Thirty-two U.S. territories ultimately became states. All of them had to struggle for statehood. Mississippi met objections from Congress mostly on the basis of its size. This concern was solved when the Mississippi Territory was divided into the state of Mississippi and the territory of Alabama. However, there were plenty of interior controversies about statehood.
It wasn’t that Mississippi didn’t want to be a state. They just weren’t sure when they would be ready.
Ready for statehood?
When the Mississippi Territory began trying to be admitted as a state, it had fewer than the 60,000 people the Northwest Ordinance made traditional for statehood. Since population size is not a requirement in the U.S. Constitution, several states did slip in when their populations were too small, but Mississippians were worried that they wouldn’t have a large enough population to support and govern themselves.
Mississippians also worried that they couldn’t defend themselves. Being attacked by a foreign country was not only possible in a territory in those days, but Mississippi had some good reasons to worry about attacks. France, England, Spain and the state of Georgia had all issued land grants in the territory. Since all three countries and the state were sovereign, they had the legal right to do so, and they didn’t get together and work out a cooperative plan. Instead, they just issued their grants during the times when they were in power — and the grants overlapped.
Thus, a French landowner might have a perfectly legal title to a piece of land of which part also was included in a perfectly legal title given to a Spanish landowner. The Governor of Mississippi was responsible for sorting this out. As long as Mississippi was a territory with a federally-appointed governor, it wasn’t the territory’s problem. As a state, Mississippi would have an elected governor of its own, and the legal issues were daunting.
Mississippi was also having clashes with the Choctaw and Chickasaw people, who had lived there since before any of the land grants were made. Obviously, the sovereign state and countries had not considered their prior claims to the land, either. What’s more, the Choctaw and Chickasaw often were at war against each other. Not only were there the common inter-tribal skirmishes, but the Choctaw were allied with the French and the Chickasaw with the British. The Creek, who also lived in the region, had a civil war of their own going on.
Without federal support, the Americans living in Mississippi were justifiably frightened of getting involved in any of these conflicts. As a territory, they knew the federal government was responsible for them, but as a state they would be in a different position. At that time, the federal system was still being worked out. It was already clear that both the states and the country as a whole were sovereign entities, and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution already laid out the powers of states, but it wasn’t completely clear that the federal government would provide defense for the states.
Fighting factions
To top it all off, there were bitterly divided factions within Mississippi. Their quarrels had little to do with statehood, but they were angry enough that it was hard for everyone to pull together to work for statehood. Distracted by these rivalries, leaders in Mississippi weren’t able to gain admission until some of the most prominent individuals involved retired or died.
At the same time, there were internal disagreements about whether the Mississippi Territory should be one state or two, a question which was settled by Congress before Mississippi was admitted. Mississippi was also involved in the national strife over slavery.
As frontier factionalism settled down, a great wave of migration brought far more than 60,000 people into the territory, and the United States strengthened its position in the New World, Mississippi decided it was ready for the rights and responsibilities of statehood and was admitted in 1817.
