Background
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, rich slave-owning planters rushed to the newly-owned fertile lands on the banks of the Mississippi River to build extravagant plantations. Sometime during the 1820s, a rich lawyer named Joseph Emory Davis was a prime example of this, as he found a soil-rich peninsula where he began new adventures as a cotton planter. Davis soon named his claim the “Hurricane Plantation”, but business boomed and he soon owned nearly all of the Peninsula, which he named as a whole Davis Bend. Although there are claims that Davis treated his slaves more favorably than most, he nonetheless was an owner of human beings and not a small number of them. In 1860, Davis reportedly owned 365 slaves, one of nine planters in the state who owned over 300. As he was one of the most wealthy people in the state due to the hard work…
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