About Natchez, Mississippi:
The history of Natchez has always been shaped by fact that it is located on the Mississippi River, one of the main transportation routes of the time. The original occupants of the area were the mound-building Natchez Indians. The French established a fort here in 1716, bringing with them the region’s first enslaved Africans. The simple log palisade at Fort Rosalie served as the primary French fortification for the lower Mississippi River, but growing conflicts with native peoples led to its destruction and a massacre of more than 200 French men, women, and children by Natchez people and cooperating Africans in 1729. The French returned, rebuilt a larger pentagonal fort surrounded by a moat and earthworks, and eliminated the Natchez Indian presence.
After the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the British took control of Natchez, but then after the American Revolution (1778), Spain took control. Spain continued the British practice of dispensing large land grants to loyal settlers who attempted to grow cash crops like tobacco and indigo, and in the 1790s the Spanish also laid out the first town grid.
Within the next 20 years, Natchez was transformed from a small town into a bustling city, due to the the invention of the cotton gin and the new improved means of transportation: steamboats. Natchez now had dozens of boats docking at the Natchez-Under-the-Hill landing. The new prosperity, based on growing cotton in a system built on slavery resulted in classically styled mansions like the Melrose mansion owned by planter-attorney John McMurran that began to rise in the city proper and on surrounding suburban estates.
An 1833 ordinance banning slave trading within the city limits gave rise to the Forks of the Road slave market district nearby.
Natchez, Mississippi during the Civil War:
It is not possible to discuss most of the southern U.S. history without going in to the tragic subject of slavery. It was a scourge that would plague the U.S. for decades beyond the Emancipation Proclamation.
Although the state of Mississippi was part of the Confederacy, most of the wealthy Natchez planters did not support secession from the Union in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War. Instead, unlike the rest of Mississippi, Natchez chose to stay with the Union rather than secede, Ultimately, that decision proved significant, as it spared the city from experiencing the devastation and destruction that came with the war; as a result. over 600 pre-civil war homes still stand today.
The Union army occupied the city of Natchez after the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation that declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
Subsequently thousands of formerly enslaved men from the Natchez area joined the United States Army and Navy.
There is a National Cemetery here in Natchez. Some of the first Union internments in the original cemetery, created in 1866, were Federal troops who had died at “The Gardens,” a Natchez home that had been converted into a military hospital. Other interments were brought from sites in Louisiana and Mississippi, including many bodies that had been buried in the levees near the west shore of the Mississippi. Click here for the official website of the National Cemetery in Natchez, Mississippi.
Natchez, Mississippi after the Civil War:
After the Civil War, Natchez was home to the largest community of free people of color in the state of Mississippi. Mississippi led the nation in political power for African Americans during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877), and Natchez had more political activity by black men than anywhere else in the state. Hiram R. Revels ascended to the US Senate from the pulpit of Zion Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Natchez, becoming the first African American to sit in the US Congress. He was shortly followed by John R. Lynch, who entered the US House of Representatives after a childhood of enslavement in the Natchez area. Barber-diarist William Johnson was one of the pillars of that community.
The Diocese of Natchez, Mississippi:
The Diocese of Natchez was converted from a vicariate to a Diocese by Pope Leo XIII on July 28, 1837 covering all of Mississippi.
As late as 1963, Segregtion of races was still in force in much of the South, even in the Catholic churches and schools in the state of Mississippi. In 1963, Bishop Gerow condemned the assassination of the American Civil Rights Movement activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi, saying, “We need frankly to admit that the guilt for the murder and the other instances of violence in our community tragically must be shared by all of us.”
The following year, he ordered Catholic elementary schools in the diocese to admit students to the first grade “without regard to race.”
In 1965, Bishop Gerow ordered the desegregation of all grades in Catholic schools to “bring our practice into full conformity with the teachings of Christ.”