The census of 1850 furnished the first opportunity to ascertain the origin of the population. The main immigration naturally was from other Southern States which contributed 145,000 against 5000 from the Northern States. In the same year 18,000 natives of Mississippi were residing in other Southern States, principally in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee.
At the census ten years later the Mississippi natives, then located in other Southern States, had almost doubled in number. The enumeration gives an interesting picture of the way in which population was flowing backward and forward between adjoining States at that time as it has in almost every other period in American history.
Since the population of Mississippi before the Civil War was almost identical in composition with the population of the other Mississippi Valley slave States, most of which owed their inhabitants originally to Virginia and subsequently to the States which Virginia had colonized, it was not surprising that these people found it easy to move from one part of this region to another. Of nearly 800,000 population at the outbreak of the Civil War, the foreign-born, still mainly Irish, constituted only one in a hundred. But nearly half of the population of the State was colored, and thus no element of racial strength. In this respect Mississippi's record was surpassed only by Georgia and South Carolina. This latter State was the only one in which Negroes actually outnumbered Whites at that time. Other Southern States later reached the same unenviable situation, and it continued in South Carolina until after the shift of Negro population which followed the World War.
Louisiana at the time of the Purchase in 1803 presented among its 50,000 residents a more varied group than could be found in any other American State. The foundation of this population was French, the Spanish element never having been important. These French seem to have represented a much more heterogeneous lot than did the early French-Canadians. One colonization scheme after another had been launched in Paris, and settlers had been recruited by all sorts of means, many of them of more than doubtful merit.
Here, however, as in other colonies, it must be remembered that the final population represented not those who arrived, but those who both survived and left posterity. This fact has too often been disregarded in the accounts of the origins of the American population. If France shipped prostitutes to New Orleans to provide wives for its soldiers, nevertheless this is now of importance only in so far as such persons left descendants. In one case, of which the details exist, forty-four girls were sent out from France in 1722. They all married, but only one left offspring.
Another element in the population was the Acadian refugees, who, uprooted by the New England militia in 1758, were driven to almost every part of the colonies. Some made their way to Louisiana, as Longfellow has described, though drawing a very erroneous picture, in Evangeline. Others were scattered through Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, in fact on almost every part of the Atlantic coast. The total number of persons expelled from Nova Scotia at this time probably did not exceed 6000, and many of these certainly died from hardships. In any case only a minority was directed to Louisiana, so that the original settlement of Acadians must represent a very small part of the population. The so-called "Cajan" population of some of the southern parishes of Louisiana is, at the present time, largely of other origins, chiefly Negro.
Another group of French refugees came from Haiti by way of Cuba after 1800, when the Negro uprising there drove out the Whites. Many of these were persons of good quality but as many as could do so went elsewhere after peace returned.
Still another source of population was the notorious Mississippi Bubble sponsored by the Scotchman John Law about 1717. This was the period at which the Germans from the Palatine and adjacent regions were emigrating in large numbers, as has been previously set forth in detail, and 10,000 or more of them were persuaded to go to Louisiana. According to accepted accounts, not more than 2000 of these Alpines actually arrived, and when the bubble burst, they settled along the Mississippi above Baton Rouge in a region which is still known as the German Coast.
An ill-natured English traveller, John Davis, visiting Louisiana in the year before the Purchase of 1803, has left the following picture of these two elements as they appeared to him: