This presentation examines how slaves and colonists weathered the economic and political upheavals that rocked the Lower Mississippi Valley in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Dr. Pinnen focuses on the fitful–and often futile–efforts of the English, the Spanish, and the Americans to establish plantation agriculture in Natchez and its environs, a district that emerged as the heart of the “Cotton Kingdom.” Within this setting, slaves seized on many weapons to claim their freedom and subsequently redefined the ever-changing meaning of race, slavery and freedom.
As a scholar of the colonial borderlands with a particular focus on race relations and slavery in Natchez, Dr. Christian Pinnen has written, researched and published on the subject for the last decade.
