The history of slavery in Mississippi began when the region was still Mississippi Territory and continued until abolition in 1865. The U.S. state of Mississippi had one of the largest populations of enslaved people in the Confederacy, third behind Virginia and Georgia. There were very few free people of color in Mississippi the year before the American Civil War: the ratio was one freedman for every 575 slaves.
Legal history
When the United States took over Mississippi as a consequence of the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, importing slaves from other regions was initially prohibited under territorial law. However, wealthy planters argued "we need more slaves" and the federal government relented, and before long any prohibition on interregional trading was all but forgotten. The first decades of the 19th century in Mississippi were defined by a continuous rolling action of Indian removal—in which Choctaw and Chickasaw people were forcibly removed from their traditional lands. And then, as Walter Johnson puts it, "African-American slaves were brought in to cultivate the land expropriated from Native Americans."
The Mississippi slave code, first passed into law by the Mississippi Legislature in 1823, prohibited groups of five or more enslaved people gathering as unlawful assembly, and leaving a plantation without a handwritten slave pass was prohibited, even to attend religious services. Under antebellum Mississippi law, the standard penalty for a slave convicted of carrying a gun, petty larceny, or attending a class where reading or writing were taught, was 39 lashes.
Economic history
Land in Mississippi was river bottomland rich in organic matter— "the Mississippi and Yazoo, the Tombigbee, Big Black, and the Pearl covered an area of over one-sixth of the entire state and offered unrivalled soil"—and this land was primarily used to grow the highly valuable cash crop cotton produced with the labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved American laborers of African descent. According to David Walker Howe in What Hath God Wrought, overseas cotton sales in 1836 exceeded , and by 1840, the cotton crop was 59 percent of the total value of U.S. exports. Mississippi cotton was a strain produced by crossing a large-bolled variety from Mexico with a green-seed variety from Tennessee that "grew better on piedmont and interior lands" than sea island cotton. The land clearance and plowing necessary to create thousands of acres of monocrop cotton plantations was ultimately debilitating to the soil, the river, and the native ecosystem.
Population growth in Mississippi in the years 1830–1860 was overwhelmingly due to the interstate slave trade. Enslaved people were imported from the slave states of the upper south and sold at Mississippi slave markets including the Forks of the Road at Natchez, at Vicksburg, and at a number of other smaller trading sites.
In Issaquena County, 92.5 percent of population in 1860 were slaves, the highest concentration anywhere in the United States. The U.S. census that year showed 7,244 slaves in Issaquena County, and of 115 slave owners, 39 held 77 or more. Stephen Duncan of Issaquena County held 858 slaves, second only to Joshua John Ward of South Carolina. This large "value of slave property" made Issaquena County the second richest county in the United States, with "mean total wealth per freeman" at $26,800 in 1860 (). By 1880—15 years after the abolition of slavery—the county had developed "a strong year-round market for wage labor", and Issaquena was the only county in Mississippi to report "no sharecropping or sharerenting whatsoever".