The beautiful site of Jackson, along the bluffs above the Pearl River, was selected as a perfect location for commerce by a young French Canadian trader. Although Louis LeFleur succeeded in his aim and set up a trading post after his exploratory voyage up the Pearl from the Gulf of Mexico, the city has, throughout its existence, been a center of government rather than business.

It is impossible to separate the town's history from its role as state capital; it was designated such as soon as the state's boundaries had expanded sufficiently, by the ceding of Native American lands, to make Jackson the state's geographical center. The first session of the legislature held in the town convened in January of 1822. By then the city had already been named for Andrew Jackson, idol of Mississippi, and laid out in a checkerboard pattern in accordance with Thomas Jefferson's recommendation to Governor Claiborne 17 years earlier. Evidence still remains of the original plan, which reserved every other square as a park or green.

There were attempts in 1829 to move the capital to Clinton and in the following year to Port Gibson, but these were averted by a legislative act of 1832 that named Jackson as the capital until 1850--by which time it had a permanent stature. Andrew Jackson addressed the legislature in what is now the Old Capitol in 1840, the year after its completion, and a Mississippi Convention assembled to consider Henry Clay's last compromise in 1850. The building was the scene of the Secession Convention in January 1861.

Jackson was the junction of two great railroads by the time of the Civil War; it played an important role as Confederate capital of Mississippi until it was besieged in 1863, when the capital was removed and the city destroyed. All that was recorded in Jackson of the state's turbulent politics and government went up in smoke when General Sherman's army reduced the city to ashes, bringing it the ironic nickname, "Chimneyville."

The so-called "Black and Tan" convention that met at Jackson in January 1868, was the first political organization in Mississippi with black representation. It framed a constitution under which Mississippi lived for 22 years, giving blacks the franchise and enabling a few to attain high political office. In the same year, the governor was ejected from his office, and the carpetbaggers reigned until 1876. Jefferson Davis made his last public appearance in Jackson in 1884.

With the coming of the 20th century and half a dozen railroads connecting Jackson with the whole South, the population doubled within five years. Further growth came with the discovery of natural gas fields in 1930. The Ross Barnett Reservoir, covering 31,000 acres in central Mississippi, created tourist and recreational attractions as well as residential and industrial sites in the greater Jackson area.