Natchez Country

Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana

George Milne

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780820347509, 9780820347493
• eBook ISBN: 9780820347516
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

At the dawn of the 1700s the Natchez viewed the first Francophones in the Lower Mississippi Valley as potential inductees to their chiefdom. This mistaken perception lulled them into permitting these outsiders to settle among them. Within two decades conditions in Natchez Country had taken a turn for the worse. The trickle of wayfarers had given way to a torrent of colonists (and their enslaved Africans) who refused to recognize the Natchez's hierarchy. These newcomers threatened to seize key authority-generating features of Natchez Country: mounds, a plaza, and a temple. This threat inspired these Indians to turn to a recent import—racial categories—to reestablish social order. They began to call themselves "red men" to reunite their polity and to distance themselves from the "blacks" and "whites" into which their neighbors divided themselves. After refashioning their identity, they launched an attack that destroyed the nearby colonial settlements. Their 1729 assault began a two-year war that resulted in the death or enslavement of most of the Natchez people.

In Natchez Country, George Edward Milne provides the most comprehensive history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Natchez to date. From La Salle's first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate dispersal of the Natchez by the close of the 1730s, Milne also analyzes the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Mississippi River and how Native Americans in turn adopted and resisted colonial ideology.

1 / Rising Suns

During the early spring of 1700, a small party of European officers, sailors, craftsmen, and laborers, guided by Native Americans, rowed up the Mississippi River. They had come to chart the region for the king of France. After several days of traveling north, they stopped to visit a large town inhabited by a powerful nation of Indians. The brother of the local headman greeted the expedition’s commander with a gift of a small white cross. He then escorted the newcomers to the Grand Village to meet the Great Sun.¹ The outsiders had arrived in Natchez Country at a particularly auspicious occasion—around the time of the Deer Moon—when headmen from the chiefdom’s outlying towns attended feasts with its leader.²

Part of their story was recorded in the log of the Renommée, by the ship’s commander and the new governor of Louisiana, Pierre le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville. In his entry for March 11, 1700, he described the countryside surrounding the native’s town as “very much like France.” He called the inhabitants “Nadches,” after the name of their principal village, although they used another name for themselves: the Théoloëls—the People of Sun—after their solar deity, Thé.³ Their ruler attracted the attention of several of the expedition’s members. Iberville wrote, “To me he seemed the most tyrannical Indian I have beheld.”⁴ The Jesuit chaplain Father Du Ru saw the same man in a more favorable light: “The chief’s manner impresses me; he has the air of an ancient emperor.” The missionary recorded the elaborate courtesies paid to the “Great Chief” by his retainers and by all of the Natchez.⁵ Du Ru spent several more days writing about the temples and the society of the Grand Village and the outlying districts.

The accounts of Captain Iberville and his companions provide insights into the ways these eighteenth-century Europeans perceived the people they met. His characterization of the Natchez’s chief as a tyrant reveals that he perceived an unusual amount power at the Sun’s disposal. Others observed reflections of Old World discourses of authority, dignity, and power in the Mississippi chiefdom—tantalizing hints of “civilization” among a non-European people. The Natchez, in turn, had the opportunity to see much among the newcomers that resonated with their own experiences of power and civility.⁶

This encounter illustrated some of the reasons that the Natchez and the Europeans assumed certain things about the other. The People of the Sun and the subjects of Louis XIV made their assumptions because of the ways that each organized their society, distributed resources, and described their relations with other-than-human powers. In the Sun King’s France, most people attributed natural phenomena to the work of supernatural beings: saints and other deities. They ascribed status through kinship, and believed that their ruler held a divine mandate. The Natchez believed that the Great Sun also based his tenure upon a divine appointment. His blood relations supported him in his political activities. These Indians also believed that other-than-human forces intervened in their lives. Thus the first Louisianans and their indigenous hosts’ tendency to see parallels among each other were based on cohesive and intelligible perceptions. When the party of René-Robert Cavalier, sieur de La Salle, arrived in 1682, it looked and sounded like a Native American trading or hunting expedition because the majority of them were Native Americans. Moreover, those in the party who were not Native Americans often acted like Native Americans. These and other similarities allowed each of these two peoples to fit the other into their respective epistemological categories.⁷

The descriptions of the realms of the Sun King and the Great Sun that follow are by no means exhaustive. They merely outline some of the characteristics that allowed each group to recognize aspects of their own culture in the other’s way of life. Many of their suppositions about such resemblances were the result of gross misperceptions—neither group saw the other without distortions. Nonetheless, neither side was staring at empty mirages; each had good reasons for making connections between themselves and the other. These resemblances generated grave consequences as Europeans and Natchez drew upon them to construct polices for dealing with each other.

The Sun King

At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the kingdom of Louis XIV represented perhaps the most refined expression of western European civilization. The colonization of Louisiana was a conscious attempt to extend France’s “gloire” while improving its strategic footing in the New World. France’s political institutions provided some of the conditions for the governance of the new province. The nature of its society determined who would cross the seas to rule at Mobile and New Orleans and, equally important, who would stay at home. Despite the nation’s sophisticated urban areas, most of its inhabitants lived in small agricultural hamlets in which the patterns of daily life changed very slowly. The missionaries, settlers, soldiers, and officials who came to the Lower Mississippi Valley often drew upon their experiences of the high culture of the court and church. Many of them, especially the lowborn, also drew upon those culled from the rural villages where they had spent the earlier parts of their lives. The realm of the sacred also played a crucial role in shaping their views of themselves, the world around them, and the world they would soon encounter. These sources of experience informed the ways they perceived and wrote about the Indians they met in Louisiana’s forests and prairies.

Louis emblazoned his domain with images of the sun to illustrate the central position of his monarchy. The motto une foi, une loi, un roi—one faith, one law, one king—epitomized this unity. France, however, was not a homogeneous polity. Louis XIV faced numerous obstacles to the exercise of his power; his was by no means an “absolute monarchy.” Political theorists of the time imagined the king at the center of the state, with his nobles, church, and people in orbit around the throne in the same way the planets revolved around the sun. Louis furthered this imagery when he employed cultural and social patronage to counter centrifugal political forces that threatened to sunder the kingdom. As he did so, he gained leverage to steer the state in some of the directions that he chose. At times he succeeded; in other instances, he accomplished less than he intended.

The king’s penchant for centralization played an important role in framing Louisiana’s government as well as that of the métropole. Although circumstances thwarted Louis’s hopes for administrative efficiency at home, the colonies seemed to offer a clean slate. His plan for a strong governor and Superior Council to run Louisiana exemplified the Sun King’s penchant for bureaucratic hegemony.⁸ The tabula rasa of “le Mississippi” notwithstanding, stability eluded his transplanted subjects: many of France’s social and political tensions followed them to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

The problems of the New World traced some of their roots back to the numerous obstacles that impeded the Sun King from exerting greater control over France’s institutions. Despite his desire for a firm grip on the domestic government, ancient traditions, civil and canon law, foreign distractions, restive nobles, and refractory parlements thwarted Louis’s designs.⁹ He also faced constitutional limitations on his power to levy taxes. The means by which he circumvented some of these obstructions made a lasting impression on the nation’s governing structures. Louis’s high-level administrative appointments and his efficient use of supervisory officers called intendants aided his quest. Louis also marshaled the finer things in life to solve some of his political problems. The celebrated Court of Versailles and the magnificent artistic and literary culture associated with his reign tamed his nobles and won the admiration of the rest of Europe.

For all his political maneuverings, Louis’s right to the throne rested on his birth into the royal family. Louis’s claim arose from his descent from the Bourbon line of kings that began with his grandfather, Henri IV. In France, as in nearly every other state throughout the globe, kinship played the defining role in determining who held the reins of power. Through blood or marriage, the king was related to many of the ruling families in Europe. The bonds of inherited privilege and authority carried forward into the quotidian practices of governance.

Louis’s court was a realm in which kinship, the most elemental and ubiquitous of all human relations, carried enormous weight. Here, Louis’s most powerful relatives attempted to influence national policy through their ancient prerogatives. This elite group had exerted far more influence only a few decades earlier, often with violent outcomes such as the series of uprisings known as the Frondes. During the late 1640s and early 1650s, the parlements, and then segments of the upper nobility, tried to take advantage of the vacuum created by the death of Louis XIII and the minority of his heir. Throughout these years, Louis XIV lived in the Louvre as little more than a prisoner of the mobs of Paris and princes of the blood. Despite the machinations of sections of the nobility, eventually a respect for the rule of succession won out, and Louis ascended to the throne.

His youthful experiences as a virtual hostage during the Frondes, coupled with an enduring memory of the chaos that preceded his grandfather’s reign, strengthened his determination to concentrate the power of the state in his own hands. In 1661, after the death of Cardinal Mazarin—the man who successfully navigated the young king through the turbulent politics of his early life—Louis began to rule his kingdom directly. To achieve this end, the king began to restructure aspects of his government. Essential to these reforms was the further development of a corps of professional bureaucrats. These were men dependent upon the king’s favor rather than upon high birth for their authority. These minions gradually circumvented the ancient prerogatives of the upper nobility by performing the necessary but monotonous work that kept the wheels of government turning. The career of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who headed many of the government’s ministries during Louis’s reign, personified this trend. In a society in which kinship legitimized control, his family’s relatively recent ennoblement and its consequent lack of prestige precluded his co-option of the king’s influence.

Low birth notwithstanding, Colbert realized that the efficient management of the state’s resources was crucial to maximizing France’s (and his own) influence. The colonies felt the impact of Colbert’s policies when he embraced a mercantilist agenda in his efforts to channel the wealth of France’s overseas possessions into the coffers of the motherland. To accomplish this end, he standardized colonial commercial and legal practices through a series of edicts. The Code Noir, although published two years after Colbert died, exemplified the minister’s proclivity for organization and attention to detail.¹⁰ Besides regulating slavery, the Code excluded non-Catholics from the colonies and standardized judicial proceedings. These reforms would have an enormous impact on Louisiana’s government, society, and economy. The racial aspects of the Code Noir would play an especially significant role in the colonists’ relationship with the Natchez.

Louis’s and Colbert’s centralizing impulses required men to implement them on a local level. Intendants, officials with fiduciary authority, administered the day-to-day functions of the government. Since the king drew them from his household staff and paid them directly, the intendants executed royal policy without depending on external sources for their salaries.¹¹ Because they often reported on state business in the provinces and audited the account books of those who oversaw it, these independent bureaucrats often found themselves at odds with nobles who had inherited or purchased their offices.¹²

Some of these administrative practices of Old France made their way to the New World, albeit with certain modifications. In Louisiana, the governor acted as chief executive and mirrored to some extent the authority of the monarch. Assisting him was a commissaire-ordonnateur, who managed the fiscal affairs of the colony.¹³ Both held seats on the Superior Council, an advisory board of six or seven important men of the colony. This body mimicked some aspects of the parlements. It first served as a court of last resort; however, soon after its creation, the Superior Council exceeded its Old World model when it acquired legislative powers.¹⁴ Despite the apparent simplicity of this arrangement, Louisiana’s records are strewn with conflicts over the civil and military affairs of the colony. The historian Donald Lemieux observed: “The reason for this conflict lies not within French Louisiana, but rather in Versailles.”¹⁵ The imprecision with which the king defined their powers led to constant bickering between the ordonnateur and the governor. These disputes routinely intruded upon relations with Louisiana’s neighbors. Parsimonious administrators frequently sent the colony’s negotiators to American Indians’ council fires with an insufficient number of the customary gifts, which earned them the derision of their indigenous hosts.

The political divisions in Louisiana reflected larger problems in the domestic French government. Louis found it difficult to increase the state’s revenue because of statutory restraints. He could impose few new nationwide taxes without the consent of the États Générales, a legislative body that had not been convened since 1613. This problem was compounded by the byzantine revenue system. Payments were frequently interrupted because the Crown often granted certain provinces tax exemptions in exchange for advance payments, further throttling the state’s revenue. In other cases, certain regions like Provence negotiated reduced rates for supplying the king’s troops guarding the borders.¹⁶ The nobles and people of these regions jealously clung to these “liberties” for generations after they obtained them. In many instances, the king leased his collections rights to tax farms—essentially granting private individuals and companies the right to gather the nation’s revenues in return for a profit.¹⁷

The king also raised part of the money that he needed through the creation of venal offices. These saleable positions came with inheritable titles that admitted their purchasers into the “nobility of the robe.” Such offices permitted their holders to charge fees for their services. Aside from the promise of steady, if small, returns, Louis’s sale of offices catered to the aspirations of wealthy merchants who wanted to improve their social rank. The use of venality was not new; connections between “public authority and private property” dated back to the Frankish kingdoms of the seventh century. Henry IV increased the number of these saleable positions in the late sixteenth century.¹⁸ His grandson Louis XIV sold still more of these offices to pay for his palaces, his enormous fêtes, his art collections, and, most of all, his wars.

Yet, this solution had its limits. Venal offices were property and could not be recouped by the Crown without compensation and thus passed beyond the reach of the king. This led to the creatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Rising Suns
• 2 Thefts of the Suns
• 3 Impudent Immigrants
• 4 The Many Lands of Natchez Country
• 5 “These Are People Who Named Themselves Red Men”
• 6 Fallen Forts
• Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index