Claiborne County, Mississippi: History
The county had been settled by French, Spanish, and English colonists, and American pioneers as part of the Natchez District; organized in 1802, it was the fourth county in the Mississippi Territory. European-American settlers did not develop the area for cotton plantations until after Indian Removal in the 1830s, at which time they brought in numerous slaves through the domestic slave trade. In total, this transported one million enslaved African Americans from the Upper South to the Deep South, disrupting numerous families. Using the enslaved workers, planters developed long plantations that had narrow fronts on the rivers: the Mississippi to the west and the Big Black River to the north, which were the transportation byways. As in other parts of the Delta, the bottomlands areas further from the river remained largely frontier and undeveloped until after the American Civil War. Well before the Civil War, the county had a majority-black population.
Grand Gulf, a port on the Mississippi River, shipped thousands of bales of cotton annually before the Civil War. It received cotton shipped by railroad from Port Gibson and three surrounding counties. The trading town became cut off from the river by its changing course and shifting to the west. Grand Gulf had 1,000 to 1500 residents about 1858; by the end of the century, it had 150 and became a ghost town. Businesses in the county seat of Port Gibson, which served the area, included a cotton gin and a cottonseed oil mill (which continued into the 20th century.) It has also been a retail center of trade.
After the Reconstruction era, white Democrats regained power in the state legislature by the mid-1870s; paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts suppressed black voting through violence and fraud in many parts of the state. These groups acted as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." …