History The county had been settled by French, Spanish, and English colonists, and American pioneers as part of the Natchez District; organized in 1802, it was the fourth county in the Mississippi Territory. European-American settlers did not develop the area for cotton plantations until after Indian Removal in the 1830s, at which time they brought in numerous slaves through the domestic slave trade. In total, this transported one million enslaved African Americans from the Upper South to the Deep South, disrupting numerous families. Using the enslaved workers, planters developed long plantations that had narrow fronts on the rivers: the Mississippi to the west and the Big Black River to the north, which were the transportation byways. As in other parts of the Delta, the bottomlands areas further from the river remained largely frontier and undeveloped until after the American Civil War.John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000 Well before the Civil War, the county had a majority-black population.
History The county had been settled by French, Spanish, and English colonists, and American pioneers as part of the Natchez District; organized in 1802, it was the fourth county in the Mississippi Territory. European-American settlers did not develop the area for cotton plantations until after Indian Removal in the 1830s, at which time they brought in numerous slaves through the domestic slave trade. In total, this transported one million enslaved African Americans from the Upper South to the Deep South, disrupting numerous families. Using the enslaved workers, planters developed long plantations that had narrow fronts on the rivers: the Mississippi to the west and the Big Black River to the north, which were the transportation byways As in other parts of the Delta, the bottomlands areas further from the river remained largely frontier and undeveloped until after the American Civil War.John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000 Well before the Civil War, the county had a majority-black population.