Notes
221 Notes Introduction 1. Natchez Daily Democrat, January 11, 1898, 6. 2. Harrison Ross to Wolf Geisenberger, Chattel Mortgages, February 27, 1895, January 27, 1896, February 8, 1897, January 11, 1898; Anderson and Mary Ross to Wolf Geisenberger, Chattel Mortgage, February 22, 1882; Lawrence Woods et al. to Wolf Geisenberger, Chattel Mortgage, January 11, 1894, Office of Records, Adams County, Natchez, Mississippi; Ronald L. F. Davis, The Black Experience in Natchez: 1720–1880 (Denver: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1994), 162–170; 1886 Natchez City Census, Natchez Collection , California State University, Northridge; U.S. Census (1880, 1900) Population Schedules, Adams County, Mississippi. 3. Harrison Ross to Wolf Geisenberger, Chattel Mortgages, May 6, 1880, February 27, 1895, January 27, 1896, February 8, 1897, January 11, 1898, Office of Records, Adams County, Natchez, Mississippi; Ronald L. F. Davis, Good and Faithful Labor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 1–9, 58–59, 169–184; Davis, Black Experience, 158–170; U.S. Census (1880, 1900) Population Schedules, Adams County, Mississippi. 4. Some historians have contended that the system of tenant farming was not all that new and in fact was a continuation of prevalent practices in upcountry cotton-producing areas with few slave owners. However, the Natchez District was an epicenter of large plantations run with slave labor. See Frederick A. Bode and Donald E. Ginter, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 1–20. 5. Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), xi–xvi; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 291–349. 6. The ten merchant families chosen for this research were the combined Abbotts/ Flemings, Beekmans, Carpenters, Friedlers, Geisenbergers, Jacobses, Lemles, Lowenburgs, Paynes, and Perraults. Their individual histories, members, and attributes will be covered completely in chapter 2. 7. Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crops of the South, 1800–1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), 199– 345; Davis, Good and Faithful Labor, 1–9, 58–59, 169–184; Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of 222 Notes Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 31–52; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (1977, repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 126–148, 171–199; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 291–349; Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, xi–xvi; David Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 58–63; Louis Kyriakoudes, “LowerOrder Urbanization and Territorial Monopoly in the Southern Furnishing Trade: Alabama, 1871–1890,” Social Science History 26 (Spring 2002): 179–198. Chapter 1. Old Ways and New Realities 1. Natchez had informally been surrendered by Mayor John Hunter to Commander James S. Palmer of the USS Iroquois on May 13, 1862. But in the intervening months, with almost all able-bodied men now in uniform on Confederate battlefronts, no one was left to defend Natchez save for an underage-overage militia. Natchez citizens grew increasingly edgy as Union gunboats passed frequently, Confederate guerrillas raided cotton plantations in the surrounding countryside, and the very large local slave population grew restive with the anticipation of their liberation with occupation—spawning fears of slave uprisings. See the Natchez Weekly Courier, May 14, 1862, 1; Davis, Black Experience in Natchez, 126–127; Edith Wyatt Moore, Natchez Under-the-Hill (Natchez, Miss.: Southern Historical Publications , 1958), 98–99; Charles L. Dufor, “The Conquest of the Mississippi,” in The Guns of ’62, Vol. 2 of The Image of War, 1861–65, ed. William C. Davis (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1982), 255–322. 2. See Commodore W. D. Porter’s report quoted in Thomas Reber, Proud Old Natchez (Natchez, Miss.: self-published, 1909), 39; see also Moore, Natchez, 99. 3. Moore, Natchez, 99; Robert Gordon Pishel, Natchez: The Museum City of the Old South (Tulsa, Okla.: Magnolia Publishing, 1959), 84, 103. 4. By one Southern account a small detachment of the local militia “Silver Grays” was led that day by a seriously wounded Major Douglas Walworth, home from the front recovering, and it was he who gave the order to fire on a larger force of “fifteen or twenty bluejackets” coming ashore—much to his later regret. See Moore, Natchez, 99; Natchez Weekly...
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