Natchez Massacre

The Natchez Massacre, or the Natchez revolt, was an attack by Natchez people on French colonists near present-day Natchez, Mississippi, on November 29, 1729. The Natchez and French had lived alongside each other for more than a decade prior to the incident, mostly conducting peaceful business and occasionally intermarrying. After a period of deteriorating relations, Natchez leaders were provoked when the French colonial commandant, Sieur de Chépart (or Etcheparre), demanded land from a Natchez village for his own plantation near Fort Rosalie. They plotted their attack over several days and managed to conceal their plans from most of the French; those who overheard and warned Chépart of an attack were considered untruthful and were punished. In a coordinated attack on the fort and the homesteads, the Natchez killed almost all of the Frenchmen, only sparing most of the women and African slaves. The fort and homes were burned to the ground.

When the French heard the news of the massacre they feared a general Indian uprising and were concerned that the Natchez might have conspired with other tribes. They first responded by ordering a massacre on the Chaouacha people, who had no relation to the Natchez revolt, wiping out their entire village. They then retaliated against the Natchez villages capturing Natchez leaders and selling them into slavery, although most of the Indians managed to escape to the north and take refuge among the Chickasaw people. The Natchez waged low-intensity warfare against the French over the next years, but retaliatory expeditions on Natchez refugees among the Chickasaw in 1730 and 1731 forced them to move on and live as refugees among the Creek and Cherokee tribes. By 1736 the Natchez had ceased to exist as an independent people.

The attack on Fort Rosalie destroyed some of the Louisiana colony's most productive farms and endangered shipments of food and trade goods on the Mississippi River. As a result, the French state returned control of Louisiana from the French West India Company to the crown in 1731, essentially marking the end of French ambitions to colonize the lower Mississippi Valley. Louisiana governor Étienne Périer was held responsible for the massacre and its aftermath, and he was recalled to France in 1732.

Background
The French first encountered the Natchez in 1682 and declared them an ally. The Natchez were sedentary and lived in nine semi-autonomous villages, and the French considered them to be the most civilized tribe of the region. By 1700 their numbers had been decimated to about 3,500 by disease, and by 1720 further epidemics had halved that number. Their society was strictly divided into a noble class called "the Suns" and a commoner class called in French "the Stinkards". Between 1699 and 1702, the Natchez received Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville in peace and allowed a French missionary to settle among them. The Natchez were at war with the Chickasaw people, who were allied with the British and had received guns from them, and the Natchez expected to benefit similarly from their relation with the French. Nonetheless, the British presence in the territory lead the Natchez to split into pro-British and pro-French factions. The central village, called Natchez or the Grand Village, was led by the paramount chief Great Sun and the war chief Tattooed Serpent (Serpent Piqué in the French sources), both of whom were interested in pursuing an alliance with the French.

First, Second and Third Natchez Wars
The first conflict between the French and the Natchez took place in 1716, when the Governor of Louisiana, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, passed through Natchez territory and neglected to renew the alliance with the Natchez by smoking the peace calumet. The Natchez reacted to this slight by killing four French traders. Cadillac sent his lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to punish the Natchez. He deceived the Natchez leaders to attend a parley, where he ambushed and captured them, and forced the Natchez to exchange their leaders for the culprits who had attacked the French. A number of random Natchez from the pro-British villages were executed. This caused French-Natchez relations to further deteriorate. As part of the terms of the peace accord following this First Natchez War, the Natchez promised to supply labor and materials for the construction of a fort for the French. The fort was named Fort Rosalie, and it was aimed at protecting the French trade monopoly in the region from English incursions.

By 1717, French colonists had established a fort and trading post at Natchez, Mississippi. They built numerous large plantations and concessions, as well as smaller farms, on land acquired from the Natchez. Relations between Natchez and colonists were generally friendly, but there were tensions and there are reports of colonists abusing Natchez, forcing them to provide them with labor or goods, and as more colonists arrived their concessions gradually encroached on Natchez lands. Some French men even married and had children with Natchez women.



From 1722 to 1724, brief armed conflicts between the Natchez and French were settled through negotiations between then-Louisiana governor Bienville and Natchez war chief Tattooed Serpent. In 1723 Bienville had been informed that some Natchez had harassed villagers, and he razed the Natchez village of White Apple and enslaved a number of the villagers, only to discover that the alleged harassment was in fact false, and had been faked by the colonists to frame the Natchez. One of the later skirmishes in 1724 consisted of the murder of a Natchez chief's son by a colonist, to which the Natchez responded by killing another Frenchman named M. Guenot. Bienville then sent French soldiers from New Orleans to attack the Natchez at their fields and settlements, and the Natchez surrendered. Their plea for peace was met following the execution of one of their chiefs by the French.

Chronicler Le Page du Pratz, who lived among the Natchez and was a close friend of Tattooed Serpent, records that he once asked his friend why the Natchez were resentful towards the French. Tattooed Serpent answered that the French seemed to have two hearts, a good one today and an evil tomorrow, and proceeded to tell how Natchez life had been better before the French arrived. He finished by saying: "In fine, before the arrival of the French we lived like men who can be satisfied with what they have, whereas today we live like slaves that cannot be suffered to do as they please". The most faithful ally of the French, Tattooed Serpent died in 1725, another blow to the relations between the Natchez and the colonists.

According to archaeologist Karl Lorenz, who excavated several Natchez settlements, another factor that complicated the relation between the Natchez and the colonists was the fact that the French did not well understand the Natchez political structure. The French assumed that the Great Sun, the chief of the village of Natchez, also held sway over all the other Natchez villages. In fact each village was autonomous and the Great Sun's power only extended to the villages of Flour and Tioux with which the village of Natchez was allied, but not to the three pro-British villages of White Apple, Jenzenaque and Grigra. When the Great Sun died in 1728 and was succeeded as Great Sun by the inexperienced son of his sister Tattooed Arm, the pro-English villages became more powerful than the pro-French villages centered at Natchez.

Commandant Chépart
In 1728, Sieur de Chépart (also known as D'Etcheparre and Chopart), whom Governor Étienne Périer had recently appointed as commandant of Fort Rosalie, was brought to New Orleans and put on trial before the governor for abuse of power, specifically treatment and behavior toward the Natchez that was unpopular among the French. He was saved from punishment, however, by "the interference of influential friends", and upon returning to the fort, continued to administer it as he had before, telling the Natchez that November that he wished to seize land containing a temple of their people's graves in the center of the village of White Apple. Governor Périer sided with Chépart's demand and planted a cross on the land he sought. By this point, most of the colonists disapproved of Chépart's actions, including Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, a French historian who wrote that this was the first time that a French colonial leader had simply claimed Natchez land as his own, without prior negotiations.

When the Natchez began to protest the seizure of their land for the plantation, Chépart said he would burn down the temple with their ancestors' graves. In response to this threat, the Natchez seemed to promise to cede the land, wrote Dumont de Montigny, but only if they were given two months to relocate their temple and graves. Chépart agreed to give them the time in exchange for pelts, oil, poultry, and grain—a request the Natchez promised to fulfill later.

Attack


The Natchez then began to prepare for a strike on the French at Fort Rosalie, borrowing firearms from some French colonists with promises to go hunting and to share the game with the guns' owners. Some French men and women overheard the Natchez planning such an attack. According to Le Page du Pratz, it was the Natchez female chief Tattooed Arm who deliberately attempted to alert the French, against the attack led by her rivals at the White Apple village. When they told Chépart, he disregarded them and placed some of the men who voiced the warnings in irons, including on the night before the massacre, when he was drunk.

On the morning of November 29, 1729, the Natchez came to Chépart with corn, poultry, and deerskins, also carrying with them a calumet—well-known to be a symbol of peace. The commandant, experiencing a hangover from drinking the night before, was certain that the Natchez had no violent intentions, and he challenged those who had warned of an attack to prove that their rumors were accurate.

While Chépart was still viewing the goods, the Natchez started firing, giving the signal to a coordinated simultaneous attack on Fort Rosalie and on the outlying farms and concessions in the area now covered by the city of Natchez. Chépart ran to call his soldiers to garrison, but they had already been killed. The details of the attack are mostly unknown as chroniclers such as Le Page du Pratz, who talked with several eye-witnesses, stated that the events were "simply too horrific" to recount.

The Natchez had prepared by seizing the galley of the Company anchored on the river, so that no Frenchmen could board it and attempt to flee. And they had stationed warriors on the other side of the river to intercept those who might flee in that direction. The commandant at the Yazoo tribe's trading post Fort St. Pierre, M. du Codére, was visiting Fort Rosalie with a Jesuit priest when they heard gunshots. They turned around to return to their ship, but warriors caught up with them, killing and scalping them.

The Natchez killed almost all of the 150 Frenchmen at Fort Rosalie and only about 20 managed to escape. Most of the dead were unarmed. Women, children, and African slaves were mostly spared; they were locked inside a house on the bluff guarded by several warriors, from where they could see the events. Women seen defending their husbands from the violence, or trying to avenge them, were taken captive or killed. One woman's unborn baby was torn from her before she herself was killed. A year after the event, the dead were tallied to 138 men, 35 women and 56 children. Some scholars argue that the fact that the Natchez spared the African slaves was due to a general sense of affinity between the Natchez and the Africans; some slaves even joined the Natchez against their masters, while others took the chance to escape to freedom. A group of Yazoo people who were accompanying Commandant du Codére remained neutral during the conflict, but were inspired by the Natchez revolt. When they returned to Fort St. Pierre, they destroyed the fort, killing the Jesuit priest and 17 French soldiers.

The Natchez lost only about 12 warriors during the attack. Eight warriors died attacking the homestead of the La Loire des Ursins family, where the men had been able to prepare a defense against the intruding Natchez.

Chépart himself was taken captive by the Natchez, who were at first unsure what to do with him, but finally decided that he should be killed by a stinkard—a member of the lowest caste in the tribe's hierarchy. The Natchez kept two Frenchmen alive, a carter named Mayeux who was made to carry all the goods of the French to the Great Village and a tailor named Le Beau who was employed by the Natchez to refit the clothing of the French to their new owners. They set fire to the fort, the store and all the homesteads, burning them to the ground. Just as Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville had done with the executed Indians in 1717 and 1723, the Natchez beheaded the dead Frenchmen and brought the severed heads for the Great Sun to view.

French response
News of the Fort Rosalie attack reached New Orleans in early December, and the colonists there began to panic. The city depended upon grain and other supplies from the Illinois settlement, and shipments up and down the Mississippi River would be threatened by the loss of Fort Rosalie. Governor Périer reacted to the massacre by forbidding the entry of a delegation of Choctaw people into the city, for fear that they were using the pretext of a friendly visit to launch an attack. He then ordered slaves and French troops to march downstream and massacre a small village of Chaouacha people who had played no part in the uprising in Natchez. His superiors in Paris reprimanded the leader for this act, which may have been intended to prevent any alliance between slaves and Native Americans against the French colonists. With many Louisiana colonists, Dumont de Montigny in particular, blaming Chépart (who was killed by the Natchez) and Périer for the massacre on the French, Louis XV, the French king at the time, ordered the latter back to France in 1732. Périer's replacement was his predecessor, Bienville, whom the French state thought to be more experienced at dealing with the Native Americans of the region. A year earlier, the French West India Company gave up control of the colony to Louis XV.

A more serious retaliation against the Natchez began late in December and in January 1730, with expeditions led by Jean-Paul Le Sueur and Henri de Louboëy. The two commanders besieged the Natchez in forts built near the site of the Grand Village of the Natchez, a mile or so east of Fort Rosalie, which had been rebuilt. They killed about 80 men and captured 18 women, and released a number of French women who had been captured during the massacre of Fort Rosalie. The French relied on allied support from Tunica and Choctaw warriors. The Choctaw attacked the Natchez without the French, killing 100 and capturing a number of women and children. This ruined the element of surprise for the French and the Natchez had already scattered. At first, the Natchez were well prepared for French retaliatory strikes, having stocked up several cannons and the firearms used in the massacre two months earlier. The Natchez captured by the Choctaw and Tunica allies of the French where given over to the governor and sold into slavery, and some were tortured to death at the frame in New Orleans.

One day in late February 1730, with Louboëy seeking to catch the Natchez by surprise, the Natchez negotiated a peace treaty and freed French captives, but the French planned an attack on the Natchez fort the following day. The Natchez then brought gifts to Louboëy, but left their fort that night and escaped across the Mississippi River, taking African slaves with them. The next day, Louboëy and his men burned down the abandoned Grand Village fort as the Natchez hid in the bayous along the Black River. A subsequent expedition led by Périer in 1731 to dislodge the Natchez captured many of them and their leaders, including Saint Cosme, the Great Sun and the Female Sun Tattooed Arm. The 387 captives captives, most of whom had belonged to the pro-French faction of the Natchez, were sold into slavery in Saint-Domingue. Many other Natchez escaped again, now taking refuge with the Chickasaw. Over the next decade the few hundred remaining Natchez lived a life on the run, waging a low-intensity guerrilla campaign against the French. French historian Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix wrote in his history, "We were not slow in perceiving that the Natchez could still render themselves formidable, and that the step of sending the Sun and all who had been taken with him to be sold as slaves in Saint-Domingue, had rather exasperated than intimidated the remnant of that nation, in whom hatred and despair had transformed their natural pride and ferocity into a valor of which they were never deemed capable."

The French continued to press for the destruction of the Natchez who now lived among the Chickasaw, traditional allies of the British—this sparked the Chickasaw Wars. In 1734 Governor Bienville attacked the Chickasaw and demanded that they turn against the Natchez. The Chickasaw agreed to drive out the Natchez from among them, but they did not keep good on the promise. In the Chickasaw Campaign of 1736, the French, under Governor Bienville, made one attack on the village of Ackia, and then retreated suffering significant casualties, but inflicting none. In the Chickasaw Campaign of 1739, Bienville summoned more than 1,000 troops to be sent over from France. Bienville's army ascended the Mississippi River to the site of present-day Memphis, Tennessee, and attempted to build a military road westward toward Chickasaw villages. After waiting for months in the winter of 1739 to 1740, the French never mounted an attack and retreated back to New Orleans. But after having suffered the attacks against the Chickasaw the remaining Natchez moved on to live among the Cherokee and Creek. At that time the Natchez, reduced to scattered refugee, had ceased to exist as a political entity.

Historical interpretations
There has been historical controversy about whether the Natchez plotted with other major tribes of the region to plan a simultaneous attack on the French. Étienne Périer wrote that many of the Indian nations in the lower Mississippi Valley had plotted with the Natchez to attack the French on the same day. Périer claimed that even the Choctaw, who had been a close ally of the French, were part of the plot, and that a conference with the Choctaw planned in New Orleans for the first two days of December was to be the occasion for an attack. Jean-Baptiste Delaye, a militia commander in the French retaliations following the massacre, wrote in an unpublished narrative that Périer's claims were groundless, and that the Tioux, Yazoo, and other nations were not complicit and had no foreknowledge of the attack.

Dumont de Montigny and Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, the leading 18th-century historians of the Natchez, drew on information collected from French women taken captive during the massacre to write their descriptions of the fighting and the preparations for it. They explained that the Natchez had conspired with other nations but had attacked a few days earlier than the agreed date and that they had used a system of bundles of sticks to count the number of days remaining until the strike. The undetected destruction of a couple of the sticks derailed the count, although the reason for the lost sticks differed in each historian's account. The other nations called off their participation in the plot because of the Natchez' premature attack, and the existence of the conspiracy remained conjectural. In his reports to superiors in France, Périer may have exaggerated the scale of the attack—suggesting that many more tribes were involved in the conspiracy—to defend his leadership as governor. He said that the results of the massacre could have been worse if not for his prompt action.

François-René de Chateaubriand depicted the massacre in his 1827 epic Les Natchez, incorporating his earlier best-selling novellas Atala and René into a longer narrative that greatly embellished the history of the French and the Natchez in Louisiana. In Chateaubriand's work, the grand conspiracy behind the massacre implausibly included native tribes from all across North America. Chateaubriand saw the Natchez Massacre as the defining moment in the history of the Louisiana colony, a position consistent with the views of other 18th-century historians, such as Le Page du Pratz and Dumont de Montigny.