Natchez, Mississippi

“ The city has four public parks, three on the river front, and one, Memorial Park, in honour of Confederate dead, in the heart of the city. On a neighbouring bluff is a national cemetery. Just outside the city limits, at Gloster, the former estate of Winthrop Sargent, first governor of the Territory of Mississippi, are the graves of Sargent and S. S. Prentiss, who lived in Natchez for some years. In and near the city are many handsome old residences typical of ante-bellum Natchez, among them being: Monmouth, General Quitman's estate ”

“ Forty-two miles from Natchez is Port Gibson, one of the most flourishing and beautiful towns in the south. It is only second to Natchez in the beauty of its location, the regularity of its streets, the neatness of its dwellings, and the number and excellence of its public buildings. It is but seven miles by land from the Mississippi, with which it communicates by a stream, called Bayou Pierre, navigable for keel and flat boats, and, in high floods, for steamboats, quite to the village. It is very healthy, and has seldom been visited by epidemics. It contains about one thousand souls. ”

“ Father Charlevoix, who visited Natchez in 1721, saw no evidences of civilization. Their villages consisted of a few cabins, or rather ovens, without windows and roofed with matting. The house of the Sun was larger, plastered with mud, and a narrow bench for a seat and bed. No other furniture in the mansion of this grand dignitary, who has been described by imaginative writers as the peer of Montezuma!"
J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi, volume 1, chapter 4.
In 1729, the Natchez, maddened by insolent oppressions, planned and executed a general massacre of the French within their territory. ”

“ The territorial schedule comprised a general list of ratable objects with fixed valuations. Land was divided into six classes, each class having three qualities. The bases of classification were proximity to the city of Natchez and distance from the Mississippi, Chickasawhay and Tombigbee Rivers. Thus, class number one contained all lands lying within eight miles of the city of Natchez, the first quality of which was rated at $12 per acre ”

“ This is further evidenced by the great number of private burying grounds scattered throughout the county adjacent to Natchez and Washington, in which are found tombs with inscriptions often a century old, and names without a living representative here.
But if slavery produced decadence in one way, it produced growth in another. Adams county, and especially the suburbs of the city of Natchez, became the home of wealthy families, owning broad acres, not only in this but in many other counties, and in the neighboring State of Louisiana. ”

“ Before the “Belle of Natchez” has reached fifty miles from the Red River’s mouth, Luis Dupré and Jessie Armstrong have mutually confessed affection, clasped hands, let lips meet, and tongues swear, never more to live asunder. That journey commenced upon the Mississippi is to continue throughout life.
In their case, there is no fear of aught arising to hinder the consummation of their hopes; no stern parent to stand in the way of their life’s happiness. ”

“ Famous Natchez-under-the-hill has not changed notably in twenty years; in outward aspect—judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession of foreign tourists—it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby. It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times—plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days. But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has always been attractive. ”

“ There thus arose a conflict of claims between Georgia and the United States, which was finally adjusted and Mississippi Territory organized by Act of Congress, approved April 7th, 1798.
Natchez was made the first territorial capital, and Winthrop Sargent was appointed the first territorial governor. Sargent, by proclamation, on April 2d, 1799, formed the Natchez District into the two counties of Adams and Pickering,—the latter name being afterwards changed to Jefferson.
Under the new regime, population and wealth increased with amazing rapidity. ”

“ After the upheaval, or during it, the Mississippi cut through the old fluviatile formation of which its bluffs are now formed, just as the Rhine has in many parts of its valley excavated a passage through the ancient loess. If I was right in calculating that the present delta of the Mississippi must have required many tens of thousands of years for its growth, and if the claims of the Natchez man to have co-existed with the mastodon are admitted, it would follow that North America was peopled by the human race many tens of thousands of years before our time. ”

“ At noon we overtook a party of boatmen from the Ohio,—tall men they were, with beards, and dark and dirty as Indians,—and we kept company with them through the country of the Chickasaws and the Choctaws until we came to a high bluff, and saw the Mississippi before us, brown and full and marked with drifting trees, and up the river the white houses of Natchez. There we camped until we made out the flat-boat,—General Wilkinson's boat, all laden with tobacco and flour and bacon, and just a few Kentucks with muskets,—that the Spaniards at Natchez had been fools enough to let pass! ”

“ I will now tell you of a colored person who visits this State, whose husband lives in Mississippi, and they figure largely at the North, and when this person enters a store in Natchez or New Orleans, every clerk rushes to wait on her, on account of the influence of the man she lives with. She has two accomplished daughters, whom she occasionally brings to spend the summer in our State, and spends the winter down South. Her cruelty to her slaves was such, although once a slave herself, she was not permitted to stay in Natchez and she had to make her head-quarters in New Orleans. ”

“ It was one of the laws established in the beginning of the reign of the Great Sun, that his posterity should not marry inter se, but only with the common people of the nation. This custom was expelling the pure blood of royalty more and more every generation, and long after the arrival of the Natchez upon the Mississippi, the great and little suns were apparently of the pure blood of the red man. Their traditions, however, preserved the history of every cross, and when Lasalle found these at Natchez and the White Apple village, nearly every one could boast of relationship to the Great Sun. ”

“ I found that Natchez was full of the most gloomy rumours. Another Yankee raid seemed to have been made into the interior of Mississippi, more railroad is reported to be destroyed, and great doubts were expressed whether I should be able to get into Vicksburg at all.
However, as I found some other people as determined to proceed as myself, we hired a carriage for $100 to drive to Brookhaven, which is the nearest point on the railroad, and is distant from Natchez 66 miles. ”

“ FOOTNOTES
[1] Somewhere about the year 1842, the writer of the foregoing address was narrating the substance of it at the White Sulphur Springs of Virginia. Among his hearers was Mr. Samuel Davis, of Philadelphia, but formerly of Natchez, Mississippi, who supplemented the story with the following anecdote. He was standing on the wharf at Natchez, one of a crowd, watching the approach of the New Orleans on her first voyage. There was a rise in the river at the time ”

“ He was arrested in January, 1807, near the mouth of Coles creek, some twenty miles above Natchez, brought to Washington, and released on bond (which he broke) , with Lyman Harding and Benijah Osmun as sureties. The room occupied by him is still pointed out in the old Osmun residence on the "Windy Hill" plantation, now owned by Miss E. B. Stanton. It is about five miles from Natchez.
In its day, the town of Washington was a veritable literary centre,—no doubt due to the influence of Jefferson College and of the Mississippi Society. ”

“ The towns and villages of Mississippi, as in European states, are located perfectly independent of each other, isolated among its forests, and often many leagues apart, leaving in the intervals large tracts of country covered with plantations, and claiming no minuter subdivision than that of "county." Natchez, for instance, is a corporation one mile square, but from the boundaries of the city to Woodville, the next incorporated town south, there is an interval of thirty-eight miles. ”

“ The Natchez, known to the novelist from the romance of Chateaubriand, are known to the ethnologist as pre-eminent amongst the Indians of the Mississippi for their Mexican characteristics. They flattened the head, worshiped the sun, kept up an undying fire, recognized a system of caste, and sacrificed human victims. Yet to identify them [121] with the Asteks, to assume even any extraordinary intercourse, would be unsafe. Their traditions, indeed, suggest the idea of a migration; but their language contradicts their traditions. They are simply what the other natives of Florida were. ”

“ Natchez belonged to the Spaniards then—you'll see old Gayosa's government house still standin' there. But now, since Mississippi's been let in as a State, it seems to me like 'most everybody's been tryin' to get down here. If many more of you Yankees come on down, we'll soon be a populated country."
"Then you like Yankees—you do not think that will make me unpopular—down here?" the young fellow interrupted.
"Shucks! It ain't where a man comes from." The old fellow uncrossed his legs and crossed them again. "It's the man himself. ”

“ Natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now, and is adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all rich outlying regions that are naturally tributary to her. And like Vicksburg and New Orleans, she has her ice-factory: she makes thirty tons of ice a day. In Vicksburg and Natchez, in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich could wear it. But anybody and everybody can have it now. I visited one of the ice-factories in New Orleans, to see what the polar regions might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics. ”

“ There are many and complicated stories connected with the driving of the Natchez Indians from their ancestral seats. Every year makes the collecting of these legends more and more difficult. The patriotic Mississippi student will see to it that they are not lost, but are gathered into the store house for use in days to come.
Joel Chandler Harris has done a wonderful work for Georgia and the Atlantic Coast in the collection of Lore. It cannot be that Uncle Remus had no kinsmen in Mississippi. Yet no one has sought to preserve these Mississippi versions of negro folk tales. ”

“ Neither the Government of the United States, nor the Western people would consent to be balked much longer. The negotiations with Wilkinson and his associates had come to nothing. A detachment of American regular soldiers came down the river to support Ellicott. The settlers around Natchez arose in revolt against the Spaniards and established a Committee of Safety, under protection of the Americans. The population of Mississippi was very mixed, including criminals fleeing from justice, land speculators, old settlers, well-to-do planters, small pioneer farmers, and adventurers of every kind ”

“ It is computed that more than two hundred [Pg 238] thousand dollars' worth of slaves will be purchased in Missouri this season, for the Natchez market. A single individual has recently left Natchez with one hundred thousand dollars, for the purpose of buying up negroes in that state to sell in Mississippi.
The usual way of transporting slaves is by land, although they are frequently brought round by sea; but the last is the most expensive method, and therefore, to "bring them through," is accounted preferable. ”

“ Yet we have seen that it is much more reasonable to believe that the culture of the Mound-Builders was introduced by a colony or by teachers from the south, than to regard the Mississippi Valley as the original birth-place of American civilization. The Natchez of the gulf states are said to have been superior at the coming of Europeans to other aboriginal tribes of the eastern states, and presented some slight analogies in their institutions to what the Mound-Builders may be supposed to have been. ”

“ Congress gave Jefferson College, Natchez, more than 46,000 acres of land; before the war this whole property had "disappeared" and the college was closed. Congress gave to Mississippi among other states, the "16th section" of the public lands for schools. In thirty years the proceeds of this land in Mississippi were embezzled to the amount of at least one and a half millions of dollars. In Columbus, Mississippi a receiver of public monies stole $100,000 and resigned. ”

“ The tide of emigration is rapidly setting to the north and east portions of the state. Planters, who have exhausted their old lands in this vicinity, are settling and removing to these new lands, which will soon become the richest cotton growing part of Mississippi. Parents do not now think of settling their children on plantations near Natchez, but purchase for them in the upper part of the state. ”

“ The home, “Rosalie”, bears the name and is situated near the site of Fort Rosalie, which was built by the French in the early 1700’s.
No home in Natchez is of greater historical importance than Rosalie. The building was started about 1820 by Peter B. Little, and required seven years for completion. All materials are of the choicest selection. Home-burned bricks and hand-hewn timbers were used in its construction.
Rosalie is situated 200 feet above the Mississippi River. ”