1798 - Journals of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the Territory/State of Mississippi, which met at Natchez and Jackson
during various sessions. 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. 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
1917 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. (Documents which were
part of the Early State Records collection were digitized from a microfilm copy of titles originally held by the Library of Congress, Mississippi
Department of Archives and History, Mississippi State Library, Duke University Library, New York Public Library, Massachusetts State Library, and other
sources).
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