Slavery in Antebellum Mississippi

By 1860, Mississippi’s farms and plantations yielded 1.2 million bales of cotton, making it the nation’s leading cotton producer. This prosperity rested on the backs of some 436,631 enslaved blacks, who constituted 55 percent of the state’s population and who made Mississippi the third-largest slave-holding state, behind only Virginia and Georgia. This presentation examines the development of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved. Beginning with the “Flush Times” of the 1830s and continuing to the outbreak of the Civil War, it examines the interstate slave trade, the working lives of enslaved blacks and the myriad ways in which bondsmen and women struggled against their masters. It traces the paths of runaway slaves, reconstructs slave uprisings and insurrection scares, looks at their families and communities and follows the enslaved into the state’s churches. The presentation draws from auto-biographies and interviews with former slaves, newspapers, plantation records and government documents.

Speakers Expertise:

Max Grivno joined the history faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi in 2007 after completing his doctorate at the University of Maryland. Dr. Grivno’s first book, Gleanings of Freedom: Free Labor and Slavery along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860, was published in 2011 as part of the University of Illinois Press’s series The Working Class in American History. Grivno is currently writing From Bondage to Freedom: Slavery in Mississippi, 1690-1865. Dr. Grivno’s teaching interests include the Old South, slavery, labor history and Mississippi history.