| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835. By David J. Libby. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. xviii, 163 pp. $40.00, ISBN 1-57806-599-2.)

David J. Libby's study of slavery in Mississippi is driven by an admirable determination to capture the dynamic character of its evolution during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By focusing on the colonial and early national periods, he is able to show the various shapes that slavery took in what became the state of Mississippi before crystallizing into the antebellum institution familiar to general readers of American history. Libby reminds us "that things have not always been the way they are remembered, that the past is never static, and that there is always the possibility of change" (p. xvii). The first two chapters trace the formation of plantation society at Natchez, from which slavery spread to other areas. Population and production grew rapidly under Spanish colonial administration, as slave owners, mostly from Anglo-America, and slaves from various parts of the Atlantic world reached the Mississippi Valley. The expansion of slavery across the cotton frontier is covered in the remaining four chapters, but here the author imposes upon the rise of this slave society a problematic rhythm that weakens the overall effort to explain change in Mississippi.

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