The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

Virginia politicians began seriously contemplating freeing enslaved people to get them off the plantation payrolls. Then the Yazoo lands opened at the moment the cotton gin was invented. These two events directly caused a doubling then tripling of the enslaved population of the United States. A system that had briefly looked like part of an old economic order suddenly became the foundation for the entire global economy. Had the Yazoo lands not been sold to speculators, who formed them into enormous plantations that were financed from London and New York—as opposed to the small forty-acre farms that would have likely populated the South had the Yazoo sale not been validated—there never would have been a King Cotton. A train of humanity stretched down the muddy and winding southeastern roads. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were “sold down the river” from the areas where rice, sugar, and tobacco couldn’t promise the same kind of wealth. They came chained and manacled, on what historian Ira Berlin has called “the second middle passage.”