Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta After The Civil War

The American South Series

by John C. Willis

Although it came to epitomize the Cotton South in the twentieth century, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta emerged as a distinct entity in the decades following the Civil War. As other southerners confronted the need to rebuild, the Delta remained mostly wilderness in 1865. Elsewhere, planters struggled to maintain the perquisites of slaveholding and poor families tried desperately to escape the sharecropper's lot, yet Delta landlords offered generous terms to freed people willing to clear and cultivate backcountry acres subject to yellow fever and yearly flooding. By the turn of the century, two-thirds of the region's farmers were African Americans, whose holdings represented great political and economic strength. Most historical studies of the Delta have either lauded the achievements of its white planters or found its record number of lynchings representative of the worst aspects of the New South. By looking beyond white planters to the region as a whole, John C. Willis uncovers surprising evidence of African-American enterprise, the advantages of tenancy in an unstable cotton market, and the dominance of foreign-born merchants in the area, including many Chinese. Examining the lives of individuals--freedmen, planters, and merchants--Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Delta began to devolve back into a stereotypical southern region with African Americans cast back into an impoverished, debt-ridden labor system. The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta has long been seen as a focal point for the study of Reconstruction, and Forgotten Time enters this historiographical tradition at the same time that it reverses many of its central assumptions.

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2000

Reviews

[Arthur Ownby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forgotten Time stands as a comprehensive and well-researched exploration of the discrete political and socio-economic factors that shaped the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta following the Civil War.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slls

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concerning the area between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers--which tellingly came to be referred to as Mississippi's Mississippi--Willis describes the post-Civil War fate of a place that for a brief time became a promised land for freed men, but which ultimately embodied the cancerous legacy of chattel slavery.

The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta in 1865 was yet largely a wilderness of original forest, which made it unattractive for cultivation, despite the richness of the soil. This meant that land was available at prices affordable for men of slender means who were willing to clear trees and to perform the necessary work to raise cotton. For many former slaves this presented a golden opportunity, and settlement began. As the value of timber and ultimately the cotton produce of these fertile bottom lands became apparent, various attempts were made to run rail lines through the Delta to facilitate the transportation of its products.

After two decades of relative success and prosperity, unfortunately, the price of cotton sank to levels which made it impossible to turn any profit on its production. By the turn of the 20th Century, debt was the norm, and very few freeholders were out of its grip. From this situation, rebounding prices after 1900 meant that surging property values put land ownership beyond the reach of those who formerly held lands, and the end of Reconstruction and rebounding of white supremacist attitudes delivered former freemen in the Delta into sharecropping, aka slavery-lite.

How does this story continue? See histories of Jim Crow and the Great Migration, such as Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.

[Walt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covering Reconstruction for this small area of the former Confederacy, Willis has done an excellent job demonstrating how the 20% minority white population managed to dominate the 80% freedmen population.

Willis' style is not as dry as many academicians. He includes some anecdotal stories and humor does appear once in a while. It is an easy book to go through. He did a masterful job synthesizing a great deal of data and research into this book.

The only issue I really have with the book is that Willis does not set the book in context relative to other locations. In a few isolated places he says that circumstances in the Yazoo Delta were unique when compared to the rest of the Old South. However, readers are left to assume that the story he presents here is applicable everywhere else in the region.

Overall, interesting, entertaining, and informative. Willis avoids proselytizing and decrying injustice. In a few places the white planter class do appear as boogey-men, but these areas are few and far between. Willis maintains that the greatest threat to the freedmen after Emancipation was economics, not intimidation or education. The price of cotton continued to fall; and that, more than anything else, hurt the new freedmen farmers. Of course, the declining price of cotton also hurt the planters, who allowed more opportunities. Once cotton prices were back up, the planters used many tricks to re-assert themselves.