Jun 12 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2708 -

Sale 2708 - Lot 133

Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
(MISSISSIPPI.) Citizens' petition to an early county court regarding riotous behavior on the Sabbath, civil liberties, and slavery. 5 manuscript pages, 12½ x 8 inches, on 2 sheets, early transcript signed by original foreman and copyist Cato West; moderate dampstaining. With worn docketing strip reading "Presentments of Grand Juries, Natches." Pickering County, MS, 17 June 1799
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A cry for help in "this remote and truely deplorable corner of the United States."

This petition evokes the lawless and primitive condition of the Mississippi Territory, which was founded in 1798 as a frontier settlement at the center of border disputes with Spain. Pickering County was an original county in the Territory extending to the banks of the Mississippi River. It covered the present cities of Vicksburg and Jackson, and has since been subdivided.

This petition begins by expressing gratitude that "judiciary courts similar to those under . . . our ancestors for ages have fought and conquered . . . are at length opened in this remote and truely deplorable corner of the United States." It then follows with an enumeration of eight "evils and grievances which are about to oppress us." Because of a non-representative territorial government, "our population is rapidly decreasing by our inhabitants moving off to the Spanish dominions." The governor and judges were making new laws and imposing new taxes without consulting with the people.

They also oppose the appointment to important posts of "persons well known to be hackneyed in Spanish duplicity and drudgery, whose former conduct is prophetic of their future, and who only wish and wait for an opportunity of aggrandizing themselves on the ruins of their country."

Slavery was another point of contention: "We present as a grievance that the executive of this government should deny to citizens who were permanent residents in this territory, previous to running the boundary line between the United States and Spain, the privilege of removing their slaves from the Spanish dominions."

They also object "that any citizen should be confined as a criminal, without an oath being preferred against him . . . and when released not even informed upon what account he was confined," and that "merchants should keep their shops open to carry on a traffick of their goods on Sundays, also that tavern keepers should be allowed to keep open houses for drinking, rioting and gaming on the above days."

Cato West, who served as the foreman of this group of complainants and created this transcript, later served as governor of Mississippi. The petition was originally signed by 14 others, whose names appear here in transcript.

The original (with slight textual differences) was held by the Massachusetts Historical Society in their Pickering Papers, when it was published in 1937 in "The Territorial Papers of the United States," pages V:66-69.




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