Un/Settlement

After a century of colonial fantasies, Americans carved into Feliciana’s red dirt an early republican slave society that produced staples for global markets. Land and laborers in the Lower Mississippi Valley produced sugar and exploding quantities of the raw cotton that powered the Industrial Revolution. Feliciana elites focused on state building, creating a police jury, Overseers of the Poor, and slave patrols. They bought books and newspapers to keep up with global affairs and enjoyed social spaces. Indigenous and African residents, by contrast, unsettled the space as elites created it. Tunica, Choctaw, and other Indigenous nations used the courts to defend their land and traded with increasingly powerful planters. Some enslaved persons fled to nearby cities, Mexico, and the Caribbean. But most survived in place, where they turned slave quarters, swamps, woods, and public spaces into places of complex communion, conflict, and care.