Little Dixie (Missouri)

Little Dixie is a 13- to 17-county region of mid-to-upper-mid Missouri along the Missouri River, settled at first primarily by migrants from the hemp and tobacco districts of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. Because Southerners settled there first, the pre-Civil War culture was similar to that of the Upper South. The area was also known as Boonslick country.

When the Southerners migrated to Missouri, they brought their cultural, social, agricultural, architectural, political and economic practices, including slavery. On average Missouri’s slave population was only 10 percent, but in Little Dixie, county and township slave populations ranged from 20 to 50 percent by 1860, with the highest percentages for counties that had large plantations along the Missouri river. New Madrid County along the Mississippi River also had a high percentage of African slaves, as cotton was cultivated on large plantations in this lowland area.

While definitions of the counties included in Little Dixie vary, in 1860 the following seven counties were developed for plantations and their populations had 25 percent or more of enslaved African Americans:

The only other county of the state where the enslaved population was as high in 1860 was New Madrid in the Bootheel, a region devoted to cotton plantations in the floodplains along the Mississippi River.

According to the Missouri Division - Sons of Confederate Veterans, the “heart” of Little Dixie was made up of the following counties:

The major cash crop was hemp. In Lafayette County, locals declared hemp as king and dedicated all agricultural production to it, while foregoing necessary food production. In addition, planters in "Outer Little Dixie" counties, such as Platte, Howard, Chariton and Ralls, grew millions of pounds of tobacco on large plantations with 20 or more slaves. Some farmers and planters grew cotton and sent their surplus down the Missouri River to St. Louis, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Cotton was exported to Britain, or shipped north to textile mills in New York and New England.

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Wikipedia