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Nitta Yuma, Deer Creek, Mississippi, 26 February 1854. Broadside, 18.5” x 11.875”, text in three columns below title. CONDITION: Very good, light toning and chipping along old folds, with losses to two letters.

An apparently unrecorded broadside printing of a fearmongering letter written from the storied Nitta Yuma plantation just a few months before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, defending slavery, the Southern spirit, and all Southern states from hostile takeover by a “black avalanche.”

Citing economic and population statistics—both Black and white—this letter develops a replacement theory avant-la-lettre, projecting growth in both sectors over the course of several generations in order to advocate for the spread of slavery as the only bulwark against the annihilation of Southern white society and, in turn, the wellbeing of the entire nation. Speculation about Mexican statehood (“assuming its annexation to the United States long before the expiration of the period named”) and the development of the new state of California (assuming the migration of “a sufficient number of blacks to colour its State Constitution frame it in the outset as they may”) bolster its arguments. Interspersed throughout are impassioned expressions of support for southern culture and dire—verging on hysterical—warnings addressed directly to both Free Soil advocates and fellow Southerners regarding and the north’s malicious, traitorous, and un-fraternal goals, including the potential take-over of the South by African Americans and “the extermination of the whites by the blacks, or inversion of the present relative position of the two races.” 

The author uses numbers from the 1850 census—multiplied by two every twenty-five or thirty years and spread across “Eastern Virginia, Eastern North Carolina, Eastern Arkansas, West Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, California, and Mexico”—to conjure the specter of “a black current” starting “down the Pacific, to meet the like colored stream flowing along the Gulf coast, at the Isthmus of Panama.” Proposing the amplified threat of a European alliance “against us,” the author asks, “what would probably be the result?” His answer: “To me it is evident that, stimulated by freesoil sympathy in the rear, and emboldened by the presence of material aid in front, a black avalanche would be loosened from its foundations, and the gallant, the noble hearted Southerner would instantly and forever disappear beneath the dark and bitter waters of the Dead Sea.” The result of this massive, phantasmagorical slave rebellion would be nothing short of the economic, social, and geopolitical disintegration of the United States:

For whose good could this event occur? The freesoil States would still have on hand the same enemies to them and their institutions, a new, anomalous, untried, bordering one, in possession of much of their Atlantic, and all of their Gulf sea board added thereto, their cotton, sugar, rice plantations, orange groves, their best market, kindred and friends, and many of the finest traits of their national character gone, with the attendant shame and remorse of having mainly caused it themselves. Criminations, recriminations and divisions would arise under this unforeseen and unpleasant condition of things. Keenly feeling the effects of their suicidal course, the States above the black line on the Mississippi river would require of the other to aid them in the recovery of their lost possessions, lost sources of wealth, lost commercial conveniences, and social pleasures, and their lost independent and commanding position geographically, commercially and politically, a refusal to comply with which demand would break the shorn freesoil republic into not less than four, and probably five divisions…Then, and not till then, sensible of their folly, the Mississippi Valley States, that is the free soil republic, seated between the Allegany and Rocky Mountains, with self-cursings, would swear the re-establishment of the old or a similar order of things—at all events, the outlets of the Mississippi river, but at what cost and character of achievement, and chances of recovery and retention, it will be their business to estimate and to know, not mine.

The broadside closes with the indication that more would follow (“To be Continued”), but we find no evidence of additional installments having been published.

Writing from the prominent Nitta Yuma plantation, the author of this letter was presumably a member of the Vick family, which owned it—probably Col. Henry William Vick (1795–1861), a.k.a. “King Cotton,” who developed the “One Hundred Seed” cotton variety, or, less likely, one of his sons, either George Vick or Henry Grey Vick, who, in 1859, was famously killed in a duel just days before his wedding. The plantation was established by Major Burwell Vick (one of the founders of Vicksburg) in the early 1800s, and is still held by Vick descendants. 

The likely addressee, Daniel Weisiger Adams (1821–1872), served as Mississippi state senator from 1852 to 1856, but spent many years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in New Orleans. When Louisiana seceded, Adams was appointed to the military board preparing the state for war. He was promoted to brigadier general by early 1862, was wounded three times and captured once over the course of the conflict, and surrendered to Union forces at Meridian Mississippi in May of 1865.

Not in OCLC.

A rare and remarkable broadside letter reflecting the sweeping racial, geopolitical, and cultural anxieties activating Southern white society in the decade leading up to the Civil War.

Item #9702

Price: $4,750.00