Deep South Tour - Fall 2011 - Day 10

After breakfast we set off hoping that Natchez would redeem itself, and, in due course, it did. We set off back along the Natchez Trace Parkway for a very short distance before turning off into Melrose house, as Natchez dodged most of the Civil war there remain several notable antebellum houses which my learned partner tells me means pre-civil war. Melrose is in many ways the most notable of them; it was built by a successful lawyer John T McMurran.
During the 1830s, Mr. McMurran’s law practice prospered. He and his wife, Mary Louisa, who came from a much wealthier family than her husband, began construction on their estate, Melrose, in 1841. The family moved into the magnificent Greek-revival style home early in 1849. By the mid-1850s, John owned or held interest in five plantations, which included over 9,600 acres of land and 325 slaves.
Melrose is a mansion that is said to reflect "perfection" in its Greek Revival design. The 80-acre estate is now part of Natchez National Historical Park and is open to the public by guided tours, which we took advantage of on this occasion. The house is furnished for the period just before the Civil War. Melrose was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974 despite this date we were told that the house was operating as an upscale bed & breakfast until 1990 and some of the furnishings had never left the house in all that time.
We were shown round the house by an enthusiastic female ranger and we noted the Punka, a fan like device to keep flies off the food, positioned over the dinner table. The downstairs floor coverings were oil cloth which looked like carpet but were painted by hand and were thus easier to clean than carpet. Ironically they are covered by identical carpet to preserve them from our modern shoes, areas are left uncarpeted to allow us to view but never touch the oil cloth and we are expected to accept that the floor is entirely covered but you have to wonder.
Outside of the house there are several outbuildings including the two storied kitchen and dairy buildings, octagonal cistern houses, a smoke house, a privy, slave quarters, a barn and a carriage house. In the hierarchy of slavery the House slaves lived in the upper floor of the kitchen and dairy while the Field slaves had a series of sheds close to the stables. These Field slaves tended the grounds of the estate and it was generally accepted that their lot was significantly harder than the House slaves but nothing like as tough as slaves on the plantations. If a slave misbehaved they could be demoted down the pecking order but that was the sort of reaction you might expect from the most benign of owners, flogging, or branding were also available as a disciplinary option.
In the slave quarters there is a display of various documents relating to slavery, one story relates to the abuse both sexual and physical of a young female slave by a neighbour, with all the good intentions of Mary Lousia and like minded members of the community the best solution they could engineer was to buy the unfortunate girl when her owner had tired of her.
I took a photo of an entry in Mary L’s diary which I will type out in its entirety as it illustrates the best and worst of the paternal Southern view of slavery. She writes:
“We were preparing for the wedding of two of our young servants – two we have reared and trained in the family – the children of old and favourite servants. They were married last Thursday, in our presence, and behaved extremely well with perfect dignity and propriety. They then retired and passed the evening with some invited friends, and had a fine supper, as happy and merry a company as one would wish to see. Would Mrs. Stowe could have viewed the scene, perhaps it might have changed some of her erroneous opinions.”
The above needs no additional comment from me. Along, with the easy observation that the stable block was better appointed than the slave quarters, this brought home the reality of slavery.
As we left Melrose we observed our first Spanish Moss hanging from the trees which is another abiding image of the holiday.
As we returned to the NTP we spotted a sign for Duncan Park Tennis Center and followed its directions. Duncan Park is large and the tennis area is well sited and greets you as you enter the park. There are eight floodlit courts some viewing areas and a pro shop. In the pro shop, not unexpectedly, I met the pro, Henry Hawk Harris. Since we are of a similar vintage we were soon chatting and had I been there longer we would have played. He told me that since many of his players come across the state line from Arkansas and there is a new tennis centre opening there the Natchez response is to build him another 12 courts when previously they had balked at adding four more. I now have an open invitation to play there but I cannot imagine taking him up on it.
We headed on to Natchez and found the self-guided walking tour, the Natchez Trail, which was interesting. We knew from Melrose House that there was another National Historic Home that of William Johnson.
Known as the “barber” of Natchez, William Johnson began his life as a slave. His freedom at age eleven followed that of his mother Amy and his sister Adelia. After working as an apprentice to his brother –in-law James Miller, Johnson bought the barber shop in 1830 for three hundred dollars and taught the trade to free black boys. It was shortly after he established a barber shop in downtown Natchez that he began to keep a diary. The diary was a mainstay in Johnson’s life until his death in 1851.
In 1851 a boundary dispute with his neighbor Baylor Winn found the two men in court. Although, the judge ruled in Johnson’s favor, Winn was not satisfied. Winn, also a free black ambushed Johnson returning from his farm and shot him. Johnson lived long enough to name Winn as the guilty party. Through strange circumstances, Winn was never convicted of the killing. Winn and his defense argued that he was actually white and not a free person of color because of his Indian ancestry in Virginia. Therefore, the “mulatto” boy who accompanied Johnson on that fateful day could not testify against Winn. Mississippi law allowed for blacks to testify against whites in civil cases, but not in criminal cases. Two hung juries could not decide if he was white or black, so Johnson’s Killer walked free.
Although a black man, at the time of his death, Johnson’s owned sixteen slaves. He writes openly in his diary about his slaves and his trial and tribulations of being a slave owner. William Johnson’s diary encapsulates sixteen years of his life. From 1835-1851, Johnson filled fourteen leather bound volumes with diary entries. Today, his diary is an important resource for the study of free blacks, African –American History and American History in general. It is also an important part of his legacy and what sets William Johnson apart from other free blacks during the time period.
Johnson’s house on State Street in downtown Natchez continued to be owned by the family until they sold it to the Ellicott Hill Preservation Society in 1976. The house was then donated to the city who in turn donated to the National Park Service in 1990. After an extensive restoration process, the National Park Service opened the house as a museum detailing William Johnson’s life in 2005.
Our reading of the information in the house yielded another observation; it seemed that most of the freed slaves mentioned were the products of unions between the owner and a female slave, thus creating either embarrassment for the master or some feeling of responsibility for their offspring, either which may have lead them to get their embarrassment/responsibility out of the picture by setting them up away from the situation.
We finished our tour at the Pig Out Inn where I had a “pulled pork” sandwich while Julia had an ice-cream. Later I again refused the supper at the hotel so while Julia had a portion of it I ate the remainder of the previous day’s pizza.
After that we drove back into Natchez and I took far too many shots of the sun going down behind the bridge over the Mississippi – some of which turned out ok. We then stopped off at the tennis club as Hawk had told us that there was a veterans’ session on, there was play but the standard was nothing special.