Little Dixie is a historic 13- to 17-county region along the Missouri River in central Missouri, United States. Its early Anglo-American settlers were largely migrants from the hemp and tobacco districts of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. They brought enslaved African Americans with them or purchased them as workers in the region. Because Southerners settled there first, the pre-Civil War culture of the region was similar to that of the Upper South. The area was also known as Boonslick country.
A 1948 article in the Missouri Historical Review defined the antebellum "Little Dixie" region as a 13-county area between the Mississippi River north of Saint Louis to Missouri River counties in the central part of the state (Audrain, Boone, Callaway, Chariton, Howard, Lincoln, Pike, Marion, Monroe, Ralls, Randolph, Saline, and Shelby counties).
When the Southerners migrated to Missouri, they brought their cultural, social, agricultural, architectural, political and economic practices, including slavery. Overall, Missouri's slave population represented 10 percent of the state's population in the 1860 U.S. Census. But in Little Dixie, county and township slave populations ranged from 20 to 50 percent by 1860, with the highest percentages for the counties developed for large plantations along the Missouri river. New Madrid County, along the Mississippi River south of St. Louis, also had a high percentage of African slaves, but was not considered part of the region.
Definition
While definitions of the counties included in Little Dixie vary, in 1860 seven counties were developed primarily for plantations, and their populations consisted of 25 percent or more enslaved African Americans: Callaway Boone Howard County Saline County Chariton County Lafayette County Clay County. The only other county of the state where the enslaved population was as high in 1860 was New Madrid in the Bootheel, a region in the southern part of the state along the Mississippi River that was devoted to cotton plantations.
The Missouri Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans defines the "heart" of Little Dixie as having consisted of the following counties: Audrain Boone Callaway Howard Monroe Randolph
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.
In Howard County, developed along the river for plantations, planters named their large estates in the Southern style, such as Greenwood, Redstone, Oakwood and Sylvan Villa. On these plantations, slave populations ranged between 15 and 70 people; they cultivated acreage of 500 acres (2 km2) to 2000 acres (8 km2), or more.
Postwar history
After the Civil War, the slaves were emancipated. The Reconstruction-era legislature established free public education for all citizens for the first time. While whites insisted that schools be segregated, the legislature required that all townships with 20 or more black children of student age had to establish schools. By 1870, of the former slave states, Missouri had the "largest proportion of schools for negro children." Black communities rapidly established independent churches and schools to express their own culture and create a sphere outside white supervision.
In Little Dixie in the early 20th century, of the counties with the largest black populations,
Callaway County at one time had twenty-eight African American schools; Boone, eighteen; Howard, sixteen; Cooper, twenty-six; Chariton, fourteen; Lafayette, twenty; Saline, eighteen. Although the number of schools decreased as rural black communities dissolved with the onslaught of the Depression and the economic opportunity of the New Deal, in 1933 these same counties still had the highest number of black schools outside of St. Louis and the Bootheel.