1799- Mississippi Session Laws, with some title variation and various state printers. Historically, European settlements in the area now comprising
the State of Mississippi were sparse all through the pre-Territorial era. Most of the settlement that did exist was concentrated in the Natchez
District, a rich cotton-farming area about 200 miles north of New Orleans framed on the west and north by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and in the
Biloxi District on the Gulf Coast. These districts were governed by four successive pre-territorial regimes. From 1682-1762 they were part of the French
Province of Louisiana. In 1762 France secretly ceded its Louisiana possessions west of the Mississippi River to Spain, and the following year, after its
defeat in the Seven Years War, it ceded its Louisiana possessions east of the Mississippi, including the Natchez and Biloxi districts, to Great
Britain. Britain divided its new Gulf possessions into two districts, East and West Florida. The Natchez and Biloxi districts fell into West Florida, and
from 1763-1783 received such governance as they got from a British Governor and General Assembly operating out of Pensacola. In 1783, under the terms
of the Treaty of Paris, British Florida was formally awarded to Spain. From 1783 to 1795 the two districts were governed from the capitol of the
Spanish Louisiana, although the U.S. disputed the terms of the Treaty of Paris, claiming the Natchez District. It was during this period that the district
began to grow commercially closer to the burgeoning United States via the famous Natchez Trace, the colonial trail that connected it to Nashville. By
1795, with bigger troubles elsewhere, Spain conceded the “Mississippi Question,” and abandoned the Natchez District to the U.S., which three years
later made it the core of the new Mississippi Territory, with its capitol at Natchez. The first Territorial legislature met in January 1799. At first the
Mississippi Territory contained a large portion of what is now Alabama, but did not include the Gulf Coast areas of present Alabama and Mississippi,
which were still held by Spain. In the next decade the southern areas were ceded to the U.S. by Spain and were incorporated into the Mississippi
Territory. As for the Alabama holdings, part of Mississippi’s statehood deal was that the overlarge Mississippi Territory would be split into roughly two
parts, one to become the State of Mississippi and the other to become the Alabama Territory. Formal statehood came on 10 December 1817, although the
first statehood legislature already had met in October of that year. (Documents that are part of the Early State Records collection were digitized from
a microfilm copy of titles originally held by the Library of Congress, Harvard University Library, Association of the Bar of the City of New York
Library, and Mississippi Department of Archives and History).
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