Natchez in the Center of Slavery - Forks of the Road
Slavery is central to American history. The labor of enslaved African Americans built much of the nation’s wealth and enabled it to gain its economic independence. The enslavement of people also challenged America’s fundamental commitment to freedom.
You are standing at Forks of the Road, the site of several markets where enslaved humans were bought and sold from the 1830s until 1863. This was the center of the trade in Natchez, one of the busiest slave trading towns in the nation.
“The slave has no rights; he is a being with all the capacities of a man in the condition of a brute. Such is the slave in the American plantations. He can decide no question relative to his own actions; the slave-holder decides what he shall eat or drink, when and to whom he shall speak, when he shall work, and how long he shall work; when he shall marry ... what is right and wrong, virtue and vice. The slave-holder becomes the sole disposer of the mind, soul and body of his slave ...” – Former slave Frederick Douglass, 1846.
“A mile from Natchez, we came to a cluster of rough wooden buildings in the angle of two roads ... Entering though a wide gate into a narrow court-yard, partially enclosed by low buildings, a scene of novel character was at once presented. A line of negroes, commencing at the entrance ... extended in a semicircle around the right side of the yard ... they stood perfectly still, and in close order, while some gentlemen were passing from one to another examining for the purpose of buying.” ”Southwest by a Yankee,” Joseph Holt Ingraham, 1834.
[Quotation over a hand-drawn, antebellum map of the Forks of the Road neighborhood from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.]