a line due E. from the mouth of the Yazoo at about 32° 28′ N. lat. Under English rule there was an extensive immigration into this region from England, Ireland, Georgia and South Carolina. A settlement was made on the Big Black, 17 m. from its mouth, in 1774 by Phineas Lyman (1716–1774) of Connecticut and other “military adventurers,” veterans of the Havana campaign of 1762; this settlement was loyal during the War of Independence. Spain took military possession in 1781, and in the Treaty of Paris (1783) both of the Floridas were ceded back to her. But Great Britain recognized the claims of the United States to the territory as far south as the 31st parallel, the line of 1763. Spain adhered to the line of 1764–1767, and retained possession of the territory in dispute. Finally, in the treaty of San Lorenzo el Real (ratified 1796) she accepted the 1763 (31°) boundary, and withdrew her troops in 1798. Mississippi Territory was then organized, with Winthrop Sargent as governor. The territorial limits were extended on the north to the state of Tennessee in 1804 by the acquisition of the west cessions of South Carolina and Georgia, and on the south to the Gulf of Mexico by the seizure of West Florida in 1810–1813,[1] but were restricted on the east by the formation of the Territory of Alabama in 1817. Just after the uprising of 1729–1730 the French, with the help of the Choctaws, had destroyed the Natchez nation, and the shattered remnants were absorbed by the neighbouring tribes. The Chickasaws ceded their lands to the United States in 1816 and the Choctaws theirs in 1830–1832; and they removed to the Indian Territory. The smaller tribes have been exterminated, absorbed or driven farther west.
An Enabling Act was passed on the 1st of March 1817, and the state was formally admitted into the Union on the 10th of December. The first state constitution (1817) provided a high property qualification for governor, senator and representative, and empowered the legislature to elect the judges and the more important state officials. In 1822 the capital was removed to Jackson from Columbia, Marion county.[2] The constitution of 1832 abolished the property qualification for holding office and provided for the popular election of judges and state officials. Mississippi thus became one of the first states in the Union to establish an elective judiciary.[3] The same constitution prohibited the importation of negro slaves from other states; but this prohibition was never observed, and the United States Supreme Court held that it was ineffective without an act of the legislature. On the death of John C. Calhoun in 1850 the state, under the leadership of Jefferson Davis, began to rival South Carolina as leader of the extreme pro-slavery States’ Rights faction. There was a brief reaction: Henry Stuart Foote (1800–1880), Unionist, was elected governor in 1851 over Davis, the States’ Rights candidate, and in the same year a Constitutional Convention had declared almost unanimously that “the asserted right of secession” . . . “is utterly unsanctioned by the Federal Constitution.” But the particularistic sentiment continued to grow. An ordinance of secession was passed on the 9th of January 1861, and the constitution was soon amended to conform to the new constitution of the Confederate States. During the Civil War battles were fought at Corinth (1862), Port Gibson (1863), Jackson (1863) and Vicksburg (1863). In 1865 President Johnson appointed as provisional governor William Lewis Sharkey (1797–1873), who had been chief justice of the state in 1832–1850, and a convention which assembled on the 14th of August recognized the “destruction” of slavery and declared the ordinance of secession null and void. The first reconstruction legislature met on the 16th of October 1865, and at once proceeded to enact stringent vagrancy laws and other measures against the freedmen; these laws the North interpreted as an effort to restore slavery. Under the Reconstruction Act of the 2nd of March 1867 Mississippi with Arkansas formed the fourth military district, commanded successively by Generals E. O. C. Ord (1867), Alvan C. Gillem (1868) and Irvin McDowell (June-July 1868), and by Gillem (1868–1869) and Adelbert Ames (1869–1870). The notorious “Black and Tan Convention” of 1868 adopted a constitution which conferred suffrage upon the negroes and by the imposition of test oaths disfranchised the leading whites. It was at first rejected at the polls, but was finally ratified in November 1869 Without the disfranchising clauses. The fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Federal Constitution were ratified in 1870, and the state was formally readmitted into the Union on the 23rd of February of that year.
From 1870 to 1875 the government was under the control of “carpet-baggers,” negroes and the most disreputable element among the native whites. Taxes were increased—expenditure increased nearly threefold between 1869 and 1871—and there was some official corruption; but the state escaped the heavy burden of debt imposed upon its neighbours, partly because of the higher character of its reconstruction governors, and partly because its credit was already impaired by the repudiation of obligations contracted before the war. The Democrats carried the legislature in 1875, and preferred impeachment charges against Governor Adelbert Ames (b. 1835), a native of Maine, a graduate of the United States Military Academy (1861), a soldier in the Union army, and military governor of Mississippi in 1868–1870. The lieutenant-governor, A. K. Davis, a negro, was impeached and was removed from office; T. W. Cardoza, another negro, superintendent of education under Ames, was impeached on twelve charges of malfeasance, but was permitted to resign. Governor Ames, when the impeachment charges against him were dismissed on the 29th of March 1876, immediately resigned. The whites maintained their supremacy by very dubious methods until the adoption of the constitution of 1890 made it no longer necessary. The state has always been Democratic in national politics, except in the presidential elections of 1840 (Whig) and 1872 (Republican). The electoral vote was not counted in 1864 and 1868.
| Territorial Period (1798–1817). | ||
| Winthrop Sargent | 1798–1801 | |
| William C. C. Claiborne | 1801–1805 | |
| Robert Williams | 1805–1809 | |
| David Holmes | 1809–1817 | |
| Statehood Period (1817 seq.). | ||
| David Holmes | Democrat | 1817–1820 |
| George Poindexter | „ | 1820–1822 |
| Walter Leake | Democrat (died in office) | 1822–1825 |
| Gerard C. Brandon (ad int.) | Democrat | 1825–1826 |
| David Holmes | Democrat (resigned) | 1826 |
| Gerard C. Brandon | (ad int. 1826–1828) | 1826–1832 |
| Abram M. Scott | Democrat (died in office) | 1832–1833 |
| Charles Lynch[4] (ad int.) | Democrat | 1833 |
| Hiram G. Runnels | „ | 1833–1835 |
| John Anthony Quitman (ad int.) | Whig | 1835–1836 |
| Charles Lynch | Democrat | 1836–1838 |
| Alexander Gallatin McNutt | „ | 1838–1842 |
| Tilghman M. Tucker | „ | 1842–1844 |
| Albert Gallatin Brown | „ | 1844–1848 |
| Joseph W. Matthews | „ | 1848–1850 |
| John Anthony Quitman[5] | „ | 1850–1851 |
| John Isaac Guion[6] (ad int.) | „ | 1851 |
| James Whitfield (ad int.) | „ | 1851–1852 |
| Henry Stuart Foote | Unionist | 1852–1854 |
| John Jones Pettus[7] (ad int.) | Democrat | 1854 |
| John J. McRae | „ | 1854–1857 |
| William McWillie | „ | 1857–1859 |
| John Jones Pettus | „ | 1859–1863 |
- ↑ South Carolina ceded its western lands to the United States in 1787 and Georgia in 1802. The government added them to Mississippi in 1804. The seizure of West Florida was supplemented by the treaty of 1819–1821, in which Spain surrendered all of her claims.
- ↑ The seats of government have been Natchez (1798–1802), Washington (1802–1817), Natchez (1817–1821), Columbia (1821–1822), Jackson (1822 seq.).
- ↑ This system proved unsatisfactory, and in 1869 was abandoned.
- ↑ Under the constitution of 1832 the president of the senate succeeded the governor in case of a vacancy.
- ↑ Governor Quitman resigned because of charges against him of aiding Lopez’s expedition against Cuba.
- ↑ On the 4th of November the term for which Guion had been elected as a senator expired and he was succeeded in the governorship by Whitfield, elected by the senate to be its president.
- ↑ Served from the 5th of January (when Foote resigned) to the 10th, when McRae was inaugurated.
