Black Slave Family’s Moral Situation in Mississippi during the Civil War

Abstract

The black family, while it had no legal existence in slavery, was in actuality one of the most important survival mechanisms for the slave.¹ Perhaps it was with this awareness that Elizabeth Warrenton Wells and James Wells Sr.² chose to marry.³ By the time the Civil War started, “the white population in 1860 was in the minority”⁴ and “Mississippi’s social, economic, and political institutions were hopelessly entangled in the web of slavery. An increasing dependence on staple agriculture created a slave-based cotton culture that affected all of the state’s white residents to one degree or another.”⁵ When Ida B. Wells, the oldest⁶ of Elizabeth and James Wells’s eight children, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862 the nation was in the second year of a civil war. At the time of Wells’s birth, “Holly Springs was one of Mississippi’s most vibrant towns.”⁷ But within three months after her birth, in “October 1862, General John C. Pemberton⁸ ordered the army to evacuate Holly Springs and the Confederates moved south through Oxford and Water Valley to Grenada. As planned, Ulysses S. Grant⁹ also moved south in pursuit. He occupied Holly Springs and there established a major supply depot designed to fuel his move into central Mississippi.”¹⁰ Within approximately five months of Wells’s birth, in December 1862, the Southerners drove the federal cavalry away and afterwards Grant halted his advance to redeploy some of his men.