The
Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the
U.S. state of
Mississippi which lies between the
Mississippi and
Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" ("Southern" in the sense of "characteristic of its region, the
American South"), because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It is two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, encompassing circa 4,415,000 acres, or, some 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain. Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest
cotton-growing areas in the nation before the
American Civil War (1861-1865). The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy
planters dependent on the labor on
black slaves, who comprised the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.