Natchez nabob

The Natchez nabobs were a cohort of rich white male plantation owners, lawyers, and politicians who lived in and around the Natchez District of the lower Mississippi River valley of North America in the 18th and 19th centuries.[1] The term nabob was borrowed into English from one of the languages of India (originally nawab) and broadly describes colonizers who settled in conquered lands and then returned home with great fortunes.[2] According to one historian there were 55 "fabulously wealthy" nabobs of note in the 1850s.[3] Stephen Duncan was one of them, owning at least 15 plantations where he farmed sugar and cotton with more than 250 slaves.[1] The nabobs were closely collected to one another by a web of kinship ties created by both intermarriage and by joint investments in slaves, land, banks, ships, and trains.[4] Most of the nabobs were not native to the south, and consequently their political makeup was different from that of the archetypical southern plantation owners. After the outbreak of the Civil War, many moved back to their New England homes and supported the Union.[1] In 1863 Dr. Stephen Duncan, one of the richest nabobs, returned to his home in New York. Before exiting, he presented the Confederate government with a bill for $185,000, which he claimed as wartime losses resulting from the secession.[1]

The term was in use by 1803, as there is a scrap of paper dated to that year in the American Philosophical Society collection of Claiborne family papers entitled "A List of the Gentlemen Little Nabobs of the Mississippi Territory."[5] Although many of the founders of the nabob class had settled in the district in the 18th century, it was not until the 1830s the clique had calcified: "In addition to agriculture, many of the nabobs were active in banking, commerce, and finance and invested extensively in land, railroads, and stocks and bonds. Their ranks also included rich merchants and lawyers who acquired plantations through marriage or debt. They were some of the wealthiest men in the South, if not the country. By the 1830s, the extreme wealth of the nabobs set them apart from lesser planters and the Natchez townspeople. They began to coalesce as a closed, self-conscious group, establishing their social rank through the creation of status distinctions and remaining aloof from the town. Marriage 'within their station' connected nabob clans through dense ties of kinship and property. Their horizons were national and international more than local."[6]

William Johnson, "the free Negro barber" of Natchez, made a partial list of nabobs in his journal in 1837. These people had probably assembled for the races at Pharsalia Race Course.[7] (Annotations by J. Clayton James, et al.)

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d Scarborough, William (July 11, 2017). "Natchez Nabobs". Mississippi Encyclopedia, Center for Study of Southern Culture.
  2. ^ "nabob, n.", Oxford English Dictionary (3 ed.), Oxford University Press, 2023-03-02, doi:10.1093/oed/5007546010, retrieved 2024-08-25
  3. ^ Bonner, Robert (2004-03-01). "Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth Century South". Civil War Book Review. 6 (2). doi:10.31390/cwbr.6.2.13. ISSN 1528-6592.
  4. ^ James, D. Clayton (1993). Antebellum Natchez. Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-1860-3.
  5. ^ Rothstein (1979), p. 86 n. 3.
  6. ^ Tomich et al. (2021), p. 29.
  7. ^ James (1993), p. 137.

Sources

  • Tomich, Dale W.; Marquese, Rafael de Bivar; Funes Monzote, Reinaldo; Venegas Fornias, Carlos (2021). Reconstructing the landscapes of slavery: a visual history of the plantation in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-4696-6311-1. LCCN 2020044270.
  • Rothstein, Morton (1979). "The Changing Social Networks and Investment Behavior of a Slaveholding Elite in the Ante Bellum South: Some Natchez Nabobs, 1800–1860". In Greenfield, Sidney M.; Strickon, Arnold; Aubey, Robert T. (eds.). Entrepreneurs in Cultural Context. School of American Research, Advanced Seminar Series. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. pp. 65–88. ISBN 978-0-8263-0504-6. LCCN 78021433. OCLC 4859059.


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