The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
Initial colonization of the region was carried out by the French. France ceded its control over portions of the region to Spain and Britain, particularly along the Gulf Coast. European-American settlers did not enter the territory in great number until the early 19th century. Rich American settlers brought many enslaved Africans with them to serve as laborers to develop cotton plantations along major riverfronts. On December 10, 1817, Mississippi became a state of the United States. Through the 1830s, the federal government bought out most of the native Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes west of the Mississippi River. American planters developed an economy based on the export of cotton produced by slave labor along the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. A small elite group of planters controlled most of the richest land, the wealth, and politics of the state; Mississippi seceded in 1861 and joined the Confederate States of America. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), control of the Mississippi River was a vital goal of both sides, with the Union in control by 1863. The Union Army had full control by 1865 and slavery was abolished. Mississippi entered the Reconstruction era (1865–1877).
The bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta were still 90% undeveloped after the Civil War. Thousands of migrants, both black and white, entered this area for a chance at land ownership. They sold timber while clearing land to raise money for purchases. During the Reconstruction era, many freedmen became owners of small farms in these areas, and by 1900, composed two-thirds of the property owners in the Mississippi Delta. Democrats regained control of the state in 1875 and in 1890 passed a disfranchising constitution, resulting in the exclusion of African Americans from political life until the mid-1960s. In the era of Jim Crow laws Blacks lost all political power and social status. The postwar sharp decline in cotton prices hurt the state economy. There was growth in the lumber industry, and railroads were built. However, there were few factories or cities. By 1900, African Americans in the state were typically farm laborers or landless sharecroppers or tenant farmers. The state continued to rely mostly on agriculture and timber, but by the 1940s mechanization meant the end of a demand for labor to pick cotton.
During the 1910 to 1960 period two waves of the Great Migration led to hundreds of thousands of blacks leaving the state for cities in the North, such as St. Louis and Chicago. By 1930 African Americans were a minority of the state population. They were still a majority in the cotton-growing Delta counties. The Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s saw African Americans organize. Thanks to new federal laws in the 1960s they recovered their rights for access to public facilities, including all state universities, and the ability to register, vote, and run for office. Public places and schools were desegregated.
By the early 21st century Mississippi had made notable progress in overcoming attitudes that had impeded social, economic, and political development. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused severe damage along Mississippi's Gulf Coast. The tourism industry grew in the early 21st century. Mississippi expanded its professional services in cities such as Jackson, the state capital. Top industries in Mississippi today include agriculture, forestry, manufacturing, transportation and utilities, and health services.Mississippi Rankings and Facts. usnews.com. Retrieved January 27, 2022. The social base of politics changed in the late 20th century as Blacks joined the liberal Democratic Party, and Whites largely switched to the conservative Republican Party.
Native Americans
At the end of the last Ice Age, Native Americans or Paleo-Indians appeared in what today is the Southern United States. Paleo-Indians in the South were hunter-gatherers who pursued the megafauna that became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene age. A variety of indigenous cultures arose in the region, including some that built great earthwork mounds more than 2,000 years ago.Busbee (2005)
The successive mound building Troyville, Coles Creek, and Plaquemine cultures occupied western Mississippi bordering the Mississippi River during the Late Woodland period. During the Terminal Coles Creek period (1150 to 1250 CE) contact increased with Mississippian cultures centered upriver near St. Louis, Missouri. This led to the adaption of new pottery techniques, as well as new ceremonial objects and possibly new forms of social structuring. As more Mississippian culture influences were absorbed the Plaquemine area as a distinct culture began to shrink after 1350 CE. Eventually the last enclave of purely Plaquemine culture was the Natchez Bluffs area, while the Yazoo Basin and adjacent areas of Louisiana became a hybrid Plaquemine-Mississippian culture. Historic groups in the area during first European contact bear out this division. In the Natchez Bluffs, the Taensa and Natchez had held out against Mississippian influence and continued to use the same sites as their ancestors and carry on the Plaquemine culture. Groups who appear to have absorbed more Mississippian influence were identified at the time of European contact as those tribes speaking the Tunican, Chitimachan, and Muskogean languages.
The Mississippian culture disappeared in most places around the time of European encounter. Archaeological and linguistic evidence has shown their descendants are the historic Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples, who were later counted by colonists as among the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast. Other tribes who inhabited the territory that became known as Mississippi (and whose names were given by colonists to local towns and features) include the Natchez, Yazoo, Pascagoula, and the Biloxi. French, Spanish and English settlers all traded with these tribes in the early colonial years.
Pressure from European-American settlers increased during the early nineteenth century, after invention of the cotton gin made cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable. This was readily cultivated in the upland areas of the South, and its development could feed an international demand for cotton in the 19th century. Migrants from the United States entered Mississippi mostly from the north and east, coming from the Upper South and coastal areas. Eventually they gained passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which achieved federal forced removal of most of the indigenous peoples during the 1830s to areas west of the Mississippi River.
European colonial period
The first major European expedition into the territory that became Mississippi was Spanish, led by Hernando de Soto, which passed through in the early 1540s. The French claimed the territory that included Mississippi as part of their colony of New France and started settlement along the Gulf Coast. They created the first Fort Maurepas under Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville on the site of modern Ocean Springs (or Old Biloxi) in 1699.
In 1716, the French founded Natchez as Fort Rosalie on the Mississippi River; it became the dominant town and trading post of the area. In this period of the early 18th century, the French Roman Catholic Church created pioneer parishes at Old Biloxi/Ocean Springs and Natchez. The church also established seven pioneer parishes in present-day Louisiana and two in Alabama, which was also part of New France. "A History of the Archdiocese of New Orleans – French Beginnings", Archdiocese of New Orleans , accessed May 6, 2008
The French and later Spanish colonial rule influenced early social relations of the settlers who held enslaved Africans. As in Louisiana, for a period there developed a third class of free people of color. They were chiefly descendants of white European colonists and enslaved African or African-American mothers. The planters often had formally supportive relationships with their mistresses of color, known in French as plaçage. They sometimes freed them and their multiracial children. The fathers passed on property to their mistresses and children, or arranged for the apprenticeship or education of children so they could learn a trade. Some wealthier male colonists sent their mixed-race sons to France for education, and some entered the military there. Free people of color often migrated to New Orleans, where there was more opportunity for work and a bigger community of their class.
As part of New France, Mississippi was also ruled by the Spanish after France's defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756–63). Later it was briefly part of West Florida under the British. In 1783 the Mississippi area was deeded by Great Britain to the United States after the latter won its independence in the American Revolution, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Following the Peace of Paris (1783) the southern third of Mississippi came under Spanish rule as part of West Florida.
Through the colonial period, the various tribes of Native Americans changed alliances trying to achieve the best trading and other conditions for themselves.
Historical populations Censusyear Population 1800 7,600 1810 31,306 1820 75,448 1830 136,621 1840 375,651 1850 606,526 1860 791,305 1870 827,922 1880 1,131,597 1890 1,289,600 1900 1,551,270 1910 1,797,114 1920 1,790,618 1930 2,009,821 1940 2,183,796 1950 2,178,914 1960 2,178,141 1970 2,216,912 1980 2,520,638 1990 2,573,216 2000 2,844,658
Territory and statehood Before 1798 the state of Georgia claimed the entire region extending west from the Chattahoochee to the Mississippi River and tried to sell lands there, most notoriously in the Yazoo land scandal of 1795. After two decades of resistance to the agreement by the Original Thirteen States in adopting the first system of governance for the United States in the old Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union in 1781, uniting the original Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and requiring that all lands west of the Appalachian Mountains chain were to be ceded by the East Coast states and to held in common by the Confederation Congress for erection of new future states, Georgia finally ceded the disputed area in 1802 to the United States national government for its management. In 1804, after the Louisiana Purchase, the government assigned the northern part of this cession to Mississippi Territory.of 1798 The southern part became attached to the Louisiana Territory (1804–1812) and its southern portion of the Orleans Territory (1804–1812) by the Congress, and after 1812 in the new 18th state of Louisiana when it was admitted to the federal Union under the presidential administration of fourth President of the United States|President] James Madison (1751–1836, served 1809–1817).
The Mississippi Territory was sparsely populated and suffered initially from a series of difficulties that hampered its development. Long protracted negotiations