MISSISSIPPI

MISSISSIPPI. Located in the heart of the South, Mississippi is one of five southern states that border the Gulf of Mexico. Its total area consists of 47,689 square miles, ranking it the second smallest Gulf-South state and the thirty-first in population nationally. Despite its size, the region has been blessed with perhaps the South's most fertile soil, though there are marked contrasts in several infertile belts. Its brown loam soil region in the central interior, its loess soil in the southwestern corridor, and its rich east-central prairie have continued to be productive cotton and grazing lands and, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, were dominant economic centers before major development of the even more fertile Yazoo-Mississippi Delta in the decades surrounding the Civil War.

Long before the arrival of Europeans and Africans, numerous native groups made Mississippi their home. Three tribes dominated, however: the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and the Natchez. While their worlds were hardly tranquil or their civilizations as technologically developed as that of the Europeans, they lived in harmony with nature and, even as the Europeans intruded, continued to develop their culture. In both positive and negative ways, life would never be the same for them thereafter. For example, after the early 1730s, the Natchez, with one of the most complex and highly developed civilizations north of Mexico, no longer existed in Mississippi following a long period of confrontations with the colonial French.

European interest in Mississippi began soon after New World discovery. The Spaniard Hernando de Soto, seeking to reclaim the glory and increase the wealth that he had achieved with Francisco Pizarro in Peru, was the first European explorer of Mississippi. He failed in his efforts, eventually dying in his quest. But the conquistador left an enduring legacy of his journey through Mississippi's wilderness when, in 1541, he happened upon the Mississippi River to become the first known white man to approach its banks overland. Other aspects of his expedition through the Southeast are far less admirable because of the inhumane tolls that he inflicted on Native peoples along the way, including the Chickasaws with whom he quartered during the winter of 1540–1541.

It was, however, the French who first laid substantive claims to Mississippi. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, an ambitious French explorer and fur trader interested in both personal gain and French expansion in North America, claimed the Mississippi countryside in 1682 for King Louis XIV as an integral part of the Louisiana colony. Thirteen years later, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, led a group of settlers to the Gulf Coast, where he constructed Fort Maurepas (later named Ocean Springs), the first permanent white settlement on Mississippi soil.

France's settlements in Mississippi soon expanded to included Natchez on the Mississippi and Biloxi near Ocean Springs. Its colonial experience in the Lower Mississippi Valley, however, proved an immense failure. A misguided imperial policy, punctuated by a weak economy, an inadequate immigration flow, and poor Indian relations influenced its regional instability. A rivalry with England for colonial domination culminated with the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and eventually led to France's expulsion from North America. For nearly two decades thereafter, England controlled Mississippi as part of its West Florida province and sought to develop a tobacco culture in the Natchez region, but it, too, met only limited success. Although the Mississippi region did not revolt against England in the American Revolution, England lost West Florida to Spain soon after Spain entered the conflict. It was a propitious situation for Spain, which added the east bank of the Mississippi to its west bank holdings, an area acquired prior to the French and Indian War.

An American dispute with Spain over West Florida's northern boundary remained a diplomatic issue until the 1795 signing of Pinckney's Treaty. The agreement ceded to the United States the coveted Yazoo Strip and resulted in the establishment of the Mississippi Territory, ceremoniously declared in Natchez on 7 April 1798. Congress fixed the northern and southern boundaries at thirty-two degrees and twenty-eight minutes north latitude and thirty-one degrees north latitude, respectively. The Mississippi and Chattahoochee Rivers bounded the territory in the west and in the east. Excluding the Gulf Coast region, which remained in Spanish West Florida, southern Mississippi and Alabama lay essentially with in the territory. However, by 1804, the territory's northern limits had reached the Tennessee line; eight years later, expansion to the south incorporated the Gulf Coast, the result of presidential decree shortly after borderland inhabitants successfully revolted against Spanish authority. Natchez, with its advantageous location, great economic potential, and larger population was the clear choice over Alabama settlements to seat the territorial government.

Mississippi's government was established under guidelines similar to legislation that organized the Old Northwest Territories in 1787. A federally appointed governor, with the assistance of a secretary and three judges, comprised the initial structure until the territory met higher population standards. With slavery long established in the area, however, provisions in the Northwest Ordinance that banned the institution there could not apply to Mississippi. Winthrop Sargent served as the first governor, a contentious tenure that lasted until President Thomas Jefferson replaced him in 1801. Sargent was a Federalist appointee and, like three of his four Democratic-Republican Party successors, governed during a period when politics in Mississippi was extremely partisan. Eastern Mississippi's yeoman farmers found much to differ over with the Mississippi River area's aristocratic planters and creditor classes, who dominated governmental and economic affairs. Political turmoil was so disruptive that it influenced Governor W. C. C. Claiborne, Sargent's successor, to seek a solution by moving the territorial capital to Washington, a small village several miles north of Natchez. Only under the administration of the more tractable Virginian David Holmes, the last territorial governor, did Mississippi find relief from the political infighting, prompting a unity certainly influenced by exigencies from the War of 1812 and the volatile Creek War of 1813.

The peace that followed sparked a period of massive population growth, particularly in the eastern areas. Rapidly upon the heels of this great migration of 1816, Mississippi successfully lobbied Congress for statehood. On 10 December 1817, President James Monroe signed legislation that admitted Mississippi to the Union as the twentieth state. By then, the Alabama settlements had gone their separate way and soon followed Mississippi into statehood.

It was clear from the outset that Mississippi's constitutional framers were uninterested in establishing a broad-based democracy. Persistent sectional problems had disrupted the constitutional convention, and eastern territorial delegates could not prevent westerners from maintaining their political dominance over the state. Only men of considerable real property were eligible to hold office and vote, though militia service could qualify one for the franchise. Occasionally, the backcountry commoners' pleas for a greater voice were heard, as they were in 1822, when efforts to end a long-standing grievance moved the capital to the centrally located and politically neutral site that became Jackson. Universal white manhood suffrage and other democratic changes resulted from a new constitution in 1832, inspired by the widening national influence of Jacksonian democracy; yet constitutional reform hardly negated the power of the wealthy ruling class of planters and businessmen.

The 1830s—Mississippi's "flush times"—were also years of unparalled prosperity. Much of this stimulation came at the expense of Native Americans, who, after experiencing years of territorial shrinkage, lost title to all of their remaining lands. Removal of the Mississippi Choctaws and Chickasaws to Indian Territory opened vast new fertile lands to white exploitation. Banks proliferated through easy credit policies and paper currency and helped to fuel the boom. Speculators prospered through high land prices. Land-hungry farmers and planters poured into Mississippi and rapidly filled the empty spaces, primarily the state's northern half. The 1840 census revealed a ten-year white population increase of 175 percent and of black, 197 percent, almost entirely slaves. But a change in federal monetary and credit policies ended this golden age, prompting the panic of 1837. Unable to meet their obligations, many Mississippians lost their possessions and suffered through the depression; numerous others sought to escape by migrating to Texas.

Some Mississippians certainly benefited from the cyclical upswing that began in the mid-1840s. The spread of the cotton culture into Indian cession lands increased the size and power of the planter elite. Corn, not cotton, was the largest crop in acreage, but it neither generated the income nor enhanced the image and prestige of its producers as "white gold" did for planters. The disparity between the affluent and poor naturally increased. None were, of course, more impoverished than the thousands of slaves, who by 1840 comprised a 52 percent population majority. They toiled in virtually every capacity, but cotton and fieldwork were their major calling and, by 1860, their labor had helped to make Mississippi one of the five richest states in the nation.

More than any other, it was the slave issue that proved to be the most decisive in Mississippi's justification for secession. To be sure, disunion was hardly endorsed enthusiastically everywhere, but even for Mississippians in areas with fewer slaves, such as the Piney Woods and the Northeastern Hills, Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 and the Republican Party's opposition to slavery's expansion seemed threatening to a familiar way of life. Consequently, the state left the union by a large majority on 9 January 1861.

The enthusiasm and optimism that Mississippians expressed at the onset of Southern nationhood soon gave way to the realities of war. Food, materials, and labor shortages affected both the military and civilian populations. Numerous battles occurred in Mississippi, but none compared to Vicksburg and the significance it held for the Confederacy as a railway supply center for the Deep South, and for the Union's goal to control the strategically important Mississippi River. For the Confederacy and Mississippi, Vicksburg's loss on 4 July 1863 was costly in human life and morale and certainly influenced the war's outcome. The siege at Vicksburg severely damaged the town, but Mississippi as a whole did not experience the extensive physical devastation that occurred elsewhere. Few communities, and fewer families, however, were left untouched in some way by the war. More than 78,000 white men went off to fight; 27,000 never returned, and, for many who did, disability was often a reminder of their commitment and sacrifice. A year after the war, Mississippi devoted one-fifth of its budget to purchase artificial limbs for veterans.

Black Mississippians, too, saw activity in the war; 17,000 fought to help save the Union and free their people. Months into the conflict, slavery's fate seemed sealed; by war's end, emancipation was assured. In Mississippi, 436,000 former slaves would join more than 3 million from other states in freedom. At the outset, however, it was unclear exactly what their status would be, beyond legal freedom. In the years that followed emancipation, their challenges proved formidable, as federal and state officials sought to define African American citizenship, while simultaneously wrestling with the politics and economics of Reconstruction (1865–1877) and North–South reconciliation.

Federal policy gave Mississippi freedmen no land and only a fleeting opportunity to experience citizenship. But they responded enthusiastically. They influenced a temporary return to Mississippi's two-party system by helping the newly formed Republican Party. They voted, helped to shape and implement constitutional reform, and served in offices at all government levels, including both houses of Congress. The seating of Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce as U.S. senators, for example, represented unprecedented nineteenth-century accomplishments. Not until 1986 would another Mississippian, Mike Espy, become the second African American to follow John R. Lynch into the House of Representatives.

Reconstruction gains were short-lived for freedmen, however. This was largely because the Republican Party's ascendancy was brief. Democrats regained elective hegemony in 1875 through their "Mississippi plan," a counterrevolution campaign of widespread violence, economic intimidation of freedmen, and balloting fraud. Thereafter, through impeachment they quickly purged most remaining Republicans from state offices.

The outcome proved crucial to the former slaves and, like elsewhere, they fell victim to an insidious political and racial backlash that relegated them to less than second class citizens. To be sure, the overthrow of Republican rule—a period that hardly equaled the Reconstruction excesses in some former Confederate states—and its replacement with the redemption (1876–1900) did not immediately submerge the freedmen into near total subordination, but by the end of the century, such results were certainly evident.

Demand for their suppression came from white farmers in the hills counties. These common men were dissatisfied with conservative democrats—so-called Bourbons, or Redeemers—because of their promotion and alliance with the railroad and industrial establishment. Railroading and timber production dramatically increased but afforded economic opportunity for only a small minority. Tied ever more to "king cotton" and one-crop agriculture, with its farm tenancy, crop lien credit system, farmers had sweltered economically in an agriculturally depressed postwar period, largely dominated by the success of northern industrial expansion. From their perspective, federal economic and monetary policies exacerbated agrarian woes. The white majority, seeking greater empowerment and believing it possible only through ousting the Bourbons and the black vote they controlled, supported a Democratic party leadership that insisted on a new constitution in 1890, which would legally deprive blacks of the vote. This disfranchisement coalesced with rigid Jim Crowism and a stifling sharecropping system that pushed blacks ever deeper into impoverishment and ensured white supremacy well beyond the mid-twentieth century.

The 1902 Primary Election Law helped propel James K. Vardaman—representative of this new "redneck" faction—into the governorship in 1903. Vardaman was popularly known as the "white chief" because of his white supremacy views, and, along with his demagogue successors, he championed white commoners' elevation through a progressive agenda of social justice, limitations on business and industry, and adherence to white supremacy and classism. Medical and juvenile care, prison reform, and transportation all progressed; improvements in education occurred only minimally. Although these leaders enjoyed immense popularity, they had their detractors, and perhaps none aroused as much controversy and criticism as did Theodore Bilbo, twentieth-century Mississippi's most rabid race baiter, who was elected governor in 1915 and 1927 and three times to the U.S. Senate.

The influence of the redneck leadership waned after the onset of the Great Depression during the 1930s and with the emergence of business-oriented governors such as Martin Sennett Conner (1932–1936) and Hugh White (1936–1940, 1952–1956). Motivated as much by the need to lessen the effects of the depression on the nation's poorest state as they were to create a more diversified economy, these leaders instituted creative measures such as the sales tax and lucrative state incentives to attract industry. Light industrial expansion in furniture and clothing manufacturing could not compare to the arrival of a major shipbuilding corporation on the Gulf Coast in 1938—which was still the state's largest private employer in the early 2000s—but collectively they added promise to the prospects of Mississippi's economic future.

Much needed to be done. Federal depression-era measures certainly helped, but conditions hardly improved for most landless farmers, black or white, who were further affected adversely by mechanization and a declining need for manual labor. For many, migration to northern industrial states or nearby cities like Memphis, Mobile, and New Orleans held the greatest promise. One result was that, by 1940, blacks had become a minority, a downward spiral that continued into the 1960s. World War II sparked a similar intrastate "pull" factor for Jackson, which assumed a distinctively urban character, and for Hattiesburg and the Gulf Coast, attractive because of demands from recently established military installations.

War put 23,700 Mississippians into military uniforms. Their service exposed them to a world that was very different from Mississippi. Veterans' benefits provided them opportunities for college and better housing. The farm and rural life appealed less to them as cities and towns continued their slow but steady growth. Some veterans had certainly been influenced by one of the war's goals—to end Nazi racism—but Mississippi found it difficult to break from its past. Opposed to black Mississippians' demands for equal rights and the national Democratic Party's increasingly liberal support of civil rights, between 1948 and 1970 the state was frequently a center of attention because of its determined stand to maintain racial orthodoxy.

Governor Hugh White's unrealistic proposals to equalize black and white schools in the early 1950s inevitably failed and forecast the historic 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision. Mississippi was perhaps the South's most segregated state, and many certainly believed they had much to defend; others understood the importance of cracking the monolith, for success there might make gains easier to achieve elsewhere. Forces such as the White Citizens Council—the so-called Uptown Klan—first emerged in Mississippi before its regional spread to fight "race-mixers" through political and economic intimidation. But change was inevitable, though it occurred grudgingly and not without frequent bloody consequences. In 1962, rioting erupted over the black student James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi, and beatings of civil rights workers by both citizens and law officials occurred throughout the state. Nothing, however, equaled the international revulsion that resulted from the manhunt and grave discovery of three young activists, two of whom were white college students, brutally murdered in the 1964 Freedom Summer voting rights campaign. By the end of the 1960s, however, nearly all white colleges and universities enrolled black students; the federal courts ordered statewide public school desegregation in the early 1970s; and, a decade after its passage, the 1965 Voting Rights Act had resulted in more African Americans in Mississippi government offices than in any other state in the nation. Undeniably, disparities endured, as revealed by a 2002 state settlement of a twenty-seven year black plaintiffs college funding discrimination suit. At the end of the twentieth century, however, the race question was no longer the political, social, and economically divisive issue that had retarded Mississippi's development throughout much of its history.

Other adjustments also appeared in the last third of the twentieth century. A viable two-party system functioned for the first time since Reconstruction, as Republicans won elective offices to all levels of government, including the governorship and Congress. The state ended its dependence on cotton as soybean production rivaled it. The early vision of governors such as Hugh White, Paul Johnson Sr. (1940–1943), and Paul Johnson Jr. (1964–1968), all of whom had worked to achieved a more balanced economy, showed remarkable fruition as industry, for the first time, provided Mississippians with more jobs and wages than did agriculture. Opportunities in extracting and developing Mississippi's major natural resources of oil, timber, coal, bauxite, sand, and gravel expanded. Oil refining, furniture and paper manufacturing, and diverse service-related jobs joined with tourism and the new casino industry to invigorate Mississippi's economy. Employment from a major automobile manufacturing plant would open in 2003 and add further economic growth in central Mississippi. A massive ongoing highway building program, initiated in the 1980s, has significantly improved the infrastructure and quality of transportation. Finally, education reform in the establishment of kindergartens, smaller classrooms, and teacher aides and the institution of more equitable funding through the Adequate Education Program have improved an education system that long lagged behind other states.

Progress not with standing, in 2000 Mississippi remained one of the nation's poorest states, its citizens earning 71 percent of the national median income. For every tax dollar that Mississippi sent to the federal government in the early 2000s it received three back through various programs. With a relatively small population of 2.8 million people as of 2002, the state's modest growth in the previous decade would result in the loss of one of five congressional seats and, perhaps accordingly, the loss of substantive influence in ensuring Mississippi's continued receipt of vital federal dollars.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartley, Numan V. The New South, 1945–1980: The Story of the South's Modernization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Bettersworth, John K. Confederate Mississippi: The People and Politics of a Cotton State in Wartime. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1978.

Bond, Bradley. Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South: Mississippi, 1830–1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Carpenter, Barbara, ed. Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. New York: Perennial Classics, 2002.

Harris, William C. The Day of the Carpetbagger. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

James, D. Clayton. Antebellum Natchez. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

Kirwan, Albert D. Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876– 1925. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964.

McLemore, Richard A., ed. A History of Mississippi. 2 vols. Hattiesburg: University Press of Mississippi. 1973.

McMillen, Neil. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

———. The Citizen's Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–1964. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Miles, Edwin A. Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi. New York: Da Capo Press, 1970.

Moore, John Hebron. The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

RobertJenkins

See alsoReconstruction ; Tribes: Southeastern ; Vicksburg in the Civil War ; andvol. 9:An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer ; Black Code of Mississippi, November, 1865 .

Mississippi , one of the Deep South states of the United States. It is bordered by Alabama (E), the Gulf of Mexico (S), Arkansas and Louisiana, with most of the border formed by the Mississippi R. (W), and Tennessee (N).

Facts and Figures

Area, 47,716 sq mi (123,584 sq km). Pop. (2000) 2,844,658, a 10.5% increase since the 1990 census. Capital and largest city, Jackson. Statehood, Dec. 10, 1817 (20th state). Highest pt., Woodall Mt., 806 ft (246 m); lowest pt., sea level. Nickname, Magnolia State. Motto,Virtute et Armis [By Valor and Arms]. State bird, mockingbird. State flower, magnolia. State tree, magnolia. Abbr., Miss.; MS

Geography

Mississippi's generally hilly landscape reaches its highest point (806 ft/246 m) in the northeastern corner of the state along the Tennessee River. The most distinctive region in the state's varied topography is the Mississippi Delta, a flat alluvial plain between the Mississippi and the Yazoo rivers in the western part of the state. A wide belt of longleaf yellow pine (the piney woods) covers most of southern Mississippi to within a few miles of the coastal-plain grasslands. Important there are lumbering and allied industries. Most of the state's rivers belong to either the Mississippi or the Alabama river systems, with the Pontoctoc Ridge the divide. The climate of Mississippi is subtropical in the southern part of the state and temperate in the northern part; the average annual rainfall is more than 50 in. (127 cm).

The state, in the path of waterfowl migration routes down the Mississippi valley and home to many species of birds, is noted for its duck and quail hunting. Along the Gulf Coast, a favorite fishing area, are several resort cities and part of Gulf Islands National Seashore. Historical sites in Mississippi include Old Spanish Fort, the oldest house on the Mississippi River, near Pascagoula, as well as Vicksburg National Military Park, Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site, and Tupelo National Battlefield (see National Parks and Monuments , table). In Natchez and Biloxi are many fine antebellum mansions. Jackson is the capital and largest city. Other important cities are Biloxi, Greenville , Hattiesburg , and Meridian .

Economy

Mississippi is traditionally one of the more rural states in the Union; not until 1965 did manufacturing take over as the leading revenue-producing sector of its economy. In 2000, Mississippi ranked third in the nation in the production of cotton, but soil erosion resulting from overcultivation and the destruction caused by the boll weevil have led to the increased agricultural diversification. The other most important crops are rice and soybeans. Today broiler chicken production, aquaculture (chiefly catfish raising), and dairying are increasingly important. The state's most valuable mineral resources, petroleum and natural gas, have been developed only since the 1930s.

Industry has grown rapidly with the development of oil resources and has been helped by the Tennessee Valley Authority and by a state program to balance agriculture with industry, under which many communities have subsidized and attracted new industries. Revenue from industrial products, including chemicals, plastics, foods, and wood products, have exceeded those from agriculture in recent years. On the Gulf coast there is a profitable fishing and seafood processing industry, and gambling is important along the Gulf Coast and in long impoversihed Tunica County, in the northwest. There are military air facilities at Columbus, Biloxi, and Meridian, as well as the Stennis Space Flight Center at Bay St. Louis. The state's per capita income, however, has been among the lowest in the nation for decades.

Government and Higher Education

Mississippi is governed under the 1890 constitution. The bicameral legislature consists of 52 senators and 122 representatives, all elected for four-year terms. The governor is also elected for a four-year term. The state has two U.S. senators, four representatives, and six electoral votes. In 1991, Kirk Fordice was elected Mississippi's first Republican governor since Reconstruction; he was reelected in 1995. Democrat Ron Musgrove won the 1999 gubernatorial election but with less than a majority of the vote, which required the state house of representatives to confirm his win. Musgrove lost in 2003 to Republican Haley Barbour; Barbour won a second term in 2007. In 2011 Republican Phil Bryant was elected to succeed Barbour.

Institutions of higher learning in the state include the Univ. of Mississippi, at Oxford (which was also the home of writer William Faulkner ) and at Jackson; Mississippi State Univ., at Mississippi State; the Univ. of Southern Mississippi, at Hattiesburg; Jackson State Univ., at Jackson; and Mississippi Univ. for Women, at Columbus.

History

Native Inhabitants and European Settlement

Hernando De Soto's expedition undoubtedly passed (1540–42) through the region, then inhabited by the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez, but the first permanent European settlement was not made until 1699, when Pierre le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, established a French colony on Biloxi Bay. Settlement accelerated in 1718, when the colony came under the French Mississippi Company, headed by the speculator John Law. The region was part of Louisiana until 1763, when, by the Treaty of Paris (see Paris, Treaty of ) England received practically all the French territory E of the Mississippi River and also East Florida and West Florida, which had belonged to Spain.

English colonists, many of them retired soldiers, had made the Natchez district a thriving agricultural community, producing tobacco and indigo, by the time Bernardo de Gálvez captured it for Spain in 1779. By the Treaty of Paris of 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, the United States (with English approval) claimed as its southern boundary in the West lat. 31°N. Most of the present-day state of Mississippi was included in the area. Spain denied this claim, and the long, involved West Florida Controversy ensued.

Territorial Status and Statehood

In the Pinckney Treaty (1795), Spain accepted lat. 31°N as the northern boundary of its territory but did not evacuate Natchez until the arrival of American troops in 1798. Congress immediately created the Mississippi Territory, with Natchez as the capital and William C. C. Claiborne as the governor. After Georgia's cession (1802) of its Western lands to the United States (see Yazoo land fraud ) and the Louisiana Purchase (1803), a land boom swept Mississippi. The high price of cotton and the cheap, fertile land brought settlers thronging in, most of them via the Natchez Trace , from the Southern Piedmont region and even from New England. A few attained great wealth, but most simply managed a living.

In 1817 Mississippi became a state, with substantially its present-day boundaries; the eastern section of the Mississippi Territory was organized as Alabama Territory. The aristocratic planter element of the Natchez region initially dominated Mississippi's government, as the state's first constitution (1817) showed. With the spread of Jacksonian democracy, however, the small farmer came into his own, and the new constitution adopted in 1832 was quite liberal for its time.

Expansionism and Secession

Land hunger increased as more new settlers arrived, lured by the continuing cotton boom. By a series of treaties (1820, 1830, and 1832), the Native Americans in the state were pushed west across the Mississippi. Mississippians were among the leading Southern expansionists seeking new land for cotton cultivation and the extension of slavery. After 1840 slaves in the state outnumbered nonslaves.

On Jan. 9, 1861, Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union. State pride was highly gratified by the choice of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy . Civil War fighting did not reach Mississippi until Apr., 1862, when Union forces were victorious at Corinth and Iuka. Grant's brilliant Vicksburg campaign ended large-scale fighting in the state, but further destruction was caused by the army of Gen. W. T. Sherman in the course of its march from Vicksburg to Meridian. Moreover, cavalry of both the North and South, particularly the Confederate forces of Gen. N. B. Forrest, remained active.

Reconstruction

After the war Mississippi abolished slavery but refused to ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and in Mar., 1867, under the Congressional plan of Reconstruction, it was organized with Arkansas into a military district commanded by Gen. E. O. C. Ord. After much agitation, a Republican-sponsored constitution guaranteeing basic rights to blacks was adopted in 1869. Mississippi was readmitted to the Union early in 1870 after ratifying the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and meeting other Congressional requirements.

While Republicans were in power, the state government was composed of new immigrants from the North, blacks, and cooperative white Southerners. A. K. Davis became the state's first African-American lieutenant governor in 1874. The establishment of free public schools was a noteworthy aspect of Republican rule. As former Confederates were permitted to return to politics and former slaves were increasingly intimidated (see Ku Klux Klan ), the Democrats regained strength. The Republicans were defeated in the bitter election of 1875. Lucius Q. C. Lamar figured largely in the Democratic triumph and was the state's most prominent national figure for many years.

Disenfranchisement and Sharecropping

In Reconstruction days the Republicans could win only with solid African-American support. After Reconstruction blacks were virtually disenfranchised. White supremacy was bolstered by the Constitution of 1890, later used as a model by other Southern states; under its terms a prospective voter could be required to read and interpret any of the Constitution's provisions. Because at the turn of the century most black Mississippians could not read (neither could many whites, but the test was rarely applied to them) and because the county registrar could disqualify prospective voters who disagreed with his interpretation of the Constitution, African Americans were essentially disenfranchised.

From the ruins of the shattered plantation economy rose the sharecropping system, and the merchant and the banker replaced the planter in having the largest financial interest in farming. Too often the system made the sharecroppers, white as well as black, little more than economic slaves. The landowners, however, maintained their hold on politics until 1904, when the small farmers, still the dominant voting group, elected James K. Vardaman governor. Nevertheless this agrarian revolt did not alter a deep-seated obscurantism that was reflected in the Jim Crow laws (1904) and in the ban on teaching evolution in the public schools (1926). Mississippi has made attempts to wipe out illiteracy, but it still has the highest illiteracy rate in the country. Another reflection of the social structure of the state was Prohibition, put into effect in 1908 and not repealed at the local level until 1959.

Public Works

Following the disastrous flood of 1927 the federal government took over flood-control work—constructing levees, floodwalls, floodways, and reservoirs; stabilizing river banks; and improving channels. Navigation, too, has not been neglected; the Intracoastal Waterway provides a protected channel along the entire Mississippi coastline and links the state's ports with all others along the Gulf Coast and with all inland waterway systems emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway , opened in 1985, connects the Tennessee River in NE Mississippi with the Tombigbee River in W Alabama.

The Persistence of Racial Conflict

Mississippi is still plagued by racial problems, which have changed the state's alignment in national politics. In 1948 Mississippi abandoned the Democratic party because of the national Democratic party's stand on civil rights, and the state supported J. Strom Thurmond, the States' Rights party candidate, for president. The 1954 Supreme Court ruling against racial segregation in public schools (see integration ) occasioned massive resistance. Citizens Councils, composed solely of white men and dedicated to maintaining segregation, began to spring up throughout the state. In the 1960 presidential election Mississippians again rebelled against the Democratic national platform by giving victory at the polls to unpledged electors, who cast their electoral college votes not for John F. Kennedy but for Harry F. Byrd, the conservative senator from Virginia. In 1964 the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater carried the state; in 1968 presidential candidate Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, who had become famous for opposing integration, won the state.

In 1961 mass arrests and violence were touched off when Freedom Riders , actively seeking to spur integration, made Mississippi a major target. However, there was not even token integration of public schools in Mississippi until 1962, when the state government under the leadership of Gov. Ross R. Barnett tried unsuccessfully to block the admission of James H. Meredith, an African American, to the Univ. of Mississippi law school. In the conflict the federal and state governments clashed, and the U.S. Dept. of Justice took legal action against state officials, including Barnett. Two persons were killed in riots, and federal troops had to be called upon to restore order. Racial antagonisms resulted in many more acts of violence: churches and homes were bombed; Medgar Evers, an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was killed in 1963; three civil-rights workers (two white, one black) were murdered the next year; and there were many less publicized outrages.

After the passage of the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, many black Mississippians succeeded in registering and voting. In 1967, for the first time since 1890, a black was elected to the legislature, and African Americans, almost 36% of the state's citizens, are now as well represented in Mississippi politics as in any state, with a large degree of cross-racial voting. In spite of these advances, in 1992 it was necessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to order the state college system to end its tradition of segregation.

Natural Disasters and Economic Difficulties

In Aug., 1969, Mississippi and Louisiana were devastated by Camille, one of the century's worst hurricanes. In Apr., 1973, the Mississippi River rose to record levels in the state; floodwaters covered about 9% of Mississippi, including parts of Vicksburg and Natchez, causing massive property damage. Economic problems continued in the 1980s and 1990s, as the state struggled to shift emphasis from manufacturing to the service sector and to avoid the national trend of industrial decline. Mississippi and Louisiana again suffered widespread devastation, even greater than that from Camille, when Hurricane Katrina struck both states in Aug., 2005.

Bibliography

See E. A. Miles, Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi (1960, repr. 1970); R. A. McLemore, A History of Mississippi (2 vol., 1973); R. D. Cross, ed., Atlas of Mississippi (1974); J. W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (1978); J. Kinser, The Cost of Mississippi (1981); N. R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989); F. M. Wirt, We Ain't What We Was (1997).

MISSISSIPPI

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Jackson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349

The State in Brief

Nickname: Magnolia State

Motto: Virtute et armis (By valor and arms)

Flower: Magnolia

Bird: Mockingbird

Area: 48,430 square miles (2000; U.S. rank: 32nd)

Elevation: Ranges from sea level to 806 feet above sea level

Climate: Temperate in north and subtropical in south, with long, hot summers and mild winters

Admitted to Union: December 10, 1817

Capital: Jackson

Head Official: Governor Haley Barbour (R) (until 2008)

Population

1980: 2,521,000

1990: 2,573,216

2000: 2,844,658

2004 estimate: 2,902,966

Percent change, 1990–2000: 10.5%

U.S. rank in 2004: 31st

Percent of residents born in state: 74.3% (2000)

Density: 60.6 people per square mile (2000)

2002 FBI Crime Index Total: 119,442

Racial and Ethnic Characteristics (2000)

White: 1,746,099

Black or African American: 1,033,809

American Indian and Alaska Native: 11,652

Asian: 18,626

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander: 667

Hispanic or Latino (may be of any race): 39,569

Other: 13,784

Age Characteristics (2000)

Population under 5 years old: 204,364

Population 5 to 19 years old: 668,850

Percent of population 65 years and over: 12.9%

Median age: 33.8 years (2000)

Vital Statistics

Total number of births (2003): 42,150

Total number of deaths (2003): 28,882 (infant deaths, 425)

AIDS cases reported through 2003: 2,875

Economy

Major industries: Transportation equipment, food products, government, trade, agriculture, manufacturing

Unemployment rate: 6.4% (December 2004)

Per capita income: $15,853 (2003; U.S. rank: 51st)

Median household income: $31,887 (3-year average, 2001-2003)

Percentage of persons below poverty level: 17.9% (3-year average, 2001-2003)

Income tax rate: Ranges from 3.0% to 5.0%

Sales tax rate: 7.0%

Mississippi, USA A state named after the largest river in the USA. The name is a Choctaw word meaning ‘Father of Waters’ or simply ‘Great Waters’ or ‘Big River’. Ceded by France to Great Britain in 1763, the area was named the Mississippi Territory in 1798. Enlarged in 1804 and again in 1812, the western part joined the Union in 1817 as the 20th state while the eastern part became Alabama. Mississippi seceded from the Union in 1861, but rejoined in 1869.

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