Davis Bend, Mississippi
   HOME
*





Davis Bend, Mississippi
Davis Bend, Mississippi (now known as Davis Island), was a peninsula named after planter Joseph Emory Davis, who owned most of the property. There he established the 5,000-acre Hurricane Plantation as a model slave community. Davis Bend was about 15 miles south of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and was surrounded by the Mississippi River on three sides. He gave his much younger brother Jefferson Davis the adjoining Brierfield Plantation. History Joseph Davis was influenced by the utopian socialist ideas of Robert Owen, whom he met in the 1820s during Owen's tour in the United States. When Davis established his Hurricane Plantation at Davis Bend, he worked to create a model cooperative slave community. He hoped to show that a higher functioning and profitable community could be achieved within slavery. He allowed a high degree of self-government for his 350 slaves, provided better nutrition and health and dental care, and created a communal environment. He worked closely with Benja ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Davis Island (Mississippi)
Davis Island is a large island located in the Mississippi River. It lies mostly in Warren County in the state of Mississippi but is also partly in Madison Parish, in the state of Louisiana. It is located about 20 miles southwest of Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA. The island is approximately in size depending on the level of the Mississippi River. It was formerly a peninsula known as Davis Bend, with an area of rich bottomlands, bounded on three sides by the Mississippi River.Brian Hamilton, "Davis Island: A Confederate Shrine, Submerged"
''Edge Effects'', 9 October 2014, University of Wisconsin-Madison, accessed 14 June 2015
Before the American Civil War, Joseph Davis ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Joseph Emory Davis
Joseph Emory Davis (10 December 1784 – 18 September 1870) was an American lawyer who became one of the wealthiest planters in Mississippi in the antebellum era; he owned thousands of acres of land and was among the nine men in Mississippi who owned more than 300 slaves. He was the elder brother (by 23 years) of Jefferson Davis and acted as his surrogate father for several years. The younger Davis became a politician, U.S. Senator, and later President of the Confederacy. In the 1820s, Joseph Davis developed the Hurricane Plantation at Davis Bend, Mississippi. Joseph Davis provided living conditions to his enslaved laborers that were marginally better than on neighboring plantations. Davis allowed enslaved persons marginal self-government and provided skills training and health care to protect his investment in human life. He left the plantations in 1862 during the American Civil War, but they continued to operate under Union direction, as well as to house black soldiers and ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Hurricane Plantation
Hurricane Plantation located near Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the home of Joseph Emory Davis (1784–1870), the oldest brother of Jefferson Davis. Located on a peninsula of the Mississippi River in Warren County, Mississippi, called Davis Bend after its owner, Hurricane Plantation at its peak in the antebellum era comprised more than with approximately of river frontage. Joseph Davis owned 346 enslaved people and had a personal worth of more than $600,000 in the 1860 U.S. Census, making him one of the wealthiest men in the state of Mississippi. The mansion at Hurricane was a three-story main house with two large semi-detached wings for entertaining, and a detached library. It contained indoor plumbing and an early form of air conditioning. There were also numerous outbuildings typical of a plantation of that scale. The residence was described in detail by Varina Davis (Jefferson Davis's second wife), in a memoir of her husband. Davis had served as surrogate father and ''de fac ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Slavery In The United States
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during early colonial days, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing. By the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. During and immediately ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Vicksburg, Mississippi
Vicksburg is a historic city in Warren County, Mississippi, United States. It is the county seat, and the population at the 2010 census was 23,856. Located on a high bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from Louisiana, Vicksburg was built by French colonists in 1719, and the outpost withstood an attack from the native Natchez people. It was incorporated as Vicksburg in 1825 after Methodist missionary Newitt Vick. During the American Civil War, it was a key Confederate river-port, and its July 1863 surrender to Ulysses S. Grant, along with the concurrent Battle of Gettysburg, marked the turning-point of the war. The city is home to three large installations of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which has often been involved in local flood control. Status Vicksburg is the only city in, and the county seat of, Warren County, Mississippi, United States. It is located northwest of New Orleans at the confluence of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it flows generally south for to the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains all or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces between the Rocky and Appalachian mountains. The main stem is entirely within the United States; the total drainage basin is , of which only about one percent is in Canada. The Mississippi ranks as the thirteenth-largest river by discharge in the world. The river either borders or passes through the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Native Americans have lived along the Mississippi River and its tributaries for thousands of years. Most were hunter-gathere ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Jefferson Davis
Jefferson F. Davis (June 3, 1808December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as the president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He represented Mississippi in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party before the American Civil War. He had previously served as the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857 under President Franklin Pierce. Davis, the youngest of ten children, was born in Fairview, Kentucky. He grew up in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, and also lived in Louisiana. His eldest brother Joseph Emory Davis secured the younger Davis's appointment to the United States Military Academy. After graduating, Jefferson Davis served six years as a lieutenant in the United States Army. He fought in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848) as the colonel of a volunteer regiment. Before the American Civil War, he operated in Mississippi a large cotton plantation which his brother Joseph had given ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Brierfield Plantation
Brierfield Plantation was a large forced-labor cotton farm built in 1847 in Davis Bend, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg and the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. History The use of the plantation, with more than 1,000 acres, was given to Jefferson Davis by his much older brother, Joseph E. Davis (1784-1870); it had previously been a part of Joseph Davis's much larger Hurricane Plantation, which it adjoined on a bend of the Mississippi River twenty miles from Vicksburg. With his brother's financial assistance and the forced labor of enslaved people, Jefferson Davis became a successful planter on the acreage following his brief first marriage to Sarah Knox Taylor (who died of malaria a few months after their wedding); after his second marriage to Varina Banks Howell in 1845, Davis erected a large comfortable frame house on the property that was home to himself, his wife, their children, as well as Davis's widowed sister and other relatives. Brierfield had very p ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Utopian Socialism
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements. As a term or label, ''utopian socialism'' is most often applied to, or used to define, those socialists who lived in the first quarter of the 19th century who were ascribed the label utopian by later socialists as a pejorative in order to imply naïveté and to dismiss their ideas as fanciful and unrealistic.''Newman, Micha ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Robert Owen
Robert Owen (; 14 May 1771 – 17 November 1858) was a Welsh people, Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer, and a founder of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. He strove to improve factory working conditions, promoted experimental socialistic communities, and sought a more collective approach to child rearing, including government control of education. He gained wealth in the early 1800s from a textile mill at New Lanark, Scotland. Having trained as a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire he worked in London before relocating aged 18 to Manchester and textile manufacturing. In 1824, he moved to America and put most of his fortune in an experimental socialistic community at New Harmony, Indiana, as a preliminary for his Utopian society. It lasted about two years. Other Owenite communities also failed, and in 1828 Owen returned to London, where he continued to champion the working class, lead in developing cooperatives and the trade union movement, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Ben Montgomery
Benjamin Thornton Montgomery (1819–1877) was an influential African-American inventor, landowner, and freedman in Mississippi. He was taught to read and write English, and became manager of supply and shipping for Joseph Emory Davis at Hurricane Plantation at Davis Bend. Early life Ben Montgomery was born into slavery in 1819 in Loudoun County, Virginia. In 1837, he was sold south, and purchased in Natchez, Mississippi, by Joseph Emory Davis. The planter's much younger brother, Jefferson Davis, later became the President of the Confederate States of America.Hermann, ''Reconstruction in Microcosm'' (1980), pg. 315. Montgomery escaped but was recaptured. Davis reportedly "inquired closely into the cause of his dissatisfaction", whereby the two men reached a "mutual understanding" about Montgomery's situation. Davis assigned Montgomery to run the general store of his plantation at Davis Bend.
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Isaiah Montgomery
Isaiah Thornton Montgomery (May 21, 1847 – March 5, 1924) was founder of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all-black community. A Republican, he was a delegate to the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention and served as mayor of Mound Bayou. He participated in the 1890 Mississippi constitutional convention as a delegate from Bolivar County and voted for the adoption of a state constitution that effectively disfranchised black voters for decades, using poll taxes and literacy tests to raise barriers to voter registration. Montgomery promoted an accommodationist position for African Americans. The I. T. Montgomery House in Mound Bayou is a National Landmark. Early life and education Born into slavery, Isaiah was the son of Ben Montgomery, a slave whose owner, Joseph Davis, promoted him to overseer. The younger Montgomery learned to read and write due to his father's influential position on the Davis Bend plantation. Davis wanted to establish a more positive working environme ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]