The Devil's Punchbowl

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.