Were most white settlers in early Mississippi settlement slaveowners?

by wwstevens

Hello all,

I've been doing some family genealogical research and and have discovered that I have deep ancestral ties to the Mississippi Delta region going back as far as the first decade of the nineteenth century. As far as I am aware, my family migrated from Virginia to Mississippi sometime around then or possibly earlier. Apart from my own genealogical research, I also read as much history of the American South as I can get my hands on. I am in the middle of reading the book Slave Country by Adam Rothman. In the book, Rothman makes the case that though land was cheaply sold in the new Mississippi territories, it was still too expensive for much of the middle class to afford, therefore mainly wealthy slaveowners were many of the original white settlers of the Mississippi Territory. Was this uniformly true across the board for most of the white settlement of Mississippi or was it more of a mix? I guess what I'm trying to ask is is it safe to assume that my ancestors, arriving before or around the War of 1812, were slaveowners?

The honest answer is that it's quite difficult to say with any measure of certainty. Rothman's book is a very good one, and he's quite correct in his assessment that expansion into the Mississippi Valley was predominantly driven by slavery throughout the history of the territory. But the time period we're talking about in the case of your family is on the cusp of a significant transition in the history of the plantation complex. Prior to the end of the War of 1812, the growth of slavery along the Mississippi still represented an expansion of the plantation complex as it existed in the Caribbean - by and large, the new planters migrating in the territory were coming out of the Caribbean colonies, not from the slave-holding states. It's only after 1815 that we begin to see a meaningful, mass expansion of the American planter class further into the south. Similarly, Mississippi was not a major end-point destination for the growing internal slave trade in this period.

Now, that's not to say there were not American planters moving south at all - certainly a small number did, and of course one did not need to be a planter to be a slave-owner. But another possible explanation is that your family may have been merchants of some kind, who certainly did come down from the north into the valley to set up trade in the new societies developing out of the plantation economy, or officials taking up new positions in the territorial administration. Such individuals were inevitably still intimately involved in the slave system and with the plantation complex, particularly the merchant class, and many would become a part of the planter class through marriage in the years after their arrival. But they would not have needed the same kind of wealth needed to move to Mississippi to engage in plantation slavery. Keep in mind though that simply because they did not come as plantation owners does not mean they did not own any slaves at all or make use of slave labour in whatever line of work they were in.

So it's difficult to say meaningfully whether or not your ancestors were slave-owners at all at the time. That's the kind of thing only your own further research can really reveal. But coming from Virginia pre-1815, it's highly unlikely that they were plantation owners.

Sources

John Craig Hammond, "Uncontrollable Necessity: The Local Politics, Geo-Politics, and Sectional Politics of Slavery Expansion," in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (2011), 138 - 60.
John Craig Hammond, "Slavery, Settlement and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770 - 1820", Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 2 (2012): 175 - 206. Especially page 179, for those interested in further reading.