Natchez
Originally Published February 2, 2022
"You'll never find it," she said, when we inquired about the Devil's Punchbowl. The flyers on the table at the Natchez Visitor Center encouraged us to "drive the Natchez Trace" and visit the "Antebellum Mansions," and so we visited the mansions. We drove by some, walked around others, and toured the interiors of one or two.
One cannot visit Natchez without stepping directly into the historical nexus of the Civil War, with all of its moral ambiguities. Fact and fiction confound. Many owners of the large mansions had come from the North to take advantage of slave labor. When Natchez surrendered peremptorily, the senior ranks of the Union Army included many of their relatives. Occupation preserved their fortunes and their mansions, allowing them to stand today.
Natchez was also home to one of the largest slave markets in the South, The Forks of the Road, just outside the city limits. The Natchez Trace had provided a return route North to Memphis for crews manning the barges that floated down the Mississippi. With the advent of the steamboat, it became instead a highway for slave traders like Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, who took advantage of the failing tobacco economy in Virginia and the Carolinas to purchase slaves at a discount and sell them at a premium in the burgeoning cotton market of the Deep South. Cotton could now be shipped upstream on the Mississippi River or around the Florida peninsula to merchants in New England, and then to off to England. With the cotton gin increasing the productive capacity of the plantations, the textile industry in England and in the North, where slavery had already been outlawed, continued to drive the demand for cotto with its associated misery. Today a small grass lot, across from a muffler shop and window tinting garage, marks the Forks of the Road.
Where fact and fiction collide in the most confounding way is the Devils Punchbowl. The facts are that starting in about 1862, many slaves had left abandoned plantations and were headed north to freedom. Often, sick, barely clothed and starving they arrived in Natchez to swell the population from approximately 10,000 to nearly 100,000. Quarantined outside of Natchez, nearly 20,000 died of infirmity and starvation. Narratives compete to explain the circumstances surrounding this gruesome event. One is that the Confederate Troops drove the escaping slaves toward the Union Army to slow their advance, thus creating a humanitarian crisis. The other is that the Union Army created a "concentration camp" resulting in genocide. Both versions perpetuate the Lost Cause as well as the putative moral superiority of the Union. The reality is probably closer to what refugees experience when caught between two warring armies. Today the site lies just outside of town in a reconstituted landscape between Route 61 and the Mississippi.
Perhaps our guide was correct when she said we would never find it.
