History of Mississippi - Gilded Age: 1877-1900

Gilded Age: 1877-1900

Not much was gold plated in Mississippi, but there was steady economic and social progress, despite the low prices for cotton. Politically the state was controlled by the conservative whites, called "Bourbons" by their critics. The bourbons represented the planters, landowners and merchants, and used coercion and cash to control enough black votes to control the Democratic party conventions, and thus state government.

The state remained rural, but the railroad system, which had been destroyed in the war, was rebuilt; a few more towns appeared, as well as small-scale industry. Everyone was now growing cotton, not just the rich Delta lands worked by black sharecroppers but also the poorer lands in other districts where poor whites operated their farms. The "crop-lien system involved local merchants who lent money for food and supplies all year, and then split the cotton crop to pay the debts and perhaps leave a little cash left over for the farmer—or often leave him further in debt to the merchants.

In 1878 the worst yellow fever epidemic Mississippi had seen ravaged the state. The disease, sometimes known as 'Yellow Jack,' and 'Bronze John,' devastated Mississippi socially and economically. Entire families were wiped out while others fled their homes in panic for the presumed safety of other parts of the state. Quarantine regulations, passed to prevent the spread of the disease, brought trade to a stop. Some local economies never recovered. Beechland, near Vicksburg, became a ghost town because of the epidemic. By the end of the year, 3,227 people had died from the disease.

The farmers resented the Bourbon control of politics and the credit lein system that seemed to keep them forever in debts. Efforts to fight the system politically went nowhere. The Populist movement failed to attract the large following in Mississippi that it did in Alabama, Georgia and other Southern states. Mississippi did put forward a few articulate Populist spokesmen, such as newspaper editor Frank Burkitt, but poor farmers, white and black, refused to follow the leadership of the Farmers' Alliance. Few farmers were willing to support the subtreasury plan, the Alliance plan of aiding farmers by providing low-cost federal loans secured by crops. The Democratic Party machine, the increasing activism of the National Grange, and fear of black political domination also contributed to the failure of Mississippi populism. By the birth of the People's Party in 1892, Mississippi populism was too weak to play a major role.

Whitecapping, a violent, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro dirt farmer movement, arose in the Piney Woods region of southern Mississippi in response to low prices, rising costs, and increasing tenancy brought about by the crop lien system. Whitecaps resented Negro tenancy on lands acquired by merchants –some of them Jewish—through foreclosures. Whitecap Clubs, resembling fraternal and military organizations, attempted to intimidate Negro laborers and landowners, and to prevent mercantile land acquisition. Whitecaps came from the rural poor; their leaders from a higher social strata.