The Devil’s Punchbowl
There is a place in Natchez, Mississippi, where the restless souls of a people
cry out for justice. An injustice that many free slaves were inflicted by,
simply for the color of their skin. One of the many facts of American History
kept hidden from the annals of time is the story of “The Devil’s Punchbowl.”
With the passing of the emancipation proclamation many slaves were free to
venture wherever they pleased, with a new found hope and dreams of a life
free of servitude they ventured to new territories hoping to find a
new home, one such place was Natchez, Mississippi. During the civil war the
influx of slaves took the population in Natchez from 10,000 to 120,000 and the
authorities decided to set up walled-off concentration camps forcing thousands
of freed slaves, men, women and children into these camps known as “The Devil’s
Punchbowl.”
The Union soldiers forced the men into hard labor while the women and
children were left to die from starvation. They begged to be released, even
promising to return to their plantation, but the union army refused.
The deteriorating conditions they lived in brought on various diseases, including
smallpox. Up to 20,000 of the free slaves died in a span of a year. The union army did not allow
them to remove the bodies; they were given shovels and told to “bury them where
they drop.”
Today the terrain is overgrown with foliage, plants and trees. It is also
populated with alligators and snakes. It is impossible to navigate through the
thick terrain because it is located in a cavern. The bodies were never
recovered and to this day the local residence talk about the wild peach
groves that grow there but no one will eat the peaches because they had been fertilized
by the remains of the freed slaves.
