Mark Tawin’s Mississippi: Race, 1800-1850Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-04-12 21:32Z by Steven |
Mark Tawin’s Mississippi: Race, 1800-1850
Mark Twain’s Mississippi
Project Partners: Northern Illinois University Libraries, The Newberry Library, The St. Louis Mercantile Library, Tulane University Libraries and University of California, Berkeley
Made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services
2005
Peter J. Kastor, Associate Professor of History and American Culture Studies Program
Washington Unviversity in St. Louis
The changes in the Mississippi Valley from 1800-1850 represented a condensed version of the broader changes that would occur throughout North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Not only did the last vestiges of Indian power collapse in the faced of white supremacy, but the fluid and complex relationships that had marked life for so long gave way to an increasingly simplistic racial hierarchy.
All of the factors at work in the Mississippi Valley—demography, commerce, diplomacy, and culture—came together to reshape these racial relationships. For example, the Europeans who vied for control of the Mississippi in 1800 may have each sought racial control, but they lacked the diplomatic power to do so. Meanwhile, the relative scarcity of white settlers made the Europeans dependent on Indians for trade. Indians welcomed this state of affairs, since the needs of Europeans for diplomatic allies or for trading partners often placed Indians in advantageous situations. Nothing exemplified this state of affairs better than the large population of mixed-race peoples who occupied the Mississippi Valley. In addition to the Métis in the mid and upper Mississippi Valley, the lower Mississippi Valley was home to a large population with African and European ancestry. That mixed-race population formed the majority of the free people of color in New Orleans, the largest and most prosperous free black community anywhere in North America. These mixed-race populations all secured their goals by exploiting the economic and diplomatic realities that continued to shape life on the Mississippi…
Read the entire essay here.