The lower Mississippi valley, as a distinct geopolitical region, is representative of the antebellum South. Arkansas and Tennessee represents the upper South and Louisiana and Mississippi the lower South. The region demonstrates much geographical diversity, but the main division is between the alluvial areas, where plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings predominate, and the uplands, which feature farming and small-scale slaveholding. The 1.16 million slaves of the region constitute more than a third of the Confederacy’s slave population. The slaveholders of the antebellum South are a distinct elite, especially in the lower Mississippi valley. The slave populations of the region also engender complex communities and a vibrant cultural life. Other than the South Carolina lowcountry and the Chesapeake, the lower Mississippi valley achieves the highest stage of historical development as a slave society within the antebellum South.

Chapter 2 leaves the rural rainforests of the northern Pacific lowlands for its two small urban frontier towns: Nóvita—the capital of Chocó before independence—and Quibdó—the capital of Chocó afterward—where the majority population of white slaveholders and mineowners lived alongside the entrepreneurial merchants from Jamaica, France, and Italy who began to settle in the Pacific lowlands after independence. Based on tax records, wills, travelogues, and other archival sources, this chapter offers a door-to-door geography of Quibdó after the Wars of Independence and explores the small-scale slaveholding central to its households. Despite slavery’s slow destruction under gradual emancipation rule, the local trade in slaves and Free Womb children paradoxically remained as active as ever in Chocó well into the 1830s and 1840s.