Complexion of Empire in Natchez: Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands

By Christian Pinnen

In Complexion of Empire in Natchez, Christian Pinnen examines slavery in the colonial South, using a variety of legal records and archival documents to investigate how bound labor contributed to the establishment and subsequent control of imperial outposts in colonial North America. He examines the dynamic and multifaceted development of slavery in the colonial South and reconstructs the relationships among aspiring enslavers, natives, struggling colonial administrators, and African laborers, as well as the links between slavery and the westward expansion of the American Republic.

By placing Natchez at the focal point, this book reveals the unexplored tensions among the enslaved, enslavers, and empires across the plantation complex. Most important, Complexion of Empire in Natchez highlights the effect that different conceptions of racial complexions had on the establishment of plantations and how competing ideas about race strongly influenced the governance of plantation colonies.

The location of the Natchez District enables a unique study of British, Spanish, and American legal systems, how enslaved people and natives navigated them, and the consequences of imperial shifts in a small liminal space. The differing—and competing—conceptions of racial complexion in the lower Mississippi Valley would strongly influence the governance of plantation colonies and the hierarchies of race in colonial Natchez. Complexion of Empire in Natchez thus broadens the historical discourse on slavery’s development by including the lower Mississippi Valley as a site of inquiry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820358512

Christian Pinnen

Christian Pinnen is professor of history and codirector of African American Studies at Mississippi College and is a 2022–2024 Bright Institute Fellow at Knox College. His research and teaching focus on the history of race, slavery, and the law in the American colonial borderlands.

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ADVISORY BOARD

Vincent Brown, Duke University

Cornelia Hughes Dayton, University of Connecticut

Nicole Eustace, New York University

Amy S. Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University

Ramón A. Gutiérrez, University of Chicago

Peter Charles Hoffer, University of Georgia

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University

Mark M. Smith, University of South Carolina

Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

COMPLEXION OF EMPIRE IN NATCHEZ

Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands

CHRISTIAN PINNEN

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

© 2021 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945150

ISBN: 9780820358505 (hardback : alk. paper)

ISBN: 9780820358512 (ebook)

To Dieter Pinnen

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Purity of Blood and Dark Complexions: French Empire Building in the Lower Mississippi Valley

2. English Bloodlines and the Expansion of Empire: Natchez 1763 to 1779

3. Masters of Complexion? Loyalists, Patriots, and Opportunists in the Colonial Backcountry

4. Spanish Complexions in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Making Race in Natchez

5. Gendered Complexions: Freedom and Interracial Relationships in Spanish Natchez

6. New Crop, New Rules of Complexion: From Prince Tobacco to King Cotton

7. Mississippi Fever: Fortifying the Malignant Empire of Complexion

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Approximately a lifetime ago, this book began as my dissertation. The thesis changed, the arguments grew, and I became indebted to communities of scholars, colleagues, and friends across the world. I have been privileged to meet many people that encouraged me along the way. Throughout, friends, professors, and colleagues have supported me unfailingly.

The University of Southern Mississippi afforded me many mentors. Curtis Austin, Sarah Franklin, Louis Kyriakoudes, William Scarborough, and Kyle Zelner challenged me to become a better scholar and teacher throughout my time in Hattiesburg. Max Grivno took an early interest in this project, and his encouragement and unwillingness to let me settle for less than excellence shepherded me through graduate school and into my tenure at Mississippi College. He sharpened my often-inchoate thoughts, and reemphasized the importance of precise, thorough scholarship. He insisted that I ask large questions of a small corner of slavery’s empire. Reading draft after draft of applications, conference papers, and chapters, he continually encouraged me to move beyond what I judged satisfactory. His mentorship as a friend remains an important resource for me and my scholarship. I owe him a great debt.

The research and writing of this book would have been impossible without the generous financial support of several institutions. The McCain dissertation fellowship at the University of Southern Mississippi afforded me the opportunity to spend the 2011–12 academic year writing and researching. I received research fellowships from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, the Louisiana History Research Fellowship of the Special Collections at the Louisiana State University Libraries, and the German Historical Institute’s doctoral fellowship allowed me to visit the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. At Mississippi College, several faculty development grants provided funding for the last research trips to complete the manuscript. I could only complete the project because of the generous support from all of these institutions.

I am indebted to commentators and audiences at conferences large and small who suggested different approaches and pointed me to analytical paths not yet taken. Matt Childs, Kevin Dawson, Paul Finkelman, Jeanne-Pierre Le Glaunec, Rebecca Goetz, Paul Hoffman, Christopher Morris, Greg O’Brien, Adam Rothman, and Kim Todt all aided the eventual manuscript with their expertise. The two anonymous readers from University of Georgia Press suggested many improvements that made this book much better. Earlier versions of sections of chapter 4 and 5 appeared in a different form in the Latin Americanist Volume 61, Issue 4, December 2017. Some of the cases discussed in this book also appear in a chapter in Contact, Conquest, and Colonization: How Practices of Comparing Shaped Empires and Colonialism Around the World and in Cultural Mobility and Knowledge Formation in the Americas, which grew out of a conference of the Bavaria America Academy in 2016.

Many people over the last decade have offered their time, camaraderie, encouragement, comments, and advice. As part of my cohort at Southern Mississippi, Tim Hemmis, Wesley Joyner, Matt McGrew, and Dennis Conklin all enriched this native German’s American experience as colleagues, roommates, on the basketball court, and during research trips. At the Latin American Section of the Southern Historical Association, many new friends assisted with an inquisitive push here and help with historiography there. Colleagues and friends Monica Hardin, Bill van Norman, Tyler Parry, Diana Reigelsperger, Tamara Spike, William Sturkey, Rob Taber, and Eleonora Rohland helped in various ways to improve the book. Charles Weeks and Aaron and Susan Anderson all graciously opened their homes to me during research trips to Jackson and Natchez. Mimi Miller and the volunteers at the Historic Natchez Foundation guided my research in the court records there. I am thankful for Benjamin Lange, a friend since our studies at the University of Bonn in 2002. He was my research assistant on a key research trip to Seville, and spent two weeks immersed in the archives, sacrificing his vacation for this project. I owe him for this, and much more.

Since arriving at Mississippi College in 2012, I have found new champions. Kristi Melancon’s and Daniel White’s friendship, as well as constant encouragement, have improved my writing, my teaching, and made me a better academic. Larry Logue has read and commented on every chapter in this book and modeled how scholarship and teaching at a small liberal arts college ought to be done. He eloquently demonstrates how to be a productive teacher and an engaged scholar. My dean Jonathan Randle graciously and generously supported my work. He has allowed me to spend a few more hours on the manuscript here and there, and I will be forever grateful for his support. Claudia Conklin, now head of Mississippi College’s Speed Library, tirelessly filled my ILL requests and was able to deliver the books and microfilms I continually needed.

Several people volunteered their own valuable time to read parts of the book. Kelly Kennington, Tamara Spike, Allison Madar, Kristi Richard Melancon, David Miller, and Michael Woods read drafts at various stages. At the University of Georgia Press, Walter Biggins took on the manuscript in its earliest form and championed it through the submission stages. Nathaniel Holly saw it cross the finish line, and I am thankful for both.

My parents, Verena and Dieter Pinnen deserve my everlasting gratitude. They continually supported me, allowing me to be the first in my family to attend college. Neither they nor I could ever have foreseen that I would ultimately earn a Ph.D. from an American University. It fills me with great sadness that my father, Dieter Pinnen, passed away suddenly before this book saw the light of day. He always encouraged me to shoot for the moon and to follow my path. I dedicate this book to him. My in-laws Bob and Lou offered support and always lent a helping hand. I am very thankful for that. My wife Sydney moved to Mississippi for me, and our children Annabel and John Christian, who saw a little less of me while I finished the book, always supported me. Thank you for everything.

Introduction

In the fall of 1722, about four savages fired on six negroes who had been cutting wood, killing one, Bougou. Immediately before the incident, the savages were talking to the negroes[,] who had stopped to eat, possibly trying to entice them to leave their enslavers.¹ The Natchez, who executed this maneuver, were concerned with the new French outpost on the banks of the Mississippi River and the concomitant expansion of French settlers and their plantations. The warriors attacked one of the outlying plantations on St. Catherine’s Creek but targeted enslaved Africans—killing one and wounding another—rather than white colonists. Enslaved Africans became pawns in the conflict because the Natives had evidently observed the treatment of Atlantic Africans by the French and were well aware of African people’s denigrated social standing in French society. Now they contested the Europeans’ right to the space for settlement along the Mississippi River and thus thrust the meaning of race, and definitions of slavery and freedom, to the center of imperial issues in the region. The Natchez treated the enslaved Africans akin to livestock in this early episode, as they had previously killed French property to express their dissatisfaction with the Europeans.²

The Natives understood that enslaved Africans were essential for the French to sustain a successful colony this far north from New Orleans. They had also become aware of the Africans’ status as unfree based on their complexion rather than on their captivity alone. The French, of course, recognized the danger and began to move their enslaved people closer to the plantation and eventually into the safety of the buildings. They sheltered their investment and shielded the enslaved from further attacks, probably hoping this would remain an isolated incident.³ Yet this was only the beginning of a struggle that involved people of all complexions in Natchez. The 1720s—the first decade of sustained colonization in the area—required the French to create racial hierarchies through a system of complexions that they were fatally unable to manage.

Seventy years later, a free woman of color took a more active role to maneuver the fault lines of imperial conflict. As the Natchez District transitioned from Spanish to American rule in 1797, Amy Lewis had bound her future closely to the Spanish governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, and to Spanish law. Her owner had died and, in his will, freed her and their son.⁴ The owner’s sister, however—an Anglo-American settler—contested the will and attempted to reenslave the two. Defending her freedom, Lewis begged Gayoso to take her with him to his new post in New Orleans. Lewis declared that she saw no prospect of a speedy determination and the pangs of suspense being more terrible to her tha[n] the most dreadful certainty, she begs your Excellency to grant her permission, to remove her suit to the tribunal at Orleans where a more speedy decision may in all probability take place.⁵ She lost the case, and when Gayoso left without her, she was promptly reenslaved. Lewis tried to negotiate an advantageous outcome in a region in which the meaning of complexion, slavery, and freedom had been constantly shifting for decades. The last shift of the imperial landscape cast Lewis into the chasm of American slavery, from which she never escaped.

The Natchez District changed hands four times in the span of roughly a century. The French attempted to settle it in the early eighteenth century, but Natchez warriors and enslaved rebels forced the French to withdraw in 1729. However, the Natives were decimated in the ensuing French retribution campaign, which left the area open to travelers, sojourners, hunters, and traders, but without sustained settlement. After the French and Indian War, Great Britain claimed the region as part of West Florida in 1763, and then lost it to Spain in 1779 during the American Revolution. Spain itself did not hold on to it for very long, as border negotiations with the United States eventually made Natchez a part of the American republic in 1795.

Throughout these ups and downs of settler colonialism, Europeans worked out the theoretical nature of complexion while seeking new ways to exploit the labor of enslaved Africans. The Natchez District’s development as a slave society seemed to continue unabated but, investigated closely, reveals fault lines enhanced by Atlantic Africans’ attempts to challenge their enslavers. I argue that people of African descent helped to create and shape legal cultures by manipulating European legal systems to expand their rights through constant efforts to litigate their freedom.⁶ This approach allows a comparison of French, Spanish, and Anglo-American conceptions of race, freedom, and slavery in a single place, involving the same population under the same economic circumstances.⁷ The enslaved may have wielded no legal or administrative power in Natchez, but as environmental agents who stood between enslavers and land, they did maintain an influence over the crops and the economic success of the colony in the Atlantic market.⁸ While the agency of enslaved people has to be carefully evaluated, in certain moments Atlantic Africans could become actors and litigants, even if they were most frequently seen and treated as subjects.⁹

The telos of previous histories of Natchez is far too frequently designed to explain the rise of the antebellum cotton empire. My investigation of the dynamics of race and enslavement in the context of four different legal systems on their own terms—and before the first cotton boom—reveals a much less defined outcome of racial definitions and attitudes than might be suspected from the standard treatment of Natchez. Indeed, even the basic histories of westward expansion in the Southeast, including the newest ones by Edward Baptist or Walter Johnson, for example, fall into this category. Natchez, and by extension the lower Mississippi Valley (or the cotton frontier) is often viewed as what Adam Rothman justifiably called Slave Country.¹⁰ Yet the lower Mississippi Valley was not already a slave country, nor was it necessarily destined to become one, when the French began to settle it in earnest in the early eighteenth century. For the next century, the area was inhabited by a fluctuating group of people—Native Americans, Atlantic Africans, and various Europeans—who in turn shaped social manifestations of race, slavery, and imperial expansion. Captivity, bound labor, and other modes of production consistently drove the region toward the nascent market economies of Europe, but there were multiple moments in which the eventual outcome was very much in doubt. It would be a mistake, then, to ascribe a manifest destiny to the borderland’s past.

Complexions of Empire in Natchez examines slavery in a colonial Sunbelt using legal records to investigate how bound labor contributed to the establishment and subsequent control of imperial outposts in colonial North America. It examines the dynamic and multifaceted development of slavery in the colonial South and reconstructs the relationships among aspiring enslavers, Natives, struggling colonial administrators, and African laborers, as well as the links between slavery and the westward expansion of the American republic. Placing Natchez at the center point reveals unexplored tensions among the enslaved, enslavers, and empires.¹¹ Historians have generally debated the legal justifications and ramifications of race and slavery by separating the British colonies in North America from the British Caribbean and their French and Spanish neighbors. Only in the last decade have borderlands historians included all European colonies in North America in the conversation about slavery, thereby widening the lens from Jamestown to Santa Fe.¹² By illuminating the complex interactions of slavery and law in the microcosm of the Natchez District, this study contributes to rich conversations in the context of slavery and law.

This book engages three historiographies that, taken together, create a mosaic of Natchez in the eighteenth century. It sits at the intersection of literatures that address geographic, legal, and racial developments in the borderlands, broadly conceived. In geographic terms, Natchez was a liminal space. I situate Natchez as a geographic outlier at the outskirts of what Ernesto Bassi defines as the transimperial Greater Caribbean. This allows me to treat Natchez and its various people as a group in flux, and as a region whose future was not predetermined by the looming takeover of King Cotton. Rather, I can focus on the multiple projects its inhabitants developed to envision their future.¹³ As colonizers from France, Spain, and Anglo-America imagined their future in the region, they had to contend with the enslaved laborers they held captive and the Native Americans who possessed the land. Therefore, settlers developed legal mechanisms that allowed them to control their enslaved workers—both African and Native American—and constructed legal and cultural definitions of complexions to justify the enslavement. Enslaved people contributed to this process with their own visions of the future devoted to freedom, and hence heavily influenced the course of Natchez’s early history.

Natchez shared many characteristics with other European outposts of the eighteenth century in the lower Mississippi Valley, and it may be most similar to St. Louis farther upriver.¹⁴ However, few European outposts shared the district’s multinational occupants and the resulting variety of legal systems that governed race and defined freedom. Natchez allows me to track the varying and frequently changing legal interpretations of race in a liminal space that generated more flexibility for Africans, Indians, and Europeans to negotiate their standing in society. The resulting complex histories reveal anecdotes of people of all races who sought to tie the meaning of complexion in each empire to their definition of freedom. Those definitions frequently conflicted, and these conflicts played out in courts, which allows historians a glimpse at the world these people sought to create. In the context of legal realities and theoretical approaches to define race in conjunction with law, I argue that the European actors in the lower Mississippi Valley used complexion in combination with socioracial categories to define a person’s status on a nonwhite spectrum.¹⁵

Complexions of Empire in Natchez marks an important departure in the histories of borderland slavery. It includes the lower Mississippi Valley in the debate by refocusing the analysis on Natchez. The town’s location allows for a comprehensive comparison of French, British, Spanish, and American legal systems. In a sense, this book follows Juliana Barr’s call to unite the narratives of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Southeast and Southwest into a new colonial South—a colonial Sun Belt—sweeping from the Atlantic to Pacific.¹⁶ I do so by focusing on the cultural and legal consequences of imperial shifts in a small place over the course of the long eighteenth century.

The French introduced a legal code to their Louisiana colony in 1724 based on a previous iteration from the Caribbean. The Louisiana Code Noir developed as part of a negotiation between local interests, the examples of the other Caribbean slave societies, and legal traditions out of mainland France. Yet the implementation of the laws and the various reactions they triggered among the European, African, and Indian people in Louisiana all point to ongoing negotiations about the actual meaning of complexion. As Native, European, and African cultures met in the lower Mississippi Valley, the Code Noir remained inadequate to ensure French control over the Natchez District because enslaved Africans and Native Americans denied the French legal superiority.¹⁷ For example, French law relied on testimony as the most central part of its judicial process. Strict guidelines existed regarding the recording of testimony, irrespective of complexion, and these allowed the voices of Africans to be recorded. Subsequently, Atlantic Africans gained influence over the court’s ultimate rulings, even if those were not necessarily in their favor. Their complexion was not an obstacle to their testifying.¹⁸

The British empire of the eighteenth century that followed French control after 1763 differed in several aspects: The British predominantly focused their empire building on an early form of market-driven expansion, slowly moving from mercantilism to precapitalism governed by an expanding constitutional monarchy. The majority of the enslavers examined in this book were Anglo-American immigrants who came to Natchez to establish a plantation enterprise from 1763 onward. Their background in Anglo-American slavery and the British Atlantic market predisposed them to understand human bondage as a system that rested on patriarchy and had to rely heavily on free trade within the empire. Within the Anglo-American system—stretching from Canada south to the Caribbean islands—the patriarch ruled supreme over his white or African-descended family. A legal system established a century prior in Virginia and the Caribbean supported this patriarchy and granted the enslaver tremendous power over the bodies and goods produced by people under his yoke. Based on that understanding, Anglo settlers conceived the British model as vastly superior to its predecessors. To them, liberty and success were tightly connected to slavery.

Spain, in contrast, governed its empire under the rule of an absolute monarch, slowly modernizing through the Bourbon Reforms. Spanish colonial policies had long been grounded in a system of slavery that presumed that slavery and liberty were not diametrically opposed. Spanish America had a system of patriarchy based on the Catholic Church and the absolute power of the royal regent. This system sought to control and regulate the behavior of families, including their human captives. Additionally, there was a difference in the legal structure that merits deeper investigation. The Spanish legal tradition in its American colonies developed in a peculiar setting. Church law competed with civil (Roman) law. It pitted enslavers against ecclesiastical authorities, royal officials, and enslaved persons. This, and premodern ideas about the individual and liberty, made for a specific place for Atlantic Africans in Spanish society. People of color in the absolutist legal matrix simultaneously constituted chattel, vassals of the Spanish king, and persons with souls. Therefore, they could achieve freedom as a result of the complex legal regime imported by Spaniards in which power was largely—if not exclusively—vested in the sovereign rather than the feudal nobility.¹⁹

The Spanish imported their system of laws and semi-legal practices to Natchez in 1781, thus setting up Anglo-American enslavers for an odd battle. Their human property was still theirs, but now the focus of patriarchy had shifted. No longer were the patriarchs the ultimate focus of power, but the church and the royal administrator could also technically intervene in the enslavers’ affairs with their human chattel. This caused several cultural crises, often expressed in economic issues that pitted a demand for a free market on the side of the enslaver against Spanish colonial interests. Enslavers’ frustration soon became palpable, peace between settlers and imperial administrators brittle, and threats only thinly veiled. Not only did the Spanish (sometimes to the benefit of enslavers) intervene in economic matters, but they also repeatedly interfered with the paternalistic slave power in Natchez. In the end, the majority of Natchez’s Anglophone population was relieved to see the Iberians abandon the district. As enslavers did across the Caribbean when given the chance, Natchez’s slave owners were determined to retake the full power of paternalism in 1798, when the United States extended its reach to the banks of the Mississippi.²⁰

Transitions from empire to empire remained incomplete because some elements of the settlers or the enslaved populations refused to let the periods of liminality pass by without taking action. White and African residents realized that there was a chance at these junctures to enhance one’s economic viability or standing in the community. Yet because these transitions remained incomplete, the actual power changes were jarring to Natchez’s people, especially so to the enslaved African population. The clearest example of this was the last transition from the Spanish Empire to the American republic. With the stroke of a pen, the Treaty of San Lorenzo (Pinckney’s Treaty) made Natchez, and much of Mississippi, an American place in 1795. Even though a similar transition occurred in New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory, the transition there was less jolting. The Code Napoléon continued to have an important place in the legal world of Louisiana and in the management of slavery across the territory and state.²¹ Residents experienced the change as less drastic, and all complexions in Louisiana’s population could continue to use a legal code that presented few new challenges in its definition of race or citizenship. This did not happen in Natchez. Enslavers welcomed American law with open arms and were easily enticed to purge the district of any vestige of the Spanish legal system that had left the control of their human property in the balance. For the enslavers of the district, the appearances of clear racial demarcations into African and white were much more alluring than anything else the Spanish may have been able to offer.

The ways through which the people of Natchez incubated ideas of race and empire make it worthy of detailed study. As settlers and enslavers encountered the different empires that ruled Natchez in succession, they ultimately forced those empires to negotiate the transitions. These negotiations were sometimes subtle but always became obvious in regard to slavery, race, property, courts, and laws. In many ways, administrators had to base their decisions on either the spirit of the law or letter of the law to justify their decisions. Court cases and rulings, therefore, were a focal point in these negotiations and provide the best sources to develop a clear picture of the intricate paths settlers and colonial administrators walked as they attempted to reconcile their positions. Free and enslaved Atlantic Africans complicated these negotiations by engaging the courts on their own whenever possible, creating a tangle of human relations among settlers, colonial administrators, and Atlantic Africans. Essentially, each case and new legal situation created novel precedents that administrators weighed carefully. Officials struggled in their ability to succinctly manage the population of the district. In fact, the settlers and their fondness for litigating race played a larger role in preempting Natchez’s success than any imperial mismanagement by forcing imperial administrators to redeploy scarce resources to engage the local suits. Local settlers constantly coalesced into competing groups, slaveholder versus nonslaveholder, debtor versus creditor, and many other adversaries over day-to-day management of the area. This was overcome—or, rather, made workable—only when the American republic extended its territorial umbrella to Natchez in 1798.

To understand the events unfolding in Natchez, conceptions of what a modern reader understands as race are extremely important. The term itself is loaded with preconceptions; it is hence important to lay out how this book will engage the ideas behind the term. Significantly, race is not merely a consequence of material interests (an ‘effect’ of class) but rather linked in complex ways to economic, political, and ideological structures; social conditions; and systems of significations one of which, I contend, is complexion.²² In other words, race never existed—and still does not exist—as a clearly defined or biologically relevant delineation of humans. Barbara Fields argues that race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of π) that can be plausibly imagined to live an external life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.²³ Likewise, Alexander Weheliye construes race, racialization, and racial identities as ongoing sets of political relations that require, through constant perpetuation, via institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructure, languages, technologies, sciences, economics, dreams, and cultural artifacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west.²⁴ Even today, then, race can be flexible in its definition, and it historically has been, and continues to be, reimagined for different circumstances and social situations. Generally, Anglo-American people used the idea of race to define who was white and to then construct a social order to their benefit.²⁵ Before the Age of Revolution separated most slaveholding European colonies from their mother countries, racial concepts were even harder to define.

Although people have used the word race over the centuries, its meaning has fluctuated widely. The eighteenth century, in which my investigation of the Natchez District is rooted, has recently been targeted as an especially fruitful period for the study of the term. Due to the Enlightenment and the rise of what participants defined as scientific inquiry in some fields, contemporary scholars also began to investigate phenotype across the globe. Hence, only in the eighteenth century, however, would invocations of nature as the basis of difference between men and women as well as between human groups begin to emerge as a prominent discourse. Prior to the rise of this (wildly inaccurate) science, religion and belonging to Christian communities were more significant, yet these associations were quickly overtaken by taxonomic enterprises in the eighteenth century.²⁶

People of all complexions continuously attempted to adjust to the intermingling of Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans in the lower Mississippi Valley. The violence of the Natchez warriors in 1722 specifically targeted enslaved Africans, suggesting that they understood the emerging institution of racial slavery and showing their determination to be read or seen as superior to the bound African laborers. This indicates that negotiations about status were ongoing. By the 1790s, as Amy Lewis lost her freedom under the rule of American law, interpretations of complexion had begun to change dramatically. As the Americans took over Natchez "by the beginning of the nineteenth century, skin color began to consistently be privileged as the sign of racial identity in literary, legal, and public arenas, and skin color became the primary tool to mark slavery, freedom, and presumed innate racial qualities."²⁷

Ideas of race in a premodern sense are crucial to the complex relations between people in the lower Mississippi Valley. European academics residing in universities across England, France, Italy, and elsewhere attempted to develop a pseudoscientific system to explain the blackness of Africans. Through the use and misuse of travelogues and what they reportedly observed—or subsequently read—European writers and academics built a picture of Africa that deeply influenced the discourse of race, in particular in France. Blackness became, as Andrew Curran asserts, a "body-based négritude in which the blood, the semen, and the organs of African people were all described as being black or black-like by 1787. Similarly, African people were rendered accountable for their own enslavement by 1704, and by 1732 dictionaries established the tautology that black" equaled enslaved. Accounts also gender Africans as primarily male through the use of predominantly male pronouns.²⁸ I will privilege complexion over race where appropriate. There was not yet an inherent meaning of race because it could denote anything from skin color to a sign of health, behavior, or emotions and more to white Europeans.²⁹

The Spanish likewise developed a concept of race that changed over the centuries. By the eighteenth century, they had arrived at their own version of a seemingly scientific model to sort people of varying complexions into a fixed system that represented social standing in conjunction with skin color. These classifications were given expression in highly stylized casta paintings that depicted two parents of various racial mixtures or pure white and African descendant and their respective offspring and hence established a sort of color chart that was designed to describe all possible racial gradients. Nevertheless, the Spanish system of racial stratification remained fluid. While caste certainly was important, cultural markers such as dress, education, and wealth could change the way the empire categorized people in census records and treated them in court.³⁰

The English found a different way to classify nonwhite people and their association with captivity. Michael Guasco argues that when Englishmen thought and wrote about slavery during this period [pre-1619], they were typically much more concerned about the possibility of their own enslavement than they were with the condition of African or Indian peoples.³¹ Only in time, throughout the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment period, did Englishmen work out the problem and begin to identify blackness with slavery in their Atlantic colonies. Before then, they were beholden like any other Europeans to the elastic way that skin color could operate in the eighteenth century and about the status Britons accorded to Christian profession.³² The following pages highlight how uniformly European empires embraced African slavery, but found various paths to defining race in their societies.

Complexions of Empire in Natchez focuses on changing laws in the Natchez District, but it speaks to issues of pressing concern across the plantation complex. Most importantly, this work seeks to highlight the effect that different conceptions of complexions had on the establishment of plantations and how competing ideas about race strongly influenced the governance of plantation colonies. Along the Atlantic Seaboard, racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty. There were too few free poor on hand to matter. And by lumping Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large enslavers in a single master class by the nineteenth century.³³ Rooted in English cultural origins, Natchez’s enslaver majority followed the same ideology. Even though the Spanish dons never threatened their acquisition of wealth, Spanish laws questioned, and perhaps endangered, inherent Anglo-American ideas about race, social structures, and the role of government in the economy.

Natchez’s enslaved Africans and free people of color challenged white authority under the French, English, and Spanish, succeeding more often than enslavers preferred. Throughout the first century of Natchez’s existence as a trading post and town, the enslaved navigated courts and achieved freedom. Even though the enslaved and enslavers did not make the laws, their litigation shaped the understanding of race and often determined what free truly meant in relationship to white liberty. The liminal century in Natchez created overwhelming ambiguity in these relationships through war, revolution, and constant negotiation between empires. This in turn afforded room for people of color and Native Americans to renegotiate relationships with white authorities and each other.³⁴ Women of color, for example, were successful in either defending their freedom or claiming rights for people of color in Spanish colonies, but not in the English Empire. As empire after empire failed to develop a successful staple crop, the enslaved Africans exploited the transitional periods and strove to establish their freedom. By doing so, they molded the definition of race and influenced slavery and its development in Natchez.³⁵

This study is not designed to encourage a legitimization of the Tannenbaum thesis, which famously argued that—in essence—enslaved Africans were treated better in Spanish slave societies because of Iberian legal codes based on Roman law.³⁶ Since its publication, Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen has received its fair share of criticism, and many of his core ideas have been refuted. However, I contend that it is legitimate and necessary to critically engage Tannenbaum’s general thesis. Following Michelle McKinley’s line of reasoning, it seems reasonable that we use Tannenbaum’s thesis to understand the legal framework adopted by subalterns and situate it within a broader sociolegal conversation about law, legality, and legal mobilization. This is particularly true in Natchez, where litigants of color used various strategies to achieve freedom and consistently altered them when new legal environments forced change.³⁷

Entangled in the imperial struggles, African-descended people were able to explore their own interest in the transitional period that characterized the first century of Natchez’s history. As the fate of these empires hung in the balance, the decisions of Atlantic Africans and African Americans offer glimpses into slavery in the American borderlands. These liminal periods generated thresholds in which ordinary acts lost customary meaning for both Africans and Europeans and created extraordinary, though short-lived, legal flexibility. The elasticity of legal codes created both by liminality and legal pluralism ended only when the expanding American republic securely fastened the Natchez District and its people to republican laws, securing enslavers’ hold on their human chattel.³⁸

The book reveals how slavery, race, and the pursuit of wealth complicated not just the westward march of the American republic but also the success of every empire that sought a hold on the Natchez District. Natchez’s fields, meadows, and swamps offer fertile soil for such an undertaking. Building on the concept of legal plurality, my work emphasizes the choices Africans, Indians, and Europeans made in Natchez.³⁹ The importance and long-term sustainability of the slave economy in Natchez was paramount to colonizers. The choices they and their administrators made on law and slavery far outweighed the decisions passed down from the European metropolis. It follows, then, that ideas of race, slavery, and empire were closely intertwined. However, with the arrival of United States troops in the spring of 1797, opportunities for the enslaved to gain their freedom began to wane under the merciless Mississippi sun, the rise of King Cotton, and the easy access to American and European markets that the United States government afforded Natchez’s enslavers. The highly profitable market for cotton ended hopes of freedom for people of color. It ushered in a solidification of legal codes in Natchez and terminated the liminal century that had afforded enslaved and free people of color some flexibility in a developing slave society.

In examining how Natchez passed through its imperial stages under French, British, and Spanish rule into American hands, Complexion of Empire in Natchez employs a largely chronological approach. The chapters lead the reader through the changes in the Natchez District and highlight the transitions wrought by colonial overlords. I place a special emphasis on the transitional periods from empire to empire. The chapters highlight the change in slave systems instituted by each new ruler and the resulting transnational character of the Natchez District. The first chapter, The Purity of Blood and Dark Complexions, analyzes the Natchez District’s first decades under French control. The French tried to establish a slave society in Natchez, emulating the successful labor regimes of their Caribbean and southeastern colonies. However, the French warred with Native Americans and eventually abandoned their expansionary plans in 1729 after a revolt of Natchez Indians and enslaved Africans destroyed the fledgling settlement. For the next two decades, the Natchez District remained unsettled by Europeans.

Enslaved people in Natchez were not exclusively African. During the first decades of the settlement, a small number were American Indians. By enslaving both peoples, the French had to relate to three different cultures of slavery: African, Native American, and European. French notions of racial superiority did nothing to ease the tension. The French underestimated the explosive nature of the relationships among the various groups, and this misjudgment led to the downfall of French rule. They were unable to prevent an alliance between enslaved Africans and Natchez Indians, and their attempt to envelop the Indian nations of the lower Mississippi Valley in binding treaties or intertribal warfare was ultimately unsuccessful. Their greed led to the downfall of the colony and all of French Louisiana. Although no court records survive, the origins of the Natchez settlement already reflected the issues that would plague the region in the decades to come, as Africans and Europeans sought to reshape ideas of complexion and freedom. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the struggles within the Natchez Nation itself. The Natchez people were in a state of transition, as they accepted refugees displaced by the British Indian slave trade from across the Southeast, as well as enslaved refugees from the French plantations, and incorporated these people into their own culture. The Indian nation had to come to terms with an increasingly complicated racial web that started to define its society.

In analyzing the district’s transition from France to Great Britain, chapter 2, English Bloodlines and the Expansion of Empire, examines British efforts beginning in 1763 to turn Natchez—now part of West Florida—into a profitable part of their American empire. The British were equally eager to create a permanent settlement in this area and surmised they could avoid the problems of the French. Natchez did experience a slow rebirth, and incoming settlers continued to rely on slavery. They also had to accept the important roles the enslaved Africans played in their proposed plantation economy, and they crafted a law code designed to ensure success in