A New History of Mississippi

Chapter Five: Cotton Kingdom

116 Chapter Five Cotton Kingdom In the late 1830s and early 1840s American surveyors imposed imaginary lines on the Choctaw and Chickasaw homelands, continuing Elliott’s mission begun with the thirty-first parallel dividing American from Spanish territories. Between 1840 and 1860 Mississippi’s population increased from 375,651 to 791,305 as settlers raced to buy the quarter sections identified by the surveyors’ lines. They subdued the land, turning it into towns and farms dedicated to producing cotton extracted from the recent wilderness by teams of oxen hauling heavy wagons across rutted muddy roads, by steamboats navigating unlikely snag-filled shallow streams,and by railroads penetrating the streamless forest areas. In the 1830s new counties placed bounties on wolves to protect farmers, but by the 1840s the wolves had vanished . Only the Delta still harbored the type of abundant wildlife Lincecum described along the Tombigbee when he entered the state twenty years earlier . Delta residents still harvested carrier pigeons with night raids on their roosting trees and killed multiple bears in a morning’s hunt, but Natchez district farmers battled erosion as their light loess soil washed away, leaving enormous gullies in their fields. Buffeted by the depression, which was triggered by the Panic of 1837, planters revolutionized agriculture by adopting new techniques and continuing old practices learned from American Indians to keep their land producing. Squatters and pioneers who relied on the natural abundance of wildlife,edible wild fruits,a cornfield,a small vegetable garden,and half-wild pig herds for their livelihood had to replace their reliance on deerskins and pelts with a cotton patch as their only source of cash.They,like the Choctaw and Chickasaw in some instances, joined the world’s market economy with reluctance and equally little success.This era’s settlers brought churches with them, and their ministers adapted theology to a society with a slave majority .Ministers also furnished the backbone of the education available to most of the population by founding academies and colleges, but the leaders of the new Mississippi society were lawyers. Land disputes, trespass, assaults, and debt collection created a lawyer wonderland, which they exploited in 117 Cotton Kingdom | order to buy land and slaves to escape into the more appealing life of the patriarchal planter and political leader. Power shifted quickly from Natchez to the newly settled north, where the ambitious lawyer-planters seized control and generated an aggressive ideology identified as“fire-eating”southern nationalism,which depended on slaves,whose lives deteriorated during this period because of more restrictive laws and regulations. Cotton made Mississippi, dominated its economy, and dictated the development of its culture. In the first half of the nineteenth century, cotton constituted over half of all American exports. The American South supplied much of Great Britain’s industrial expansion in textiles and purchased both agricultural and industrial supplies from the North. Cotton fueled the American nation’s expansion and made a few of the most successful planters the richest elite in America. Slaves produced the cotton. In 1840 slaves outnumbered free Mississippians by about 15,000 and in 1860 by over 80,000. Being a minority altered the white population’s psychology by immersing whites in African American culture. The mass of the whites reacted aggressively and fearfully to their new status as a racial minority, enacting increasing controls over the majority while asserting their determination to extend their domination and exploitation forever. In the late 1850s many fire-eating secessionists began to demand reopening the African slave trade in order to provide a cheaper, more plentiful supply of labor. The more moderate Steamboat loaded with cotton, illustrating the productivity of Mississippi’s farms and plantations. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History from the Cooper Postcard Collection. 33.147.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 03:02 GMT) 118 | Cotton Kingdom fire-eaters advised against advertising their ambition, but nevertheless led Mississippi to secede from the United States, seeking to preserve slavery and expand its cotton economy either westward across the continent or into Latin America. In nineteenth-century terms, Mississippians enjoyed a democratic government in that all white men could vote. Such was not the norm in much of the world.Even in Great Britain at the time,all men did not have the right to vote. The 1832 Mississippi Constitution removed property qualifications, and white men elected all their leaders,including judges.Therefore the mystery of Mississippi’s history in this period is why did the majority...