Obligated to Destroy Them? Contextualizing Natchez and French “Massacres" in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1698–1731

• In Event: Massacre and Genocide in the Early Modern World I

Abstract

In 1729 the Natchez Indians unexpectedly slaughtered more than 300 French colonists in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Colonial and Atlantic historians have long struggled to explain the sudden breakdown of the French and Natchez alliance and why the Natchez so brutally severed this partnership. They have characterized the killing of these French settlers as a “massacre”, and described the incident as one that was motivated by racial hatred and uniquely bloody in its form. If we draw comparisons to other French possessions within the Atlantic world, this does appear exceptional, yet by examining Native networks and diplomatic practice this violence takes on entirely new significance. By contextualizing this violence within broader patterns of trans-national diplomacy in the Lower Mississippi Valley, it becomes evident that this massacre was not a break from, but rather part and parcel of political exchange within the destabilized geopolitical world of the eighteenth century Native southeast.

Author

• Elizabeth Ellis, University of Pennsylannia