| Summary: | The increased consensus among historians that the emergence of a market revolution engendered widespread economic, political, and social changes throughout the second quarter of nineteenth-century America has brought a number of provocative questions to bear on the antebellum South. Among the most provocative is the assertion that during the 1830s, a strain of reform-minded southern planters took it upon themselves to integrate the regions subsistence farmers into the market economy. The historian Harry Watson has asserted that a small, but influential, group of southern planters sought to confront Dixies dilemma of pursuing a modern economy without cutting ties with the archaic and brutal system of slave labor. For these forward-thinking planters the promotion of internal improvements represented the most logical strategy for accomplishing such disparate goals.
Mississippi provides and excellent location to perform a test case. Specifically, this study will examine events in Mississippi beginning 1820, at the time of the state capitols relocation to Jackson, until the economic crash of 1837. My purpose is to seek out attitudes and behaviors found in Watsons study, without overlooking events and circumstances particular to life in Mississippi during the 1820s and 1830s.
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