Samuel Davis (–September 14, 1853) was a major plantation and slave owner of the antebellum U.S. South who also speculated in farmland, invested in banks and railroads, maintained a ferry monopoly at a key crossing the Mississippi River, and was remembered as an enterprising risk-taker for using a steamboat to transport cotton from Natchez to New Orleans in 1811. Most of Davis' plantations were in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, on land inherited through his wife from José Vidal, a Spanish colonial administrator who had been awarded large land grants on the Louisiana side of the river immediately opposite the commercially significant settlement of Natchez.
Cotton was the primary product grown by the people enslaved on Davis' multiple plantations. Davis plantation cotton was considered to be of high quality. He operated on "scientific principles," using what new mechanisms were available and advising other planters to provide cistern water for slaves to prevent the spread of cholera. When cotton stored in a gin house owned by Davis burned in 1850 the estimated loss was . His plantations produced 3,000 to 5,000 bales of cotton annually.
Considered one of the Natchez nabob elite in 1837, Davis and his wife had settled into an elegant house in Philadelphia by 1850, which they shared with a child and six servants. Husband and wife died four days apart in September 1853. Their estate was largely inherited by their children, most notably sons Alfred V. Davis and Samuel M. Davis, who had been educated at the University of Pennsylvania but returned to the lower Mississippi River valley to carry on their cotton-planting businesses. One married a daughter of planter baron Stephen Duncan, and the other married a daughter of planter baron Francis Surget, and they each were the legal owners of hundreds of people in 1860, immediately prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War. S. M. Davis was said to have been an avid secessionist. A. V. Davis served as an officer in the Confederate Army for four months.
S. M. Davis died in Virginia in 1878. A. V. Davis moved to Pass Christian, Mississippi, where he died in 1899, at which time he was memorialized as having been one of the "planter princes" of the antebellum South.
Biography
Samuel Davis was born in Massachusetts in the 1780s. He arrived in Natchez by 1811. Some sources say he came from Philadelphia. He married Maria Clarissa Vidal, a daughter of the namesake of Vidalia, Louisiana, Don Jose Vidal. Maria Clarissa Vidal was born about 1797 in Louisiana. Vidal was said to "have laid the foundation of the immense estate of the late Samuel Davis Esq." Originally a lawyer, after his marriage Davis "directed his attention to proper management of his immense estates."
Early career When the steamboat New Orleans arrived in Natchez in 1811, per J. F. H. Claiborne, "Davis was the only man in the crowd that had the nerve to ship cotton on the first trip of the boat. The first cotton ever shipped by steamer from Natchez was shipped by him, and he was thought to be taking a very great risk." Davis is elsewhere credited with being, in the late 1810s, a pioneer of the use of steam power to ship cotton from Natchez to New Orleans: "With the replacing of the New Orleans by the old Vesuvius, steamboat commerce between the two big Southwestern cities was begun on a large scale." In 1827 he and John Ker published a statement supporting John Quincy Adams for reelection as president. At some point he hosted a grand dinner in honor of Massachusetts politician Edward Everett, at which Adam L. Bingaman made a toast in Choctaw (), and "No one present understood it except Mr. Davis and Colonel Claiborne." In 1829 Davis bought 12 people from "Alfred Bowran, of Clarke County, Kentucky."
Land speculation
According to Mississippi historian Claiborne, "Mr. Wm. M. Gwin, after the death of his brother, became a large operator in lands, in conjunction with the late H. R. W. Hill, of New Orleans; subsequently with Dennistoun & Co., of New Orleans and Liverpool, and Samuel Davis, of Natchez. In the summer of 1836, he entered for this company over 100,000 acres, chiefly in Arkansas, and was offered by a New York firm a profit of $100,000 for the investment, which he vainly urged his friends to accept. The great financial revulsion of 1837 proved the wisdom of his advice." In the telling of 20th-century historian Clayton James, Gwin headed a "Democratic clique" out of Vicksburg known as the Mississippi Regency, with an "emphasis on...party rather than sectional domination of Mississippi politics." The Regency both promoted politicians with Robert J. Walker and Alexander J. McNutt, and ran a land-speculation concern with James C. Wilkins, Levin R. Marshall, and Davis, "which manipulated lucrative schemes in Arkansas, Texas, and Mississippi."
By 1837 he owned two plantations from Vidalia at Lake Concordia. The same year, William Johnson, a free man of color who lived and worked in Natchez, included "Mr. Saml. Davis" on a list he made in his journal of Natchez nabobery in town for the races at Pharsalia. "A valuable servant of Samuel Davis" died in a fall from the second story of a building under construction in 1842. In 1846 he paid to have his father-in-law's body moved from New Orleans and reinterred under a monument in Natchez City Cemetery. In 1848 he had listed for sale thousands of acres of cotton land in "Union and adjoining counties," Arkansas, accessible from the "Washita River".
Plantations and slaves In July 1849 he wrote a public letter advising other planters on cholera protections for their enslaved labor forces that "it is very certain that Cistern is much healthier than river water in summer, drank as it usually is by slaves." A British geologist named Charles Lyell wrote about meeting Davis, who "impressed him the most" of the slave owners he encountered, "because of his humanitarian concern for his Negroes." Lyell felt that Davis-owned slave quarters were "neatly built and well whitewashed." James, writing in 1968, commented, "Davis' interest in his slaves as persons, however, was probably exceptional among the Natchez nabobs, who generally were concerned with their colored people mainly as chattel investments."
A fire broke out in the cotton gin at his Island plantation at Lake Concordia at 3 a.m. on October 31, 1849, destroying the gin house and 125 bales of cotton. On a Sunday night at the beginning of December 1850, "the gin house on the plantation of Samuel Davis, in the rear of this town [Vidalia], was discovered to be on fire; the large quantity of cotton in the house was in a few moments in a blaze, the country for miles around was lighted up by the flame. The loss cannot be less than 15 or 20 thousand dollars," which is roughly $500,000 to $750,000 in 2025 dollars. In December 1852, there was another fire at a Davis plantation, this time destroying "a negro house and the kitchen of the quarters."
Davis was enumerated as an owner of two plantations on slave schedules of the 1850 federal census of Concordia Parish, along with plantations owned by P. M. Lapice located on both sides. Davis owned 485 slaves attached to one plantation, and 79 attached to another. In addition to the Lake Concordia plantations near Lapice, he owned "Pittsfield, Weecama, and all the Island" plantations. The same year the Concordia Intelligencer reported, "The two best cotton crops we saw in our tour was on the Wickemore plantation on Lake Concordia belonging to Samuel Davis. Esq., and on Mrs. Hoover's plantation on the Tensas river. The owners of these places may reasonably expect to make a bale to the acre of the best quality of cotton." Davis himself was a resident of Philadelphia in 1850, living with his wife Maria (born in Louisiana around 1795), a 10-year-old named Pauline Davis (born in Philadelphia), and six servants (all natives of Ireland). Davis listed his occupation as planter. The court case Police Jury of Concordia v Samuel Davis made the New Orleans papers in 1850. In 1851 Davis was said to own "the town of Vidalia and also very extensive and valuable plantations adjacent hitherto." In 1853, a mechanical cotton stalk harvester was in use on one or more of his plantations. In July 1853, Davis sued "Philander Wood for his refusal to deliver up a certain slave named Charles Clark" (who had died of yellow fever while hired out to Wood), seeking $2,000 in damages but the jury found for Clark.
Business papers Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge holds a collection of Jose Vidal and Samuel Davis documents. As summarized by the WPA's Historical Records Survey and published in 1940, the collection includes:
Death and legacy Samuel Davis died in Philadelphia in September 1853 of pulmonary apoplexy. Maria Clarissa Vidal Davis had died four days prior, at her home at the corner of Broad Street and Poplar Street, of congestion of the lungs. Coincidentally, there was an unusual yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in September 1853. The Davises were buried beside each other at Laurel Hill Cemetery. Their Philadelphia house, known as the Benjamin Stiles house (for the original owner), was sold in December 1853 for to a principal of the Anspach, Brother & Co. anthracite coal company. The Samuel Davis art collection, advertised to be "old masters, a portion in richly carved Italian frames," was listed for sale at the same time. Davis kept a record of the rise and fall of the Mississippi River for 23 years, from 1817 to 1840. As reported in De Bow's Review, the "great estate" of Samuel Davis "always produced" 3,000 to 5,000 bales annually until his death and the subdivision of his lands and slaves by inheritance.
Davis v. Police Jury of Concordia (1839–1850) Per a 1932 history of Concordia Parish, "In 1801, the Spanish Government, through the Marquis of Casa Calvo, granted to Thomas Thompson, (brother-in-law of Vidal), In 1803, Thompson conveyed his franchise to José Vidal, who continued to operate the ferry, through his lessees, until 1817, when he sold it to Samuel Davis, (his son-in-law), 'who has ever since kept up a ferry,' says the Court. In 1839, the Police Jury passed an ordinance for the letting of a ferry privilege from Vidalia to Natchez to the highest bidder. Davis enjoined their action, setting up a perpetual and exclusive franchise from the Spanish Government to his author in title, Thompson; his continuous operation of the ferry and the acquiescence of the Police Jury by the collection of a yearly license fee of $10; that the Police Jury had no power to set the grant aside, or to operate a ferry within three miles, etc." The state court dissolved Davis' injunction and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the state court's decision. The decision in Davis v. Police Jury of Concordia (50 U.S. 9 How. 280 1850) was rendered by the Taney court in 1850.
Heirs