Named for war hero Andrew Jackson, Jackson, Mississippi, was founded in 1821 at the intersection of the Natchez Trace and the Pearl River. Jackson himself had come through the area twice, both times marching along the Trace while campaigning during the War of 1812. The city’s importance as a transportation hub only grew over time as the state’s railroad network converged there, turning Jackson into an ideal manufacturing center. The city’s relative geographic centrality made it an ideal location as the state capital.
As a result, a town named for a man who once declared “Our Union—It Must be Preserved” ironically became the site of Mississippi’s secession vote on January 9, 1861.
Mississippi’s capitol building, 1874, Scribner’s
Mississippi became America’s twentieth state on December 10, 1817. By December of 1822, the new state capitol was ready, and the legislature convened there for the first time on the 23rd, just two days before Christmas.
By 1861, Mississippi had become the largest cotton-producing state in the country, and Jackson, at the intersection of the Southern Railroad of Mississippi and the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad, became its hub. Cotton, said the state fathers, was “the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.” The increasing demand for cotton produced an increasing demand for slave labor to harvest it. According to the 1860 census, of the state’s 791,305 people, 354,674 were free and 436,631 were enslaved—55 percent. Jackson, by that time, had grown to a population of just under 3,200 people.
