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•jo	MISSISSIPPI: THE GENERAL BACKGROUND
ized a company of Tennessee volunteers to avenge the outrage and wage a campaign against the Creek Nation. Fighting with Jackson against the Creeks was the youthful Sam Houston. In 1814 a British fleet overwhelmed a small American force off Bay St. Louis in the last naval engagement of the war; but this defeat was avenged by the victory of New Orleans, in which Mississippi troops played a prominent part.
The same spirit of independence that had shaken off European claims to the territory was manifested in the quarrel between the people and their appointed Territorial governors, the conflict being especially pronounced during the Sargent administration. By 1810 the Territory was clamoring for Statehood; and in 1817 the western portion was admitted to the Union by act of Congress on December 10, as the State of Mississippi.
During the Territorial period, when political unity was being achieved, a cotton boom had given the people a basis for economic unity. The high price of cotton and the low price of land drew from the older South (the Piedmont principally) the "Great Migration” that was to complete the settlement of Mississippi and annex it to the cotton kingdom.
The changes wrought by this influx of new people between 1817 and 1832 are politically enshrined in the State constitutions of these years. The first constitution was written by George Poindexter, an exceptionally brilliant lawyer who represented the Whigs of the State, and was a reflection of the conservative if not actually aristocratic character of the Natchez district planters. The convention adopting this constitution assembled July 7, 1817, at the Methodist meeting house in Washington (see Tour 3, Sec. b). Cowles Mead, a Virginian who had migrated from Georgia, proposed that the new State be called Washington. His proposal received 17 votes, as against 23 for the name of Mississippi. By 1832 the State contained many small farmers, Jacksonian Democrats steeped in Jacksonian principles; and the constitution adopted in that year was in many respects the most democratic State constitution of the time. It even provided for an elective judiciary.
The feverish pressure of the immigrants who followed the westward moving cotton boom drove the Indians out of Mississippi. The treaty of Doak's Stand in 1820 opened 5,500,000 acres of Choctaw (and to white settlement, and resulted in an immediate influx of population. By 1829, however, only about one-third of the tract had been sold to settlers or speculators ; it was claimed that the Indians possessed the "fat of the land." As only about half the land of the State was open to white settlers, many demanded that the Indians yield all their territory and move westward. By the treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, the Choctaw Nation ceded to
AN OUTLINE OF FOUR CENTURIES	71
the United States "the entire country they own and possess east of the Mississippi River; and they agree to move beyond the Mississippi River as early as practicable." In 1832 the Chickasaw ceded their lands in northern Mississippi. These accessions not only rounded out the State geographically, but were evidences of the peculiar nature of the early cotton economy, which made free and easily cultivated land a prerequisite to wealth. One tangible evidence of this wealth was the opening of the State University at Oxford in 1848. Significantly, Oxford was one of the towns that sprang into being almost in the center of the newly acquired lands.
Loyal to King Cotton, Mississippians justified their expansionist sentiments by chivalric military and oratorical exploits in the struggle for Texas independence and admission to the Union. This struggle was climaxed by the War with Mexico in 1846. Robert J. Walker and Henry S. Foote, orators, John A. Quitman and Jefferson Davis, soldiers, were the leading expansionists of the period. These men more than any others kept the slave States on an equality with the North in the race for possession of a continent.
When the election of i860 forced the issue between union and secession, economic interests molded the political alignments in Mississippi. The older and wealthy families, loath to trust their fortunes to an untried government, were for the Union, and so were the poorer people or yeomanry. The great middle class, however, was for secession. By their numbers, ability, and reckless courage, they swept the Whigs and yeomen with them into withdrawal from the Union. On January 9, 1861, they made Mississippi the second State of the Confederacy.
The fact that Jefferson Davis, a resident of Mississippi, was President of the Confederacy drew the State particularly close to the new government. Lingering doubts as to the righteousness of the southern cause were lost in the roar of cannon that followed the capture of Fort Sumter. The State threw its resources into the war magnificently; at Manassas five regiments of Mississipians participated as units of the Army of Virginia.
During the first year of war, activity in Mississippi was chiefly of a preparatory sort. But the year 1862 brought the war closer home. Union forces concentrated on two primary objectives in the State: Vicksburg and with it, control of the Mississippi River, and the isolation of Mississippi troops from arms and supplies. In April the first military invasion of the State began. After the Federal victory at Shiloh, General Halleck led 100,-000 troops against Corinth, and made northeastern Mississippi a battleground for the remainder of the year. Hard fighting took place at Corinth,