Cotton, Soil, and Bondage, The Delta's Origins

The Mississippi Delta is not a delta in the geographic sense. It is a vast alluvial plain, roughly two hundred miles long and eighty miles wide, bounded by the Mississippi River to the west and the Yazoo River to the east. The soil is among the most fertile on earth, deposited by ten thousand years of river flooding. In the eighteen thirties and forties, planters looked at it and saw a fortune waiting to be extracted, if only there were enough human labor to drain the swamps and plant the fields.

They supplied that labor by force. Enslaved men, women, and children were bought and transported from the eastern seaboard states, sold through slave markets in Natchez and lesser depots across the state. Mississippi's enslaved population grew from roughly thirty-two thousand by eighteen twenty to more than four hundred thousand by eighteen sixty, by which time enslaved people outnumbered free white Mississippians. The state produced more millionaires per capita than any other in the nation. The cotton they grew moved through New Orleans to textile mills in England and New England, and the profit built banks, insurance companies, and universities far from the fields where it was made.

Emancipation in eighteen sixty-five ended slavery but did not end the Delta's economic logic. Sharecropping replaced the plantation. A freedman and his family would farm a portion of a planter's land in exchange for a share of the crop, but because the planter controlled the scales, the credit, and the books, the share almost never arrived. Debt peonage bound families to land they could not leave and could not own. The crop-lien system held Mississippi's Black majority in near-servitude for another eighty years, a system finally broken not by law but by the mechanical cotton picker, the Great Migration, and the civil-rights movement.