MSMississippi History

The Natchez, the mounds, and the revolt of 1729

On November 28, 1729 the Natchez killed roughly 230 French colonists at Fort Rosalie, on the bluff where Natchez stands now, after the local commandant ordered the village of White Apple cleared for a tobacco plantation. France answered with Choctaw allies and artillery, and by 1731 the Natchez had ceased to exist as a nation, the survivors shipped to Saint-Domingue as slaves or taken in by the Chickasaw and the Creek. They were the last people in the lower valley still inside the mound-building tradition, ruled by a hereditary Great Sun on a platform mound at the Grand Village. Earlier centuries of that world stand at Winterville near Greenville and at Emerald Mound, the second largest surviving ceremonial mound in the country.

At contact the Chickasaw held the north, the Choctaw the center and southeast, and the Natchez the river bluffs, with Tunica, Yazoo, Biloxi and Pascagoula towns between them.

Four sovereigns before statehood

Hernando de Soto's expedition cut across the northern counties in 1540 and 1541, leaving epidemic disease behind and taking nothing away. Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville built Fort Maurepas at Old Biloxi in 1699, the first European foothold of French Louisiana, and Natchez followed in 1716. Britain took the region in 1763 and administered it as part of West Florida. Spain seized it during the American Revolution and held on until Pinckney's Treaty in 1795 fixed the boundary at the 31st parallel. Congress organized the Mississippi Territory on April 7, 1798. The territory was split in 1817, its eastern half becoming Alabama, and Mississippi entered the Union on December 10, 1817 as the 20th state.

Dancing Rabbit Creek and the cotton kingdom

Cotton made the state, and a variety bred near Rodney in the 1820s from Mexican seed, sold as Petit Gulf, made the bolls faster to pick. What planters needed was land. The Treaty of Doak's Stand in 1820 took a first block from the Choctaw. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, signed on September 27, 1830, took the remaining eleven million acres and was the first removal treaty concluded under the Indian Removal Act. Most Choctaw walked west to Indian Territory over the next three winters, thousands dying on the way. The Chickasaw signed at Pontotoc Creek in 1832 and followed. Those who stayed became the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

The emptied land filled with plantations worked by people bought out of Virginia and the Carolinas through the domestic slave trade. By 1860 enslaved Mississippians made up about 55 percent of the population, the highest share in any state, and white Mississippians had the highest per capita wealth in the country.

Secession, Vicksburg, and the counter-revolution

Mississippi seceded on January 9, 1861, the second state to go, and its declaration of causes named slavery in its opening lines. Jefferson Davis, whose plantation Brierfield lay downriver from Vicksburg, became president of the Confederacy. Grant's 1863 campaign ran through Champion Hill to a siege of Vicksburg lasting from May 18 to July 4, when the town surrendered and the Confederacy lost the river that held its halves together. Vicksburg went generations without an official Fourth of July.

Reconstruction seated Hiram Revels in the US Senate on February 25, 1870, the first Black man ever to sit there, and Blanche K. Bruce after him. It was taken apart by force. The Mississippi Plan of 1875 used armed clubs to drive Republican voters from the polls, and the constitution of 1890 wrote a poll tax, a literacy test and an understanding clause into law. Black registration fell close to zero, and every other Southern state copied the design.

The flood of 1927, the Delta, and the music that left

The levee at Mounds Landing gave way on April 21, 1927 and the river covered the Delta for months. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, Black laborers were held in guarded camps and put to work on the levees, and the migration north that the boll weevil had started turned into a flood of its own. The music that traveled with those trains was worked out on Delta plantations like Dockery Farms, where Charley Patton played and Son House and Chester Burnett learned. B.B. King grew up around Itta Bena, and Muddy Waters was recorded at Stovall in 1941 before he took the train to Chicago.

From Money to a new flag

Emmett Till, fourteen and visiting from Chicago, was murdered near Money on August 28, 1955, and his mother's insistence on an open casket made the case national. James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962 behind federal marshals, after a night of rioting that left two dead. Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway in Jackson on June 12, 1963. Freedom Summer brought volunteers to register voters in 1964, and James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered near Philadelphia on June 21. That August, Fannie Lou Hamer testified for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party on live television. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black registration went from under seven percent to well over half within four years, and the state now elects more Black officials than any other.

Hurricane Camille came ashore near Pass Christian on August 17, 1969, and Katrina destroyed the same coastline on August 29, 2005. Dockside casinos, legalized in 1990, were allowed to reopen on land afterward. In June 2020 the legislature retired the 1894 state flag and its Confederate canton, and voters approved a magnolia design that November.

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