Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · September 17, 1867

The census of Mississippi was taken last year, and a comparison of the population with that of 1860 exhibits the desolation caused by the war in a very striking manner. In 1860 the total population was 801,308—whites 353,899, blacks 447,404. In 1866 the whole population was 724,718—whites 343,460, blacks 381,258. The absolute decrease in six years was 76,585, the whites losing 10,437, the blacks 66,143. But at the rates of increase before the war the population should have been 854,000 in 1866, and the real loss by the war was 230,000, of which the whites lost 52,000, the blacks 78,000. The excessive loss of the negroes is accounted for by the fact that they fled from the interior to the river towns during the war, where they herded together and rotted of disease by the thousand. This was the case elsewhere in the South, but nowhere else to so shocking an extent as in Mississippi.