Monmouth: General Quitman's Kingdom

Monmouth was built in eighteen eighteen by a merchant named John Hankinson, one of hundreds of ambitious men who arrived in Natchez in the early nineteenth century hoping to turn land and labor into wealth. The Greek Revival mansion on its oak-shaded grounds passed through several hands before landing in eighteen twenty-six with the man who would define it: John Anthony Quitman.

Quitman was a New Yorker by birth, trained as a lawyer, who arrived in Natchez in eighteen twenty-one and married into the Natchez planter class with a speed that suggested both ambition and charm. His wife, Eliza Turner, came from one of the city's most prominent families. With the marriage came connections, and with the connections came land. By the eighteen forties Quitman was building a plantation empire across the Mississippi delta.

He was also making a military reputation. In the Mexican War of eighteen forty-six to eighteen forty-eight, Quitman commanded a division that stormed Chapultepec and marched into Mexico City. He was one of the first American officers to enter the capital, and the image of Quitman leading troops through the Plaza de la Constitución made him a national hero. He returned to Mississippi as the first popularly elected governor of the state.

The irony of Quitman's story is his geography. Born in New York, educated in the North, he became one of the most committed advocates of Southern secession in the antebellum period, convinced that Northern industrial power was strangling the slave economy on which he had built everything he owned. He died in eighteen fifty-eight before the war he had helped bring closer could arrive. When Union troops occupied Natchez, his daughters had to pledge loyalty to the Union to keep Monmouth from being burned.

The house has been restored and operates today as a historic inn, a monument to the contradictions of a city that was very good at producing them.