Narratives
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Narratives
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For Slave Narratives in other
Mississippi Counties Click
Here
Stories
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Biographies
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The enslaved population of Mississippi lived principally on large plantations along the Mississippi River. In some of these plantation counties, blacks outnumbered whites 9 to 1. Settled early by the French in the 1720s, which brutally squashed a rebellion of Natchez Indians and slaves in 1726, the state functioned as the western terminus of the domestic slave trade in the decades before the Civil War. The second largest slave market in the lower South was located in Natchez. Thousands of slaves were transported to the Natchez market for sale, and blacks in the upper South feared being sold "down river" to Mississippi. Almost all the enslaved of Mississippi worked in the backbreaking production of cotton as field hands. Several thousand enslaved blacks lived in urban places such as Natchez, Jackson, Vicksburg, and Columbus, where they were used as domestic servants or manual laborers. To control the enslaved population, the state passed one of the region's harshest slave codes, subjecting those accused of serious crimes to special courts and severe punishment. Surprisingly, a few hundred blacks (1,366 in 1830) lived as free men and women in the state, working mostly as skilled tradesmen and small farmers. In the 1830s, at least a dozen free blacks were themselves slaveholders.
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