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4
The Journal of Mississippi History
groves. Some of his orange trees had been producing for sixty years, he maintained, and still yielded a substantial revenue, bringing ten dollars a thousand at the New Orleans market.10
The principal crop on Claiborne?s plantation was long staple or sea island cotton. A correspondent for a New Orleans newspaper reported in June, 1858, after seeing Claiborne?s cotton:
We yesterday examined the sample of twenty-two bales Sea Island cotton, sold in this city a few days since. This cotton was grown upon the plantation of Colonel J. F. H. Claiborne and Major Andrew Jackson, on Pearl River, Hancock County, Mississippi, and was sold at the handsome price of 35, 40, and 44 cents, 16 bales bringing 40 cents per pound; the whole consignment of 22 bales netting to the enterprising planters something over $2250, after deducting freights, commissions, and all other charges.11
At the start of the Civil War, when Claiborne?s one hundred slaves produced an average of eight hundred pounds of seed cotton to the acre,12 he was out of debt and had an annual income of six thousand dollars.13
At ?Laurel Wood,? with more leisure than he had enjoyed at any prior period, Claiborne was able to devote his energies to scholarly and cultural pursuits. In view of his long experience in political arenas, his services in various elective and appointive offices, and the prominent role his ancestors had played in the development of the Old Southwest, it is not surprising that he exhibited a serious historical interest. In 1858 Claiborne was associated with Benjamin L. C. Wailes, Joseph B. Cobb, the author of Mississippi Scenes, and Benjamin W. Sanders, the state librarian, in the
10	J. F. H. Claiborne, ?The Pine District of Mississippi,? Jackson Weekly Clarion, December 27, 1876.
11	New Orleans Picayune, June 6, 1858.
12	Claiborne, ?The Pine District of Mississippi,? Jackson Weekly Clarion, December 27, 1876.
13	Cain (ed.), ?Letter from J. F. H. Claiborne to Richard Abbey,? Journal of Mississippi History, VI, 49.