When cotton was king, plantation owners made a huge amount of money and to show off their wealth they built mansions in Natchez regardless where their holdings were. The town is fairly small with the typical disparity between rich and poor obvious. The National Park Service has several properties here, and helped build a very nice visitor center in partnership with the town.
Plantation owners didn’t plant or grow or harvest cotton, they bought slaves to do that; they bought slaves to do everything. Natchez was a very busy slave dealing city, especially those acquired from the northern states.
I toured the exhibits at the visitor center twice, looked at all the major sites, read a lot of interpretive plaques, and watched the movie yet I’m still unclear about the exact nature and extent of the slave-dealing enterprise here. Sometimes it’s obvious that slaves were a large business, other times the story is not mentioned or completely ignored.
I have the impression that the people here are not quite sure how to present themselves, who they are and where they came from. They are proud of their moneyed and leisure history, yet they were also captains of the domestic slave industry, kidnapping folk from Boston and New York to be sold at ridiculous profits. Natchez was a social center of Southern elegance and extravagance, yet noted for it’s prostitution, gambling, and booze. Naturally, politicians from everywhere visited often.
The town is quiet now, though there are popular re-enactments of the grand old days, no doubt including discussions about how good it was back then (1820’s) and how nice it would be if everything just went back to when it was “right”.
And it’s this “right way” that I think they are having trouble communicating to other people. Plus, 250 years of very storied history is hard to demonstrate. A lot of tough material needs to be covered, and it isn’t very well.
It’s a pretty town if you don’t drive the back streets, the mansions are splendid. This is a great place to see how slavery, secession, and racism play in our nation’s history, but I’d recommend some extracurricular reading to get the whole story.
Moving on a bit tomorrow morning to wait out a short thunderstorm.
We especially liked the ornate churches, built by money wrung from the sweat of the slaves.
I was astonished everywhere in the South as to what the slaves did. Churches, yes, but also homes, levees, streets, fences, docks, absolutely everything. Everything you see was built by slave labor.