Natchez: The City That Cotton Built

Natchez stands at the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace, perched on bluffs above the Mississippi River, and its history is as layered as the geology beneath it. The French built Fort Rosalie here in seventeen sixteen, trading and fighting with the Natchez Indians on the creek bottoms below. Britain took it after seventeen sixty-three. Spain held it after seventeen seventy-nine. The United States absorbed it into the Mississippi Territory in seventeen ninety-eight, and Natchez became the first capital of the new state of Mississippi in eighteen seventeen.

By then a transformation was already under way. The cotton gin had arrived in the seventeen nineties. The river made Natchez one of the great export ports of the South. And the forced labor that made it all possible flowed through a market called the Forks of the Road, one of the largest domestic slave trading depots in the United States, where men, women, and children were sold publicly, stripped, examined, and priced by the hundreds of thousands.

The wealth that system generated was staggering and specific. By the eighteen fifties, Natchez had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States. Their money built the mansions you see here: more antebellum homes than anywhere else in America, more than a thousand structures on the National Register of Historic Places. The city survived the Civil War largely intact, partly because Grant's forces faced no significant resistance here and partly because Natchez had a faction of Unionists influential enough to negotiate a quiet occupation.

Walking Natchez today means holding two histories at once. The columns and porticoes were built by enslaved people whose names are mostly lost. The city is still working out what to do with that fact, and the conversation is more honest here than in many Southern towns. The Trace that ends here carried boatmen south and the memory of a nation north.