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Story Archives: Slave exodus from plantations leads to death in Natchez
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Slave exodus from plantations leads to death in Natchez
 (10th in a series)
In September 1863, Natchez, part of the Confederate States of America, was occupied by a Union army with a force of almost 12,000 troops. At Union headquarters at Rosalie mansion high atop the bluff, Matilda Gresham, the wife of a Yankee general, arrived to visit her husband, who was in command of the city.
During the Union occupation, hundreds of former slaves, all recently freed, converged on Natchez where many suffered great hardship. Many died.
Matilda said Rosalie's "lawns to the rear, the site of the old fort, and beyond, were covered with tents" of the army when she arrived. For two months, Matilda lived at Rosalie with her husband, Gen. Walter Q. Gresham. There, he, his staff and visitors kept up lively conversations when they weren't in the field.
"At the morning meal," Matilda wrote in a 1919 biography of her husband, "the talk was unguarded…'Shop' was talked –that is military movements. But what interested me most was to hear my husband discuss the political, social, and economical changes the abolition of slavery would make…He expounded a legal proposition with the clearness that was interesting to all. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure; it freed only certain individuals; it did not change the fundamental law which recognized the institution of slavery."
That change would come later, but in the meantime, the Union army was contending with a major problem -- what do with the huge numbers of slaves leaving the plantations and arriving in big towns, such as Natchez. At the same time in this changing world, the South was facing economic ruin.
Many of the owners of the profitable cotton plantations in Concordia and Tensas parishes were wealthy Natchez residents who had hedged their bets during the war by moving their money to the banks of Liverpool and Paris. Levin R. Marshall of Natchez, the owner of Richmond, was known as a "neutral," wrote Matilda, which meant he was considered a "Union man." In a letter to Gen. Gresham, Marshall's wife begged "that the (federal) troops…not evacuate Vidalia, for if they leave the other side of the river our property will almost certainly be destroyed; our corn, of which we have plenty, and our mills and gins burned, and then our negroes must starve."
Unlike Natchez, where there was little resistance to the Yankee advance beginning in 1862, the rest of Mississippi, Concordia and northeastern Louisiana fought until the end. The Yankee army occupied Vidalia, but Confederate calvary often conducted raids looking for supplies and food. When Gen. U.S. Grant was planning his assault on Vicksburg, he moved through northeastern Louisiana and crossed the river into Mississippi at Hard Times Landing in Tensas Parish.
Planter Haller Nutt of Natchez, the owner of Longwood, also owned the plantation Winter Quarters and Hard Times Landing. Unlike many southern planters, Haller didn't burn his corn and kill his hogs as the Union army approached. According to Matilda Gresham, Nutt "left them to subsist General Grant's army...(Nutt) did not survive the war, but his estate was compensated for what our army took, but not for the large number of negroes whose freedom was contemporaneous with the advent of United States forces."For the full story, subscribe to the The Concordia Sentinel's NEW E-Edition! |
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