Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1789–1840 by Mike Bunn and Clay Williams (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1789–1840 by Mike Bunn and Clay Williams
• Patrick Luck

Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1789–1840. By Mike Bunn and Clay Williams. Heritage of Mississippi Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Pp. xvi, 303. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4380-7.)

Mike Bunn and Clay Williams’s Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1789–1840 is the ninth volume in the Heritage of Mississippi Series, which is projected to include fifteen volumes covering the most important aspects of Mississippi’s history. In their preface, Bunn and Williams rightly bemoan that the period covered by their volume has often been ignored and, when discussed, has usually been briefly sketched “as the first several years of a decades-long antebellum story revolving around little more than slavery, secession, and Civil War” (p. xiii). Bunn and Williams’s book is a welcome (if flawed) contribution that goes some way to overcoming this historiographical neglect.

Old Southwest to Old South is divided into two parts, with the first “chronicl[ing] the story of Mississippi’s American settlement and governmental administration” and the second “detailing the ways most of Mississippi’s territorial and early statehood period residents actually lived their lives and how their efforts at community building laid the foundation for the development of [the] state” (p. xv). Bunn and Williams argue that “key themes that still resonate today can trace their beginnings from this time period,” including “troubled race relations,” “heavy reliance on certain agricultural pursuits,” and “persistent economic inequalities” (p. xiii). Overall, Bunn and Williams succeed in their goals, and Old Southwest to Old South is a detailed exploration of these decades of Mississippi’s history that will be essential reading for any scholar of the state. The book is particularly strong at showing how a settler-colonial society (a term not used in the book) was created and consolidated in Mississippi.

However, Bunn and Williams make a regrettable choice in how they frame this book that undermines its overall effectiveness. This book is predominantly a history of white male settlers. This perspective is apparent in an introduction that focuses on the “wildness” of a Mississippi that was both a “paradise” and full of “potential environmental troubles,” but does not mention Native Americans and mentions the enslaved only once (pp. 4, 6). In fact, the authors barely discuss women and Native Americans, and the enslaved are discussed [End Page 416] relatively briefly. They justify this decision by referring to a lack of sources for women and a desire not “to repeat too much information” found in other volumes of the series, including one already published on Native Americans and a forthcoming one on slavery (p. xvi).

This explanation is unsatisfactory as the book is framed as a history of Mississippi in a period that began with an overwhelming Native American majority and ended with a population that was majority enslaved. Bunn and Williams do recognize the importance of Indian removal and slavery to Mississippi’s history, but this recognition does not drive the book. For example, Indian removal and slavery are dealt with in a single combined chapter. Jarringly, the Choctaws’ and Chickasaws’ own Trails of Tears are described in a single paragraph. Similarly, the experience of the enslaved is only focused on for a few pages, and then in general terms that could apply to most slave societies in the United States during the 1800s. Beyond these examples, Native Americans and the enslaved vanish for long stretches of the book, and when they are present, it is typically in relationship to white settlers’ actions and goals.

Old Southwest to Old South is a useful, even essential, book that narrates a dynamic period in Mississippi history that laid the groundwork of the antebellum Deep South and perhaps the future of the South more broadly. However, it is unfortunate that the authors chose to focus most of their attention on how one group experienced and affected that dynamic period.

Patrick Luck Florida Polytechnic University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...