History of Mississippi
The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
Initial colonization of the region was carried out by the French, though France would cede their control over portions of the region to Spain and Britain, particularly along the Gulf Coast. European-American settlers did not enter the territory in great number until the early 19th century. Some European-American settlers would bring many enslaved Africans with them to serve as laborers to develop cotton plantations along major riverfronts. On December 10, 1817, Mississippi became a state of the United States. Through the 1830s, the federal government forced most of the native Choctaw and Chickasaw people west of the Mississippi River. American planters developed an economy based on the export of cotton produced by slave labor along the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. A small elite group of planters controlled most of the richest land, the wealth, and politics of the state, which led to Mississippi seceding from the Union in 1861. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), its river cities particularly were sites of extended battles. Following the collapse of the Confederacy in 1865, Mississippi would enter the Reconstruction era (1865–1877).
The bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta were still 90% undeveloped after the Civil War. Thousands of migrants, both black and white, entered this area for a chance at land ownership. They sold timber while clearing land to raise money for purchases. During the Reconstruction era, many freedmen became owners of farms in these areas, and by 1900, composed two-thirds of the property owners in the Mississippi Delta. Democrats regained control of the state legislature in the late 19th century, and in 1890, passed a disfranchising constitution, resulting in the exclusion of African Americans from political life until the mid-1960s. Most African Americans lost their lands due to disenfranchisement, segregation, financial crises, and an extended decline in cotton prices. By 1920, most African Americans in the state were landless sharecroppers and tenant farmers. However, in the 1930s, some African Americans acquired land under low-interest loans from New Deal programs; in 1960 Holmes County still had 800 black farmers, the most of any county in the state. The state continued to rely mostly on agriculture and timber through the mid-20th century, but mechanization and acquisition of properties by megafarms would change the face of the labor market and state economy.
During the early through mid-20th century, the two waves of the Great Migration led to hundreds of thousands of rural blacks leaving the state. As a result, by the 1930s, African Americans were a minority of the state population for the first time since the early 19th century. They would remain a majority of the population in many Delta counties. Mississippi also had numerous sites of activism related to the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s, as African Americans sought to re-establish their constitutional rights for access to public facilities, including all state universities, and the ability to register, vote, and run for office.
By the early 21st century Mississippi had made notable progress in overcoming attitudes and attributes that had impeded social, economic, and political development. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina would cause severe damage along Mississippi's Gulf Coast. The tourism industry in Mississippi would help play a key role in helping build the states economy in the early 21st century. Mississippi would also expand its professional communities in cities such as Jackson, the state capital. Top industries in Mississippi today include agriculture, forestry, manufacturing, transportation and utilities, and health services.[1]
Reconstruction[edit]
After the defeat of the Confederacy, President Andrew Johnson appointed a temporary state government under provisional governor Judge William Lewis Sharkey (1798–1873). It repealed the 1861 Ordinance of Secession and wrote new "Black Codes", defining and limiting the civil rights of freedmen, the former slaves. The whites tried to restrict the African Americans to a second-class status without citizenship or voting rights. Johnson was following the previously expressed policies of his predecessor, 16th President Abraham Lincoln. He had planned a generous and tolerating Reconstruction policy towards the former Confederates and southerners. He intended to grant citizenship and voting rights first to Black veterans, while slowly integrating the remainder of the freedmen into the political and economic life in the nation and the "new South".
The Black Codes were never implemented. Radical Republicans in the Congress, with the early support of President Lincoln, objected strongly to the intent to impose new restrictions on the movement and rights of freedmen. The federal government established the Freedmen's Bureau as an agency to help educate and assist the former slaves, in the U.S. War Department. It attempted to help the freedmen negotiate contracts and other relations in the new free labor market. Most officials in the Freedmen's Bureau were former Union Army officers from the North. Many settled permanently in the state, with some becoming political leaders in the Republican Party and in business (they were scornfully known as "carpetbaggers" by white Democrats in the South). The Black Codes outraged northern opinion, as they represented an attempt to reassert conditions of slavery and white supremacy. They were not fully implemented in any state. White Mississippians and other Southerners were committed to restoring white supremacy and circumscribing the legal, civil, political, and social rights of the freedmen.
In September 1865 Congress was under the control of more Radical Republicans from the North, and refused to seat the newly elected Mississippi delegation. Responding to tumultuous conditions and violence, in 1867, Congress passed Reconstruction legislation. It used U.S. Army forces to occupy and manage various areas of the South in an effort to create a new order, and Mississippi was one of the areas designated to be under military control.
The military Governor-General, and Union Army Gen. Edward O.C. Ord, (1818–1883), commander of the Mississippi/Arkansas District, was assigned to register the state's electorate so that voters could elect representatives to write a new state constitution reflecting the granting of citizenship and the franchise to freedmen through amendments to the United States Constitution. In a contested election, the state's white voters rejected the proposal of a new state constitution. Mississippi continued to be governed by federal martial law. Union Gen. Adelbert Ames (1835–1933) of Maine, under direction from the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, deposed the provisional civil government appointed by President Johnson. He enabled all black men of age to enroll as voters (not just veterans), and temporarily prohibited about a thousand or so former Confederate leaders to vote or hold state offices.[38]
In 1868 a biracial coalition (dominated by whites) drafted a new constitution for the state; it was adopted by referendum. The Constitutional Convention was the first political organization in the state's history to include African American (then referred to as "Negro" or "Colored") representatives, but they did not dominate the convention, nor the later state legislature. Freedmen numbered 17 among the 100 members, although blacks comprised more than half of the state population of the time. Thirty-two Mississippi counties had black majorities, but freedmen elected whites as well as blacks to represent them.
The 1868 constitution had major elements that lasted for 22 years. The convention adopted universal male suffrage (unrestricted by property qualifications, educational requirements or poll taxes); created the framework for the state's first public school system (which Northern and border states had begun 40 years earlier); forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property; and prohibited limiting civil rights in travel. It provided for a four-year term for the governor rather than two years (the previous legislatures had severely limited executive power); provided the governor with the power to appoint judges (taking judicial elections out of what had been corrupt elections before the war); required legislative reapportionment of seats to recognize the new voting freedmen in many jurisdictions; and repudiated the ordinances and powers of secession. Opponents of black franchise referred to this as the "Black and Tan Convention", although whites composed the overwhelming majority of delegates. Mississippi was readmitted to the Union on January 11, 1870, and its representatives and senators were seated in Congress on February 23, 1870.[39]
Black Mississippians, participating in the political process for the first time, formed a coalition with white Republicans made up of locals and Northerners in a Republican party that controlled the state legislature for a time. Most of the Republican voters were freedmen, several of whom held important state offices. Some black leaders emerged who had gained education in the North and were returning to the South. A. K. Davis served as lieutenant governor, and Hiram Revels (1827–1901) and Blanche K. Bruce (1841–1898) were elected by the Legislature to the U.S. Senate. John R. Lynch (1847–1939) was elected as a representative to Congress. The Republican regime faced the determined opposition of the "unreconstructed" white Democrats in the population. Soon after the end of the war, chapters of the Ku Klux Klan were organized in Mississippi, working to intimidate blacks and their allies, such as schoolteachers, and suppress voting.
The planter James Lusk Alcorn (1816–1894), a Confederate general, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865 but, like other Southerners who had been loyal to the Confederacy, was not allowed to take a seat at that time. He supported suffrage for freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment, as required by the Republicans in Congress. Alcorn became the leader of the "scalawags", local residents who comprised about a third of the Republican Party in the state, in coalition with "carpetbaggers" (migrants from the North) and freedmen.
Alcorn was elected as governor in 1869 and served from 1870 to 1871. As a modernizer, he appointed many like-minded former Whigs, even if they had become Democrats. He strongly supported education, conceding segregation of public schools to get them started. He supported founding a new college for freedmen, now known as Alcorn State University (established 1871 in Lorman). He maneuvered to make his ally Hiram Revels its president. Radical Republicans opposed Alcorn as they were angry about his patronage policy. One complained that Alcorn's policy was to see "the old civilization of the South 'modernized'" rather than lead a total political, social and economic revolution.[40]
Alcorn resigned the governorship to become a U.S. senator (1871 to 1877), replacing his ally Hiram Revels, the first African-American U.S. senator from the state. In speeches to the Senate, Alcorn urged the removal of the political disabilities of white southerners and rejected Radical Republican proposals to enforce social equality by federal legislation. He denounced the federal cotton tax as robbery, and defended separate schools for both races in Mississippi. Although a former slaveholder, he characterized slavery as "a cancer upon the body of the Nation" and expressed his gratitude for its end.[41]
Although President Grant achieved suppression of the KKK in much of the South through the Enforcement Acts, new groups of Democratic insurgents arose through the 1870s. Such paramilitary terrorist organizations as the White League, the Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, and associated rifle clubs raised the level of violence at every election, attacking blacks to suppress the freedmen's vote.
In 1870, former military governor Adelbert Ames (1835–1933) was elected by the Legislature (as was the process at the time) to the U.S. Senate. Ames and Alcorn battled for control of the Republican Party in Mississippi; their struggle caused the party to lose its precarious unity. In 1873 they both ran for governor. Ames was supported by the Radicals and most African Americans, while Alcorn won the votes of conservative whites and most of the scalawags. Ames won by a vote of 69,870 to 50,490.
In 1874 Republican voters elected a black sheriff in the city of Vicksburg and dominated other elections. White had been organizing to throw out Republicans and, on December 6, 1874, forced the newly elected sheriff Peter Crosby to leave his office. Freedmen tried to support him, coming in from the rural areas on December 7, but he advised them to return home peacefully. Armed white militia attacked the freedmen that day and in the following days, in what became known as the Vicksburg massacre. White Democrats are estimated to have killed 300 blacks in the area. The massacre was carried by newspapers from New York[42] to California.[43][44][45] The New York Times also carried reporting on the congressional investigation into these events, beginning in January 1875.[46]
The Democratic Party had factions of the Regulars and New Departures, but as the state election of 1875 approached, they united and worked on the "Mississippi Plan", to organize whites to defeat both white and black Republicans. They used economic and political pressure against scalawags and carpetbaggers, persuading them to change parties or leave the state. Armed attacks by the Red Shirts, White League and rifle clubs on Republicans proliferated, as in the September 1875 "Clinton Riot". Governor Ames appealed to the federal government for armed assistance, which was refused. That November, Democrats gained firm control of both houses of the legislature by such violence and election fraud. Ames requested the intervention of the U.S. Congress since the election had been subject to voter intimidation and fraud. The state legislature, convening in 1876, drew up articles of impeachment against him and all statewide officials. He resigned and fled the state, "marking the end of Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi."[47][48]
Progressive Era[edit]
By 1900, Mississippi lagged behind other Southern states. It had a one-party government dominated by white Democrats who emphasized not raising taxes, resulting in no paved roads; residents suffered widespread illiteracy and regular epidemics of contagious diseases, the latter spread in part because of the lack of sanitation infrastructure, endemic hookworm; this was the nadir of race relations, marked by a high rate of lynchings of blacks, especially when sharecrop accounts were due to be settled and cotton prices were low; local affairs were controlled by courthouse rings; and the state had few natural assets besides prime cotton land and once important cities on the Mississippi River.
Mississippi failed to attract much outside investment or European immigration, although European Jews settled in the larger cities such as Meridian and Jackson. Planters recruited Chinese workers for agriculture from 1900 to 1930, but the newcomers did not stay long in the fields. They became merchants in small towns.[62] Planters also had recruited Italian workers for field labor, and they complained about peonage conditions to their consulate. A State Department investigation ensued in some areas, including an Arkansas plantation owned by prominent US Senator LeRoy Percy of Greenville, Mississippi.[63]
The Progressive Era had some results in Mississippi. Governor Theodore Bilbo (1916 to 1920) had the most successful administration of all the governors who served between 1877 and 1917, putting state finances in order and supporting such Progressive measures as passing a compulsory school attendance law, founding a new charity hospital, and establishing a board of bank examiners. However, Bilbo was also an avowed racist who openly defended segregation and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.[64]
Literature[edit]
Mississippi has been noted for its authors, including Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner, as well as William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Stark Young, Eudora Welty and Anne Moody.