From North to Natchez during the Age of Gradual Abolition

This essay examines connections between slaveholding in south central Pennsylvania and the Lower Mississippi Valley during the age of gradual abolition, with particular attention to Carlisle and Natchez. Between 1780 and 1830, the number of enslaved and slaveholding northerners plummeted, while the population of the Old Southwest surged. Men and women from all over the country flocked to the blossoming Cotton Kingdom, including many influential people from northern slaveholding communities. Many of these northern-born transplants were descended from slaveholders, and a substantial number of them had grown up in households attended to by unfree black servants. The family ties and elite status these migrants cultivated in Pennsylvania as slavery waned helped them establish the institution in Mississippi.