History of Mississippi

The attraction of vast amounts of high-quality, fertile and inexpensive cotton land attracted hordes of settlers, mostly from Georgia and the Carolinas, and from former tobacco areas of Virginia and North Carolina in the Upper South. By this time, most planters in the Upper South had switched to mixed crops, as their lands were exhausted from tobacco and it was barely profitable as a commodity crop.

From 1798 through 1820, the population in the Mississippi Territory rose dramatically, from less than 9,000 to more than 222,000. The vast majority were enslaved African Americans brought by settlers or shipped by slave traders. Migration came in two fairly distinct waves—a steady movement until the outbreak of the War of 1812, and a flood after it was ended, from 1815 through 1819. The postwar flood was catalyzed by various factors: high prices for cotton, the elimination of Indian titles to much land, new and improved roads, and the acquisition of new direct water outlets to the Gulf of Mexico. The first migrants were traders and trappers, then herdsmen, and finally farmers. Conditions on the Southwest frontier initially resulted in a relatively democratic society for whites.[8] But expansion of cotton cultivation resulted in an elite group of white planters who controlled politics in the state for decades.

Expansion of cultivation of cotton into the Deep South was enabled by the invention of the cotton gin, which made processing of short-staple cotton profitable. This type was more readily grown in upland and inland areas, in contrast to the long-staple cotton of the Sea Islands and Lowcountry. Americans pressed to gain more land for cotton, causing conflicts with the several tribes of Native Americans who historically occupied this territory of the Southeast. Five of the major tribes had adopted some western customs and had members who assimilated to varying degrees, often based on proximity and trading relationships with whites.

Through the 1830s, state and federal US governments forced the Five Civilized Tribes to cede their lands. Various US leaders developed proposals for removal of all Native Americans to west of the Mississippi River. This took place following passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 by Congress. As Indians ceded their lands to whites through the Southeast, they moved west and became more isolated from the American planter society, where many African Americans were enslaved. The state sold off the ceded lands, and white migration into the state continued. Some families brought slaves with them; most slaves were transported into the area from the Upper South in a forced migration through the domestic slave trade.[9]

In 1817 elected delegates wrote a constitution and applied to Congress for statehood. On Dec. 10, 1817, the western portion of Mississippi Territory became the State of Mississippi, the 20th state of the Union. Natchez, long established as a major river port, was the first state capital. As more population came into the state and future growth was anticipated, in 1822 the capital was moved to the more central location of Jackson.[10]

French colonists had established the Catholic Church in their colonial settlements along the coast, such as Biloxi. As Americans entered the territory, they brought their strongly Protestant tradition. Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians made up the three leading denominations in the territory, and their congregations rapidly built new churches and chapels. By this time, many slaves were already Christians, attending church under the supervision of white planters. They also developed their own private worship and celebrations on the larger plantations. Adherents to other religions were a distinct minority. Some Protestant ministers won converts and often promoted education, although there was no state public school system until it was authorized after the Civil War by the Reconstruction-era biracial legislature.

Whereas in the first Great Awakening, Protestant ministers of these denominations had promoted abolition of slavery, by the early 19th century, when the Deep South was being developed, most had retreated to support for slavery. They argued instead for an improved paternalism under Christianity by white slaveholders. This sometimes led to improved treatment for the enslaved.[11][12]

William C. C. Claiborne (1775–1817), a lawyer and former Republican congressman from Tennessee (1797–1801), was appointed by President Thomas Jefferson as governor and superintendent of Indian affairs in the Mississippi Territory from 1801 through 1803. Although he favored acquiring some land from the Choctaw and Chickasaw, Claiborne was generally sympathetic and conciliatory toward Indians. He worked long and patiently to iron out differences that arose, and to improve the material well-being of the Indians. He was partly successful in promoting the establishment of law and order; his offer of a $2,000 reward helped destroy a gang of outlaws headed by Samuel Mason (1750–1803). His position on issues indicated a national rather than regional outlook, though he did not ignore his constituents. Claiborne expressed the philosophy of the Democratic-Republican Party and helped that party defeat the Federalists.[13] When a smallpox epidemic broke out in the spring of 1802, Claiborne directed the first recorded mass vaccination in the territory. This prevented the spread of the epidemic in Natchez.[14]

The United States government removed land from the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes from 1801 to about 1830, as white settlers entered the territory from coastal states. After Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the government forced the tribes to accept lands west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory. Most left the state, but those who remained became United States citizens.

After 1800 the rapid development of a cotton economy and the slave society of the Deep South changed the economic relationship of native Indians with whites and slaves in Mississippi Territory. As Indians ceded their lands to whites in the eastern sections, they moved west in the state, becoming more isolated from whites and blacks. The following table illustrates ceded land in acres:

By the 1830s Mississippi was a leading cotton producer, increasing its demand for enslaved labor. Some planters considered slavery a "necessary evil" to make cotton production profitable, for the survival of the cotton economy, and were brought in from the border states and the tobacco states where slavery was declining.[15] The 1832 state constitution forbade any further importation of slaves by the domestic slave trade, but the provision was found to be unenforceable, and it was repealed.

As planters increased their holdings of land and slaves, the price of land rose, and small farmers were driven into less fertile areas. An elite slave-owning class arose that wielded disproportionate political and economic power. By 1860, of the 354,000 whites, only 31,000 owned slaves and two thirds of these held fewer than 10. Fewer than 5,000 slaveholders had more than 20 slaves; 317 possessed more than 100. These 5,000 planters, especially the elite among them, controlled the state. In addition a middle element of farmers owned land but no slaves. A small number of businessmen and professionals lived in the villages and small towns. The lower class, or "poor whites", occupied marginal farm lands remote from the rich cotton lands and grew food for their families, not cotton. Whether they owned slaves or not, however, most white Mississippians supported the slave society; all whites were considered above blacks in social status. They were both defensive and emotional on the subject of slavery. A slave insurrection scare in 1836 resulted in the hanging of a number of slaves, as was common in the South after such incidents. Several white northerners were suspected of being secret abolitionists.[16]

When cotton was king during the 1850s, Mississippi plantation owners—especially those in the old Natchez District, as well as the newly emerging Delta and Black Belt region of the uplands in the center of the state—became increasingly wealthy due to the great fertility of the soil and the high price of cotton on the international market. The severe wealth imbalances and the necessity of large-scale slave populations to sustain such income played a strong role in state politics and political support for secession.[17] Mississippi was among the six states in the Deep South with the highest proportion of slave population; it was the second state to secede from the union.

Mississippi's population grew rapidly due to migration, both voluntary and forced, reaching 791,305 in 1860. Blacks numbered 437,000, making up 55% of the population; they were overwhelmingly enslaved. Cotton production grew from 43,000 bales in 1820 to more than one million bales in 1860, as Mississippi became the leading cotton-producing state. With international demand high, Mississippi and other Deep South cotton was exported to the textile factories of Britain and France, as well as those in New York and New England. The Deep South was the major supplier and had strong economic ties with the Northeast. By 1820, half of the exports from New York City were related to cotton. Southern businessmen traveled so frequently to the city that they had favorite hotels and restaurants.

In Mississippi some modernizers encouraged crop diversification, and production of vegetables and livestock increased, but King Cotton prevailed. Cotton's ascendancy was seemingly justified in 1859, when Mississippi planters were scarcely touched by the financial panic in the North. They were concerned by inflation of the price of slaves but were in no real distress. Mississippi's per capita wealth was well above the U.S. average. The major planters made very large profits, but they invested it on buying more cotton lands and more slaves, which pushed up prices even higher. They educated their children privately, and the state government made little investment in infrastructure. Railroad construction lagged behind that of other states, even in the South. The threat of abolition troubled planters, but they believed that if needed, the cotton states could secede from the Union, form their own country, and expand to the south in Mexico and Cuba. Until late 1860 they never expected a war.[18]

The relatively low population of the state before the Civil War reflected the fact that much of the state was still frontier and needed many more settlers for development. For instance, except for riverside settlements and plantations, 90% of the Mississippi Delta bottom lands were still undeveloped and covered mostly in mixed forest and swampland. These areas were not cleared and developed until after the war. During and after Reconstruction, most of the new owners in the Delta were freedmen, who bought the land by clearing it and selling off timber.[19]

At the time of the Civil War, the great majority of blacks were slaves living on plantations with 20 or more fellow slaves, many in much larger concentrations. While some had been born in Mississippi, many had been transported to the Deep South in a forcible migration through the domestic slave trade from the Upper South. Some were shipped from the Upper South in the coastwise slave trade, while others were taken overland or forced to make the entire journey on foot.

The typical division of labor on a large plantation included an elite of house slaves, a middle group of overseers, drivers (gang leaders) and skilled craftsmen, and a "lower class" of unskilled field workers whose main job was hoeing and picking cotton. The owners hired white overseers to direct the work. Some slaves resisted by work slowdowns and by breaking tools and equipment. Others left for a while, hiding out for a couple of weeks in woods or nearby plantations. There were no slave revolts of any size, although whites often circulated fearful rumors that one was about to happen. Most slaves who tried to escape were captured and returned, though a handful made it to northern states and eventual freedom.

Most slaves endured the harsh routine of plantation life. Because of their concentration on large plantations, within these constraints they built their own culture, often developing leaders through religion, and others who acquired particular skills. They created their own religious practices and worshipped sometimes in private, developing their own style of Christianity and deciding which stories, such as the Exodus, spoke most to them. While slave marriages were not legally recognized, many families formed unions that lasted, and they struggled to maintain their stability. Some slaves with special skills attained a quasi-free status, being leased out to work on riverboats or in the port cities. Those on the riverboats got to travel to other cities; they were part of a wide information network among slaves.

By 1820, 458 former slaves had been freed in the state. The legislature restricted their lives, requiring free blacks to carry identification and forbidding them from carrying weapons or voting. In 1822 planters decided it was too awkward to have free blacks living near slaves and passed a state law forbidding emancipation except by special act of the legislature for each manumission.[16][20] In 1860 only 1,000 of the 437,000 blacks in the state were recorded as free.[21] Most of these free people lived in wretched conditions near Natchez.

Mississippi was a stronghold of Jacksonian democracy, which glorified the independent farmer; the legislature named the state capital in Andrew Jackson's honor. Corruption and land speculation caused a severe blow to state credit in the years preceding the Civil War. Federally allocated funds were misused, tax collections embezzled, and finally, in 1853, two state-supported banks collapsed when their debts were repudiated. In the Second Party System (1820s to 1850s), Mississippi moved politically from a divided Whig and Democratic state to a one-party Democratic state bent on secession.

Criticism from Northern abolitionists escalated after the Mexican War ended in 1848. Mississippi and other southern planters expected the war to gain new territory where slavery could flourish. The South resisted attacks by abolitionists, and white Mississippians were among those who became outspoken defenders of the slave system. An abortive secession attempt in 1850 was followed by a decade of political agitation during which the protection and expansion of slavery became their major goal. When Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 with the goal seeking an eventual end of slavery, Mississippi followed South Carolina and seceded from the Union on January 9, 1861. Mississippi's U.S. senator Jefferson Davis was chosen as president of the Confederate States.

After each battle, there was increased economic chaos and local societal breakdown. State government during the course of the war transferred around the state. It moved from Jackson to Enterprise, to Meridian and back to Jackson, to Meridian and then to Columbus and Macon, Georgia, and finally back to what was left of Jackson. The first of the two wartime governors was the Fire-Eater John J. Pettus, who carried the state into secession, whipped up the war spirit, began military and domestic mobilization, and prepared to finance the war.[28] His successor, General Charles Clark, elected in 1863, remained committed to continuing the fight regardless of the cost, but he faced a deteriorating military and economic situation. The war presented both men with enormous challenges in providing an orderly, stable government for Mississippi.[29]

There were no slave insurrections, but many slaves escaped to Union lines. Numerous plantations turned to food production. The federal government wanted to keep up cotton production to fulfill the North's needs, and some planters sold their cotton to Union Treasury agents for high prices. The Confederates considered this a sort of treason but were unable to stop the lucrative trading on the black market.[30]

Most whites supported the Confederacy, but there were holdouts. The two most vehemently anti-Confederate areas were Jones County in the southeastern corner of the state, where the "Knight Company" originated, and Tishomingo County in the northeastern corner. Among the most influential Mississippi Unionists was Presbyterian minister John Aughey, whose sermons and book The Iron Furnace or Slavery and Secession (1863) became hallmarks of the anti-secessionist cause in the state.[31]

The war shattered the lives of all classes, high and low. Upper-class ladies replaced balls and parties with bandage-rolling sessions and fund-raising efforts. But soon enough they were losing brothers, sons and husbands to battlefield deaths and disease, lost their incomes and luxuries, and had to deal with chronic shortages and poor ersatz substitutes for common items. They took on unexpected responsibilities, including the chores previously left to slaves when the latter struck out for freedom. The women coped by focusing on survival. They maintained their family honor by upholding Confederate patriotism to the bitter end. Less privileged white women struggled even more to hold their families together in their men's absence; many became refugees in camps or fled to Union lines.[32] After the war, Southern women organized to create Confederate cemeteries and memorials, becoming champions of the "Lost Cause" and shapers of social memory.[33]

Black women and children had an especially hard time as the plantation regime collapsed; many took refuge in camps operated by the Union Army. They were freed after the Emancipation Proclamation but suffered from widespread diseases that flourished in the crowded camps. Disease was also common in the troop camps; during the war, more men on both sides died of disease than of wounds or direct warfare.[34]

Mississippi has been thought to typify the Deep South during the era of Jim Crow that began in the late 19th century. But it had an enormous frontier of undeveloped land in the backcountry and bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta. Tens of thousands of black and white migrants came to the Delta seeking the chance to buy and work land, cut timber, and make lives for themselves and their families. Because the Mississippi Delta contained so much fertile bottomland away from the river settlements, African Americans achieved unusually high rates of land ownership from 1870 to 1900. Two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Delta were black.

As the Panic of 1893 brought another depression and very low cotton prices, many farmers had to sell their land to pay off debts and become sharecroppers.[54] The sharecropping system, as Cresswell (2006) shows, functioned as a compromise between white landowners' desire for a reliable supply of labor, and black workers' refusal to work in gangs. By the turn of the century, much of the second-generation of black owner-farmers had lost their land.

In 1890 the state adopted a new constitution that imposed a poll tax of $2 a year, which the great majority of blacks and poor whites could not pay in order to register to vote; they were effectively excluded from the political process. These requirements, with additions in legislation of 1892, resulted in a 90% reduction in the number of blacks who voted. In every county whites allowed a handful of prominent black ministers and local leaders to vote.[49]

As only voters could serve on juries, disenfranchisement meant blacks could not serve on juries, and they lost all chance at local and state offices, as well as representation in Congress. When these provisions survived a Supreme Court challenge in 1898 in Williams v. Mississippi, other southern state legislatures rapidly incorporated them into new constitutions or amendments, effectively extending disfranchisement to every southern state. In 1900 the population of Mississippi was nearly 59% African American, but they were virtually excluded from political life.

The Jim Crow system became total after 1900, with disenfranchisement, coupled with increasingly restrictive racial segregation laws, and increased lynchings. Economic disasters always lurked, such as failure of the cotton crop due to boll weevil infestation, and successive severe flooding in 1912 and 1913. By 1920, the third generation after freedom, most African Americans in the state were landless sharecroppers or laborers facing inescapable poverty.[54]

Legal racial segregation was imposed in Mississippi primarily following the Reconstruction era. A handful of state laws earlier required separate facilities for black and white school children. The legislature passed statutes requiring three restroom facilities in public buildings: one for white males, one for white females, and one for black males and females. Otherwise, segregation arose by local custom more than it did by state or municipal law. Since segregation was a customary practice, historians consider it to be one that mandated social distance between whites and blacks rather than physical distance. In most Mississippi communities from the late 1800s until the 1970s, blacks and whites lived in relative proximity to one another. Whites depended on the labor of blacks either as agricultural or domestic workers. White and black children often played together until they reached puberty, at which time parents began instructing their children about the racial status quo.

White children were taught they were superior to blacks, while black children were forced to learn the vacillating and arbitrary customs of Jim Crow, which often differed from community to community. By 1900, racial segregation had become more rigid. Jim Crow became the mainstay of the Mississippi social order.

Tens of thousands of African Americans left Mississippi by train, foot, or boat to migrate north starting in the 1880s; migration reached its pinnacle during and after World War I. In the Great Migration, they went North to leave the violence and a society that had closed off opportunity.[55] Another wave of migration arose in the 1940s and 1950s. Almost half a million people, three-quarters of them black, left Mississippi in the second migration, many seeking jobs in the burgeoning wartime defense industry on the West Coast, particularly in California.

Jim Crow and disenfranchisement persisted in Mississippi for decades, sometimes enforced by violence and economic blackmail, particularly as African Americans organized to achieve civil rights. It did not legally end until after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as concerted federal enforcement, and court challenges by black groups and national advocates, and local customs began to break down by 1970.[56][57]

Following Reconstruction, the Democrat-dominated state legislature cut back on already limited funding for public schools. For decades public school funding was poor for whites and very poor for blacks. Northern philanthropy helped support the schools. The Anna T. Jeanes Foundation, begun in 1907 and also known as the Negro Rural School Fund, aimed to provide rudimentary education for rural Southern blacks. Jeanes supervisors, all experienced teachers, personally made physical and academic improvements in rural schools. Early Jeanes supervisors brought vocational education into their classrooms, based on the Hampton and Tuskegee Institute models promoted by Booker T. Washington. By the 1940s, the Jeanes program changed its emphasis from industrial education to academic subjects.

Other major northern foundations also helped, especially the General Education Board (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rosenwald Fund), which supported construction of more than 5,000 schools in southern rural areas. Northern churches supported denominational colleges.[58]

Mississippi became a center of rich, quintessentially American music traditions: gospel music, jazz, blues, and rock and roll were all invented, promulgated, or developed largely by Mississippi musicians, particularly of the Delta areas. They also carried these traditions upriver to Chicago during the Great Migration, creating new forms of jazz and blues in that city.

In the 1940s, John Lomax and his son Alan recorded some of the Delta's rich musical tradition for the Library of Congress. They sought out blues songs and field chants at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. In 1941, Alan Lomax recorded Muddy Waters, then 28 years old, at Stovall's Plantation. Among other major artists, Bo Diddley, B.B. King and Muddy Waters were born and raised on Mississippi plantations.

When the automobile arrived about 1910, the state had poorly constructed dirt roads used for wagon traffic, and an outdated system of taxation. Road improvement continued to be a local affair controlled by individual county supervisors for each beat in the counties; they achieved few positive results. The Lindsey Wagon Company of Laurel built the famous Lindsey wagon after 1899. It was a heavy-duty eight-wheel wagon used to haul logs, timber, and other bulky and heavy material. Wagon production reached a peak in the 1920s, then declined. Improved roads finally made it possible for residents to use trucks built in Detroit. The Great Depression after 1929 reduced the need for new wagons.[64]

After 1928, the need to build roads motivated politicians to talk up the cause. They enacted massive bond issues, created excise taxes, and centralized control to create a genuine state highway system, with a system of main highways designed by engineers, using a common system of signage and nomenclature.[65]

Meanwhile, black activists had been increasing their local work throughout the South. In Mississippi in 1962, several activists formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), to coordinate activities in voter registration and education of civil rights groups in Mississippi: the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In 1963 COFO organized the Freedom Vote in Mississippi to demonstrate the desire of black Mississippians to vote. They had been disfranchised since statutory and constitutional changes in 1890 and 1892. More than 80,000 people quickly registered and voted in mock elections which pitted candidates from the "Freedom Party" against the official state Democratic Party candidates.[72]

In the summer of 1964, the COFO brought more than one hundred college students, many from the Northern and Western United States, to Mississippi to join with local activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Many white residents deeply resented the outsiders and attempts to change their society. The work was dangerous. Activists were threatened.

On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two Jewish volunteers from New York, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker, disappeared. With the national uproar caused by their disappearance, President Johnson forced J. Edgar Hoover to have the FBI investigate.

The FBI found the bodies of the civil rights workers on August 4 in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. During its investigation, the FBI also discovered the bodies of several other Mississippi blacks whose murders and disappearances over the past several years had not gained attention outside their local communities.

The case of the young murdered activists captured national attention. They were found to have been murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department. President Johnson used the outrage over their deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2. It banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment and education. It also had a section about voting, but voting protection was addressed more substantially by passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1964, civil rights organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all-white slate from the state party, based as it was on disfranchisement of blacks. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, the MFDP held its own primary. They selected Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray to run for Congress, and a slate of delegates to represent Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

The presence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was inconvenient for national leaders. Democratic Party organizers had planned a triumphant celebration of the Johnson Administration's achievements in civil rights, rather than a fight over racism within the party. Johnson was also worried about inroads that Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was making in what had been the Democratic stronghold of the "Solid South", as well as the support which Independent candidate George Wallace had gained in the North during the Democratic primaries. The all-white delegations from other Southern states threatened to walk out if the official slate from Mississippi was not seated.

Johnson could not prevent the MFDP from taking its case to the Credentials Committee. There Fannie Lou Hamer testified eloquently about the beatings which she and others endured, and the threats they faced, all for trying to register to vote and exercise their constitutional rights. Turning to the television cameras, Hamer asked, "Is this America?"

Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise" under which it would receive two non-voting, at-large seats, while the white delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would retain its seats. The MFDP angrily rejected the compromise. The MFDP kept up its agitation within the convention, even after it was denied official recognition. The 1964 convention disillusioned many within the MFDP and the Civil Rights Movement, but it did not destroy the MFDP. The new party invited Malcolm X, head of the Black Muslims, to speak at its founding convention and issued a statement opposing the war in Vietnam.

Armed self-defense became an integral part of the Southern planning strategy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) after 1964. The ideological shift on the question of nonviolence within CORE and SNCC occurred primarily because of the effect of white violence in Mississippi, such as the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in Neshoba County. The shift marked the beginning of the end of nonviolence as the philosophy and method of the Southern freedom movement.

Southern blacks had a tradition of armed resistance to white violence that had become more organized and intense as the struggle accelerated and federal protection failed to appear. Moreover, it was the armed protection by local blacks and the haven provided by Mississippi's black farming communities that allowed SNCC and CORE to operate effectively in the state.[73]

After 1966 the blacks moved into the Democratic party, where they organized politically to vote, to nominate candidates for office, and win their elections. They struggled to get candidates elected to office, particularly in the Delta, where they were a majority of the population and had long been oppressed by white officials.

During the 1960s, the vocal opposition of many politicians and officials, the use of tax dollars to support the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which spied on citizens and helped achieve economic boycotts of civil rights activists; and the violent tactics of Ku Klux Klan members and sympathizers gave Mississippi a reputation as a reactionary state.[74] The state was the last to repeal Prohibition and to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, in 1966 and 2013, respectively.[75]

As in other states of the former Confederacy since the late 1960s, the Republican Party has won increasing support from white conservatives, who formerly had voted Democratic since before the Civil War. In Mississippi, the three majority-white congressional districts support Republican candidates. The majority-black 2nd congressional district has supported Democratic candidates since the national party's support for the civil rights movement and President Lyndon B. Johnson's gaining passage of legislation to this end in the mid-1960s. As was noted by reporter R.L. Nave of the Jackson Free Press in 2012 when the Republicans took control of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, "of course, the Republican Party of the 1880s was very different from the GOP that now rules the state."[76]

• August 17, 1969 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast, killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage.
• September 12, 1979 – Hurricane Frederic
• September 2, 1985 – Hurricane Elena
• September 28, 1998 – Hurricane Georges
• August 29, 2005 – Hurricane Katrina caused the greatest destruction across the entire 90 miles (140 km) of Mississippi Gulf coast from Louisiana to Alabama.

• Busbee, Westley F. Mississippi: A History (2005), online edition
• Gonzales, Edmond, ed. A Mississippi Reader: Selected Articles from the Journal of Mississippi History (1980)
• Krane, Dale and Stephen D. Shaffer. Mississippi Government & Politics: Modernizers versus Traditionalists (1992), government textbook; online edition
• Loewen, James W. and Charles Sallis, eds. Mississippi: Conflict and Change (2nd ed. 1980), high school textbook
• McLemore, Richard, ed. A History of Mississippi 2 vols. (1973), thorough coverage by scholars
• Mitchell, Dennis J., A New History of Mississippi (2014)
• Skates, John Ray. Mississippi: A Bicentennial History (1979), popular
• Sparks, Randy J. Religion in Mississippi (2001) 374 pp online edition
• Swain, Martha H. ed. Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (2003). 17 short biographies

• Barnett, James F., Jr. The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735, Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 185 pp
• Carson, James Taylor. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999 online edition
• Peacock, Evan. Mississippi Archaeology Q and A, Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2005, online at Googlebooks online edition at Questia
• Wells, Samuel J. and Roseanna Tubby. After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi, Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1986/3rd edition, 2010
• White, Douglas R., George P. Murdock, Richard Scaglion. "Natchez Class and Rank Reconsidered." Ethnology 10:369–388. (1971). Study of the Natchez nation before the French-Indian wars of the 1720s. online

• Ballard, Michael B. Civil War Mississippi: A Guide (2000) online edition
• Barney, William L. The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (1974) 371 pp. statistical analysis of voting
• Bettersworth, John K. Confederate Mississippi: The People and Policies of a Cotton State in Wartime (1943). 386 pp.
• Buchanan, Thomas C. Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (U of North Carolina Press 2004) online
• Cresswell, Stephen. Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 1877–1902 (1995) online edition
• Cresswell, Stephen. Rednecks, Redeemers, And Race: Mississippi After Reconstruction, 1877–1917 (2006)
• Donald, David H. "The Scalawag in Mississippi Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Nov., 1944), pp. 447–460 in JSTOR
• Ellem, Warren A. "The Overthrow of Reconstruction in Mississippi," Journal of Mississippi History 1992 54(2): 175–201
• Ellem, Warren A. "Who Were the Mississippi Scalawags?" Journal of Southern History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1972), pp. 217–240 in JSTOR
• Ferguson, James S. "The Grange and Farmer Education in Mississippi," Journal of Southern History 1942 8(4):497–512. in JSTOR
• Frankel, Noralee. Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (1999)
• Garner, James Wilford. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901) reflects Dunning School historiography; full text; online edition; full text online
• Guice, John D. W. "The Cement of Society: Law in the Mississippi Territory," Gulf Coast Historical Review 1986 1(2): 76–99
• Halsell, Willie D. "The Bourbon Period in Mississippi Politics, 1875–1890," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Nov., 1945), pp. 519–537 in JSTOR
• Harris, William C. "Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi: Conservative Assimilationist." in Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed. Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (1982). 3–38
• Harris, William C. "James Lynch: Black Leader in Southern Reconstruction," Historian (1971) 34#1 pp. 40–61, doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.1971.tb00398.x
• Harris, William C. The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (1979) online edition
• Harris, William C. Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi (1967) online edition
• Haynes, Robert V. "Territorial Mississippi, 1798–1817," Journal of Mississippi History 2002 64(4): 283–305
• James, Dorris Clayton. Ante-Bellum Natchez' (1968)
• Johannsen, Robert W. "The Mind of a Secessionist: Social Conservatism or Romantic Adventure?" Reviews in American History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 354–360 in JSTOR on John A. Quitman
• Kirwan, Albert D. Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics: 1876–1925 (1965), classic political history; online edition
• Libby, David J. Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (2004) online edition
• Logue, Larry M. "Who Joined the Confederate Army? Soldiers, Civilians, and Communities in Mississippi," Journal of Social History, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 611–623 in JSTOR
• Lowery, Charles D. "The Great Migration to the Mississippi Territory, 1798–1819," Journal of Mississippi History 1968 30(3): 173–192
• McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989)
• Miles, Edwin Arthur. Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi (1960) online edition
• Morris, Christopher. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (1995) online edition
• Olsen, Christopher J. Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (2000) online edition
• Pereyra, Lillian A. James Lusk Alcorn: Persistent Whig (1966), the standard scholarly biography
• Rainwater, P. L. "An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61." Mississippi Valley Historical Review Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jun., 1937), pp. 35–42 in JSTOR
• Rainwater, P. L. "Economic Benefits of Secession: Opinions in Mississippi in the 1850s," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Nov., 1935), pp. 459–474 in JSTOR
• Roberts, Giselle. "The Confederate Belle: the Belle Ideal, Patriotic Womanhood, and Wartime Reality in Louisiana and Mississippi, 1861–1865," Louisiana History 2002 43(2): 189–214
  • Roberts, Giselle. The Confederate Belle (2003) online edition
• Roberts, Bobby and Moneyhon, Carl. Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War, (1992). 396 pp
• Smith, Timothy B. Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) 265 pp. Documents the declining morale of Mississippians as they witnessed extensive destruction and came to see victory as increasingly improbable
• Span, Christopher M. From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (2009)
• Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi. (1933).
• Thompson, Julius E. Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865–1965. (2007). 253 pp. ISBN 978-0-7864-2722-2.)
• Wayne, Michael. The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860–1880 (1983)
• Weaver, Herbert. Mississippi Farmers, 1850–1860 (1945)
• Wharton, Vernon Lane. The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (1947)
• Willis, John C. Forgotten Time: The Yazoo–Mississippi Delta After the Civil War (2000)
• Wynne, Ben. Mississippi's Civil War: A Narrative History. (2006). 243 pp. ISBN 978-0-88146-039-1.

• Beito, David T., "'Let Down Your Bucket Where You Are: The Afro-American Hospital and Black Health Care in Mississippi, 1924–1966," Social Science History, 30 (Winter 2006), 551–569. in Project MUSE
• Bolton, Charles C. William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography (University Press of Mississippi; 2013) 368 pp; scholarly biography of the governor 1980–84
• Bolton, Charles C. The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980 (2005) online edition
• Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2009) 360 pp; examines the conservative backlash among white Mississippians after the state's leaders strategically accommodated themselves to federal and civil-rights demands
• Crespino, Joseph. Mississippi as Metaphor: State, Region, and Nation in Historical Imagination Southern Spaces, 2006.
• Cresswell, Stephen Edward. Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi after Reconstruction, 1877–1917 (2006)
• Danielson, Chris. "'Lily White and Hard Right': The Mississippi Republican Party and Black Voting, 1965–1980," Journal of Southern History Feb 2009, Vol. 75 Issue 1, pp. 83–119
• Danielson, Chris. After Freedom Summer: How Race Realigned Mississippi Politics, 1965–1986 (University Press of Florida; 2012) 294 pp
• Katagiri, Yasuhiro. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States' Rights (2001)
• Key, V.O. Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), has famous chapter on Mississippi, pp. 229–253.
• Lesseig, Corey T. " 'Out of the Mud': The Good Roads Crusade and Social Change in 20th-century Mississippi." Journal of Mississippi History 60 (Spring 1998): 51–72.
• McLemore, Nannie Pitts. "James K. Vardaman, a Mississippi Progressive," Journal of Mississippi History 29 (1967): 1–11
• McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989)
• Morris, Tiyi M. Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2015), 237 pp.
• Namorato, Michael V. The Catholic Church in Mississippi, 1911–1984: A History (1998) 313 pp. online edition
• Nash, Jere, and Andy Taggart. Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976–2008 (2nd ed. 2010)
• Orey, Byron D'Andra. "Racial Threat, Republicanism, and the Rebel Flag: Trent Lott and the 2006 Mississippi Senate Race," National Political Science Review July 2009, Vol. 12, pp. 83–96, on Senator Trent Lott
• Osborn, George Coleman. James Kimble Vardaman: Southern Commoner (1981).
• Ownby, Ted. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty & Culture, 1830–1998 (1998) online edition
• Parker, Frank R. Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi After 1965 (1990)
• Peirce, Neal R. The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven Deep South States (1974) see chapter 4 on Mississippi in the 1970s online edition
• Silver, James W. Mississippi: The Closed Society (1963)
• Smith, Lewis H. and Robert S. Herren, "Mississippi" in Richard P. Nathan, Fred C. Doolittle, eds. Reagan and the States (1987), pp. 208–230.

• Bolton, Charles C. Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (1994) online edition
• Brazy, Martha Jane. An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez And New York (2006)
• Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (1992) online edition
• Cosby, A.G. et al. A Social and Economic Portrait of the Mississippi Delta (1992) online
• Currie, James T. Enclave: Vicksburg and Her Plantations, 1863–1870 (1980)
• Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994)
• Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1957) sociological case study of race and class in the 1930s
• Greenberg, Kenneth S. "The Civil War and the Redistribution of Land: Adams County, Mississippi, 1860–1870," Agricultural History, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 292–307 in JSTO
• Helferich, Gerry. High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta (2007), growing cotton in the 21st century
• James, Dorris Clayton. Ante-Bellum Natchez (1968)
• Morris, Christopher. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (1995)
• Nelson, Lawrence J. "Welfare Capitalism on a Mississippi Plantation in the Great Depression." Journal of Southern History 50 (May 1984): 225–250. in JSTOR
• Owens, Harry P. Steamboats and the Cotton Economy: River Trade in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (1990).
• Polk, Noel. Natchez before 1830 (1989)
• Von Herrmann, Denise. Resorting to Casinos: The Mississippi Gambling Industry (2006) online edition
• Willis, John C. Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta After the Civil War (2000)
• Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (2003)

• Brinkley, Douglas G. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2007)
• Fickle, James E. Mississippi Forests and Forestry (2001). 384 pp
• Hearn, Philip D. Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast, (2004) 233 pp

• Abbott, Dorothy. ed. Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth. Vol. 2: Nonfiction, (1986).
• Baldwin, Joseph G. The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853), on the boom times of the 1830s online edition
• Bond, Bradley G. ed. Mississippi: A Documentary History (2003) excerpt and text search; online edition
• Evers, Charles. Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story (1997), memoir of a black politician
• Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. (1968) memoir of Black girlhood
• Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee; Recollections of a planter's son (1941) 347 pp excerpt and text search
• Rosengarten, Theodore. All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974) memoir of a Black Mississippian
• Waters, Andrew, ed. Prayin' to Be Set Free: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Mississippi (2002) 196 pp