Cotton Kingdom, 1833–1865

General William Tecumseh Sherman is probably best remembered for his spectacular 1864 “March to the Sea” in which he stormed 225 miles through Georgia with no line of communication in a Union campaign to take the American Civil War to the Confederate population. Sherman, however, was not always so daring and independent, but rather he was a general who profoundly grew and developed during the Civil War.

David Holmes, 1817-1820
George Poindexter, 1820-1822
Walter Leake, 1822-1825
Gerard Chittocque Brandon, 1825-1826

Definitions for Women's Suffrage Amendment

In the 20th century, Mississippi legislators were twice called upon to act on two constitutional amendments that had major implications for American women. The first for their consideration was the woman suffrage amendment which was ratified in 1920 and became the Nineteenth Amendment.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success for many White Mississippians, a number of White people could always be found at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with Black Mississippians in the century after the American Civil War.

When Vicksburg fell to Union troops on July 4, 1863, the Confederacy lost its last chance to control the Mississippi River.

In the years after the American Civil War, famous generals and common soldiers alike published their remembrances.  These accounts appeared in books, in magazines, and, as was the case here, in newspapers.  The press created Civil War series such as the one reprinted here from the New York Tribune.  The most famous of all these series appeared in The Century Magazine and in the late 1880s was published in four volumes under the title Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. (In 2002, a fifth volume was added to the original four.)

Most Union soldiers fought the American Civil War close to home. Recruits from Pennsylvania in the Army of the Potomac, for example, spent the entire war within one or two hundred miles of home. Farther west, men from Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio did not have far to travel to reach the battlefields of Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Road to War Timeline

The American Civil War (1861-1865) left Mississippi in chaos with its social structures overturned and its economy in ruins. However, the war meant freedom for enslaved people who made up more than half the population of the state.

“Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed - something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation's public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished.