From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones
Because land had to be continually cleared to enlarge the productive proportion of the plantation, the normal agrarian harvest rhythms were replaced with a year-round work schedule. On Doro. the Charles Clark plantation, enslaved workers were only given six or seven Saturday afternoons off per year. A British travel writer for the Daily News reported in 1857 that most Delta slaves spent their lives “from the moment they are able to go afield in the picking season till they drop worn out in the grave in incessant labor, in all sorts of weather, at all season of the year without any other change or relaxation than is furnished by sickness…indebted solely to the forbearance of the good temper of the overseer for exemption from terrible physical suffering.”
This cruel system, however, paid handsome dividends. Emigration and the importation of enslaved people ballooned in the thirty years preceding the Civil War. In the Delta’s Washington Country, the total population in 1830 was 1,976, of whom 1,184 were slaves. A decade later, the slave population had increased by a factor of six, with a ratio of ten enslaved Africans to every white citizen. By 1850, this ratio would increase to 14.5 to 1, with the average white family in Washington County enslaving 81.7 people.
In 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War, the US Census, revealed that four Delta counties (Bolivar, Coahoma, Issaquena, and Tunica) were among the thirty-six wealthiest counties in the United States – wealth accounted for less by landholdings or production than by holdings of enslaved people. Even this remarkable wealth only hinted at what seemed to be the limitless profit possibilities of the region. As historian James C. Cobb notes in his landmark book, The Most Southern Place on Earth. “With only 10 percent of its land cleared in 1869, the Yazoo Delta was little more than a sparsely inhabited plantation frontier as the antebellum era drew to a close.”
The abduction and enslavement of millions of Africans was, like the killing and deportation of Indigenous people, rooted in the vision of European and Christian superiority captured in the Doctrine of Discovery. The brutal treatment of the two groups supported the same ends: the securing of land and the exploitation of its resources exclusively for people of European descent. Genocide and exile of Indigenous people were key to the former, and enslavement of Africans secured the later.
The leaders of the Confederacy saw their project as the culmination of the divine promise of Euro-Christian domination contained in the Doctrine of Discovery.