed the region. Because of these contesting powers, Natchez remained a frontier for many years despite it fertile soil, political uncertainty, among other things, hampering its connection with the developing industrial world. Libby is at pains to sketch a society that aims toward capitalism and achieves success when, through cotton (and American political hegemony), it establishes firm ties with a growing Atlantic economy. He has no use for the concept of the South as a pre-modern, pre-capitalist, feudal, or seigneurial society (depending on how one uses the last term) and instead, following scholars such as Mark Smith and Joyce Chaplin, to mention only two who have significantly modified the idea that the South was totally out of step with the rest of the nation, sees Mississippi frontiersmen and planters as striving to be part of current business and scientific trends. He considers cotton to be peculiar in that, unlike other crops, it militated against maintenance of "a kind of premodern work culture that allowed slaves to preserve many aspects of their African heritage through their work" (p. 46). Here one could wish he were more specific as to how sugar, tobacco, and rice did so for while facts come to mind, it would be good to know his thinking along these lines. He even has problems with the concept of paternalism, at least as regards early Mississippi and separates the attitudes of Virginian John Steele, for example, from that of frontier Mississippi and while noting the limitations of Steele's concern for his slaves, or for one slave, considers his the values of "an old planter elite" (p. 38), values he says transformed in Mississippi. It is difficult to see any real transformation in Steele, however, because Libby does not provide enough information to support the argument. He notes at the outset that Steele's concern was mostly for a personal servant (which did not prevent him from separating the slave from his family) and that he was less concerned about his other slaves; setting up a new plantation in Mississippi may have been harder work than on a settled one in Virginia but there is little indication that Steele or any other planter, paternalist or otherwise, objected to working slaves hard. The circumstances but not Steele's values seem to have changed.

Perhaps Libby had in mind a contrast between Steele and William Dunbar, who revealed himself as a fierce and unfeeling taskmaster, but even he had patriarchal if not paternal attitudes.. Much of what...