1798- Journals of the Legislative Council/Senate of the General Assembly of the Territory/State of Mississippi: Natchez & Jackson, under various
titles and with various state printers. Apart from their Native American inhabitants, parts of present-day Mississippi were successively ruled by the
Spanish, the French and the British during the more than two centuries between first contact by Hernando de Soto in 1540 up to the American Revolution.
England ceded its claims to the U.S. after the Revolution, and Spain relinquished its claims in 1798 and 1810. The Mississippi Territory was first
organized by Congress in 1798, but was subsequently expanded to include additional territory that had been in dispute between the United States and
Spain. Initially the Mississippi Territory also included a large eastern portion, which later became the Territory and State of Alabama. The whole of the
massive and sparsely settled Mississippi Territory was governed from Natchez by a governor appointed under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of
1787. He was assisted by an appointed House of Representatives and a appointive Legislative Council. The territorial years were unhappy ones for the
easterners, who were isolated from the territorial government in Natchez and consistently underrepresented in its legislature. After two decades the
conflicting claims to parts of the larger territory by Georgia had been settled with monetary payments and those of the Native Americans by war. The only
question remaining for Congress was whether to admit the whole of the vast Mississippi Territory as one large state, as the westerners wanted, or as
two entities, with Alabama being separate, as desired by the easterners. Congress went with the second option. In 1817 Mississippi was made a state,
and Alabama was severed off as the Alabama Territory. For the first five years the capital of Mississippi was maintained at Natchez. But starting in
1822 the legislature began meeting in the more centrally located present capital, Jackson. The following sessions are not found in this collection:
September 1800-May?, 1804; July, 1805, December 1807; September 15-19, 1808; February 1809; November 6-?, 1809; November 17-?, 1810; November 2-December
18, 1811; December 6-January 22, 1813; November 7-December 27, 1814, (Documents that are part of the Early State Records collection were digitized from
a microfilm copy of titles originally held by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Mississippi State Library, the Library of
Congress, Duke University Library, and others).
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