Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi River

This 1858 hand-colored map gives a detailed rendering of all the plantations along the lower Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana. As indicated by the color-coding shown at upper left, the plantations between New Orleans and Baton Rouge primarily cultivated sugarcane, while those between Baton Rouge and Natchez cultivated cotton. Engraved vignettes at the top and the bottom of the map show scenes along the river at Baton Rouge and New Orleans, as well as images of a cotton plantation and a grand, columned sugar-plantation house.

In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, nearly 350,000 enslaved people suffered forced migration from the Upper South, where tobacco farming was stagnating, to work in the booming cotton and sugar plantations of the Lower South.