by Karen L. Cox
Why Americans ventured to Natchez has a lot to do with its history, a history that made the town a temptress of sorts. As journalist David Cohn wrote in an issue of the Atlantic Monthly in 1940, “Natchez was a lady.” She was the oldest settlement on the lower half of the Mississippi River and earned her name from her original inhabitants, the Natchez Indians. Her suitors included the French (who established Fort Rosalie in 1716), the English (following the Seven Years’ War with England, the fort was ceded to the British in 1763), the Spanish (from 1779 to 1798, during which time Natchez began to take shape as a city laid out in the common grid pattern under territorial governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos), and finally the Americans in 1798, when Lady Natchez came under the control of the U.S. government.
The town has had its fair share of famous visitors throughout its history, even before the Civil War. When it was the capital of the Mississippi Territory, former vice president Aaron Burr was first arrested near Natchez for conspiring to create a separate nation, though he was released and later acquitted on charges of treason. Two decades later, the American naturalist John James Audubon spent a few months there painting birds; he also enrolled his sons at nearby Jefferson Academy, a military school for young boys. P. T. Barnum brought the Swedish singing sensation Jenny Lind to Natchez in 1851, where she performed to a sell-out crowd, as she had done in cities across the United States.
Northerners from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maine, Connecticut, Maryland, and Massachusetts came, too. Between the 1830s and the 1850s, they purchased large tracts of land in Louisiana and Mississippi, staking their claim to the profits of the region’s cotton boom. While stately homes were built for families of wealth in Natchez proper, the life of a country gentleman was to be found in the gently rolling hills on the outskirts of town. There, planters created large estates, which, in addition to very grand homes, included outbuildings and slave quarters. Melrose typified this model.
Melrose was built for the McMurran family during the 1840s. The home sat back from the main road, and in the nineteenth century travelers made the long approach to Melrose in a horse-drawn carriage. Bouncing along the dirt path, guests of Melrose passed through a romantic landscape. At the entryway was an ornamental pond and, later, a bog surrounded by cypress trees dressed in Spanish moss, after which visitors drove through a canopy of tall trees. As the home came into view, it seemed to grow larger in size. House slaves greeted guests and took their trunks and baggage, leading them into the house through the imposing portico. The McMurrans filled their home with “all that fine taste and a full purse” could afford — silk draperies, painted canvas floor coverings, and ornate rococo-style furniture. A hand-carved mahogany punkah, operated by slaves, shooed flies away from the food served on the long dining room table, as well as provided dinner guests with a gentle breeze. Service itself had been modernized, relative to the antebellum era, through a system of bells linked between the main house and the brick dependencies where house slaves were quartered.5
Such estates were often filled with the best porcelain and silver money could buy and objets d’art from Europe. In fact, traveling through Europe was seen as a rite of passage for the sons of the planter elite before they assumed their role in the family business. Frederick Quitman, for example, took a six-month tour of Europe that included the British Isles, Switzerland, Venice, and Milan following his graduation from Princeton in 1853. Only then did he return to manage his father’s sugar plantation. Not everyone lived as well as the planters, however, and Natchez was not always ladylike.6
Down below the bluffs, the area known as “Natchez Under-the-Hill” had a different historical reputation altogether. It was one of the most notorious river landings on the Mississippi River, peopled with gamblers, thieves, swindlers, and prostitutes. Boatmen, who traveled up and down the river loading cotton and unloading slaves, frequented its saloons, and knife fights were a regular feature on the levee below Natchez proper. Still, it was the wealth and the mansions above the bluffs that defined Natchez.
The town was an important link in the global market for cotton, much of which was shipped directly to New York and Liverpool, England. The booming British textile industry created the demand for the cotton coming from the lower Mississippi valley. A labor-intensive crop, cotton required substantial numbers of slaves, and as demand for it increased, America’s domestic slave trade rapidly expanded, too. Between 750,000 and one million enslaved people were forcibly relocated to the Deep South, roughly two-thirds of whom were sold through the mechanisms of the slave trade. For most, their first stop was the port of New Orleans. By 1850, it was the third-largest city in the country and the epicenter of America’s domestic slave trade. Most of them were purchased by slave traders in the Upper South states of Maryland and Virginia, where tobacco farming had depleted the soil and was being replaced by other less labor-intensive crops. As a result, slave trading became a business of supply and demand. Planters in the Upper South had the supply, and the demand for slaves resided in the Deep South. Between October and January, New Orleans annually received ships filled with slaves from Maryland and Virginia. Once they arrived in the Crescent City, they were thrown into one of the high-walled pens, or holding areas, in the city’s slave market. To entice potential buyers, slave traders dressed men in suits, while female slaves wore gingham dresses. They were among the thousands of men, women, and children sold on a daily basis whose final destinations were the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi. Many were taken and sold in slave markets upriver, including Natchez, the second-largest slave market in the Deep South outside of New Orleans.7
The town was integral to this slave network. It had active slave markets as early as 1801, but its most famous, and the largest, was the slave market known as the Forks of the Road, where Washington Road and Liberty Road intersected. The Forks, established after an 1830 ordinance was passed to keep traders out of the city limits, served as the basis of operations for numerous slave traders, including the firm of Franklin and Armfield. Isaac Franklin of Tennessee purchased property at the Forks for the express purpose of slave sales, while his nephew John Armfield operated the firm’s slave pen in Alexandria, Virginia. Together, they became two of the most active slave traders in the United States, buying slaves for low prices in Virginia and then selling them for considerable profit in Natchez. Like other slave traders at the Forks, they built rudimentary pens to hold the human chattel they brought to the area from other slave markets. Rectangular in shape and built from wood, they offered nothing in the way of human comforts because they were considered temporary shelter. Joseph Ingraham, in his book The South-West by a Yankee published in 1835, described the shelter for slaves as “old unoccupied buildings, and often tents or booths, pitched upon the common.” He also detailed the march of slaves from the river landing, below the Natchez bluffs. “Passing through the city in procession, sometimes dressed in a new uniform, purchased for them in New Orleans, but often in the brown rags in which they left Virginia preceded by a large wagon carrying the surplus baggages; they are marched beyond the city limits” to the Forks of the Road.8
Since Congress abolished the African slave trade in 1808, Natchez planters relied on the domestic slave trade to meet their needs. In addition to the slaves shipped to New Orleans from Baltimore, Maryland, and Alexandria, Virginia, and eventually brought upriver to Natchez, slave traders marched thousands more overland. These coffles of slaves — large groups bound together by chains — were force-marched from Virginia to Tennessee. Then, just outside of Nashville, they traveled down the old Indian trading path known as the Natchez Trace. By the time they reached Natchez, a journey of several weeks, they had walked more than a thousand miles.
Once there, they were prepared for their sale to the owners of area estates who held thousands of acres in Adams County and neighboring Jefferson County and across the river in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. “The slaves are made to shave and wash in greasy pot liquor, to make them look sleek and nice,”
wrote William Anderson, who was sold in Natchez in the early nineteenth century. “Their heads must be combed, their best clothes put on, and when called out to be examined, they must stay in a row — the women and men apart — then they are picked out and taken to a room and examined.” Men and women, husbands and wives, were often sold separately. Anderson also described children being torn from their mothers’ arms and sent away, never to be seen again. The “weeping and crying” he heard disturbed him, but the reaction of the slave owners was to quell the noise by beating the slaves with a lash. These scenes were repeated for decades and took place within sight of Monmouth, Linden, and D’Evereux — the mansions owned by some of the wealthiest of the town’s slave owners.9
When the Civil War erupted, the world that Natchez planters enjoyed came to a swift end. Union troops arrived there in August 1863 after having seized Vicksburg, another town that sat atop bluffs farther upriver from Natchez. Planters in Natchez had divided loyalties, both Union and Confederate, but regardless of their sympathies, the Yankees moved quickly to seize control of their estates. While officers fashioned headquarters inside the mansions, soldiers pitched tents on the grounds around them. Those who remained loyal to the Union, some of whom entertained federal troops while they occupied Natchez, were the most fortunate.
Down below the bluffs, the federal army established a slave contraband camp and, most alarming to Natchez residents, placed black soldiers on street patrol. The Union occupiers also placed black troops at the Forks of the Road slave market, where they were quickly joined by slaves who had abandoned local plantations. The very existence of black soldiers struck fear into the hearts of white Natchezeans, but having them stationed at the Forks sent the message that the days of chattel slavery were numbered.
A New York Times correspondent traveling with the army commented on what the locals likely took for granted — the city’s riches. “It contains more wealth in proportion to its inhabitants than perhaps any town in the whole country, either North or South. It is a common saying here that if a man is not worth a million, he is not considered well off,” he wrote. The wealthiest planters and largest slaveholders were, according to the Times reporter, “the most stubborn Union men,” which included Jennie Merrill’s father, who owned plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, several hundred slaves, and Elms Court — one of the most beautiful homes in the area.10
Confederate defeat and the end of slavery marked the beginning of the town’s long decline, but for the thousands of slaves who toiled in the cotton fields that made Natchez planters wealthy and helped build the mansions that tourists still see today, it was the dawn of a new day. Of the four million humans in bondage at the war’s end, a large majority worked on plantations in the lower Mississippi valley. According to the U.S. Census in 1860, slaves constituted the majority of the population in this area. In Adams County, slaves made up 72 percent of the total population, in neighboring Jefferson County the figure was 81 percent, and in Concordia Parish just across the river from Natchez, 91 percent of the population was enslaved.11 Their emancipation ended the economic domination of planters in the Cotton Kingdom, some of whom left and went back north, while others stayed and tried to return their lands to profitability in the absence of free labor. Sharecropping replaced slavery, and while cotton still dominated the regional economy for decades, Natchez was no longer the center of opulence.
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a Jewish mercantile class played a key role in the town’s economic recovery. A few of these merchants became cotton planters, but their financial success came as agents in the plantation supply and cotton-buying business, accomplished by working with both white planters and black sharecroppers. Natchez had a vibrant Jewish community going back to 1843, and during the later years of the nineteenth century Jews made important civic improvements and also participated in politics. In the early 1930s, the mayor of Natchez was a Jewish merchant, Saul Laub, whose wife was a member of the Natchez Garden Club. The glory days of the southern aristocracy, however, had long since passed.12
During the early twentieth century, very little new industry had emerged. The town was accessible by train, but there were no good roads in Mississippi to make it worth investing in a town as remote as Natchez. Sure, there was the river, but steamboats and ferries were outmoded forms of transportation. There wasn’t even a bridge across the river. So, like a debutante waiting for someone to sign her dance card, Natchez sat on the sidelines of modernity for decades.
Still, the magnificent homes and estates built from that wealth remained. Aside from being weatherworn or needing repairs, by 1932 not much had changed these antebellum structures for almost a century. Some of the descendants of the original families still lived in them. And the descendants of slaves? Many joined the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities searching for what author Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.” Wright would know. He was born in Adams County, and, like other black Natchezeans, his family, too, went north. Still others became part of the black middle class who located their businesses — barbershops, restaurants, funeral homes, and juke joints — along St. Catherine Street. They worked side by side with Italian immigrant families, like Eduardo and Maria Stallone, who operated a grocery store there. This was also the street where they attended their churches, the largest of which was Holy Family — the first Catholic congregation for African Americans in Mississippi.
Yet for so many more it was almost as if time had not passed. Except for earning meager wages, their lives often resembled those of their grandparents. They continued to work for white families in Natchez — cooking for them, cleaning their homes, washing and ironing their clothes, and maintaining the grounds of the estates. Some were able to purchase farmland, but they were sharecroppers, too. And while they were free, the constant state of indebtedness to the landowners made it feel like freedom in name only. Those who lived in town rented ramshackle houses because they couldn’t afford to own one. Entire black neighborhoods emerged within spitting distance of the Forks of the Road, where so many of their ancestors had been bought and sold. This is important to understanding why outsiders felt as if Natchez was nothing short of a time capsule of the Old South — six decades after the Civil War.
Americans in the 1930s were fascinated by this image of the region, and it was a fascination with a long history, extending back in time to the early nineteenth century, when plantation novels were all the rage. In the twentieth century, the new medium of film also captured this nostalgia for the plantation South. Movies sought to bring southern romance to life, but it was always Hollywood’s version in which the main attraction was often the setting itself — the large, white-columned mansions peopled by ladies in hoop skirts and black house slaves all too happy to serve their white masters. It was a well-established image long before the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. In fact, two years earlier, Stark Young’s book So Red the Rose had been the best-selling novel on the Old South. Its setting? Natchez.13
As it turned out, Natchez had all of this southern romance in spades, and it was no movie set. It was real. Charleston and Savannah also drew visitors seeking southern pastoral romance, but in the Deep South, no city other than New Orleans could boast such a large collection of antebellum houses as Natchez, which included Jennie Merrill’s ancestral home, Elms Court.
Still, beneath the patina of a glamorous southern civilization presented by the garden club, many visitors were also curious about that other house. The one with the goats. The one where the “Wild Man” and the “Goat Woman” lived. The one where Poe’s and Faulkner’s fiction came to life.
This book returns to the Deep South of the 1930s — to Natchez, Mississippi — when Jennie Merrill was killed and descriptions of Goat Castle riveted the nation. It revisits the facts of the case and the personalities involved, placing them in the context of their time. As the story unfolds, the history of both black and white Natchezeans before, during,
and after the crime help to explain what actually became of the descendants of both slave owners and the enslaved at a time when writers waxed nostalgic about the South’s pastoral traditions or, in some cases, held up a mirror to its decline. This account of events also engages the contemporary issues at play — particularly race relations — that are critical in understanding how the region moved from slavery to Jim Crow in the decades following the Civil War. Finally, Natchez itself helps us to better understand the nation’s idealized image of the South during this decade, since, for so many, Natchez was the Old South.
Many have tried to make sense of this crime. Several journalists and local citizens felt compelled to write about it. In 1933, Homer G. Wells, a Memphis-based crime writer, authored a five-part series of the crime for the pulp magazine Master Detective, published under the title “The Crimson Crime at Glenburney Manor.” During this same year, Natchez resident Zaida Marion Wells published her seventeen-page booklet, The Merrill Murder Mystery, exploring the crime. Howard University professor Sterling Brown visited Natchez in the early 1940s. He briefly noted the crime, calling Glenwood a “perverse attraction for tourists,” which it was. Harnett Kane, a best-selling author from New Orleans, included a chapter about the murder in his book Natchez on the Mississippi (1947), referring to Goat Castle as a “peep show for the nation.” Fifteen years passed before anyone sought to write the full story. Charles East, former editor for the Louisiana State University Press, researched the case for years and submitted his book proposal, which he called “Natchez Gothic,” to American Heritage Publishing in 1962. The editors turned him down, so he continued his research; he died in 2009 having never written the book. In 1985, two local Natchezeans, businessman Sim Callon and journalist Carolyn Vance Smith, published their book, The Goat Castle Murder: A True Natchez Story That Shocked the World. While it presents the basic outline of the story, it includes next to nothing on the black principals in the case, leaving many questions unanswered. And yet, it has had the most influence over how locals and tourists have learned about the events of that year. Its impact is also evident in the most recent book to examine the crime, The Goat Castle Murder, a fictionalized account by novelist Michael Llewelyn. As a work of historical fiction it fabricates dialogue, and sometimes the “facts” are simply the myths that have been repeated in Natchez for decades. Llewelyn, like so many others, treats the experience of Emily Burns with only passing interest. By doing so, the story remains incomplete. That is, until now.14