Forks of the Road

Slave trading had existed in Natchez, Mississippi, long before there was a place called Forks of the Road. But in 1832, amid fears surrounding a cholera epidemic, city officials ordered slave traders to move their businesses outside the city limits.

They settled near the junction of several important roads about a mile east of downtown Natchez. The location was ideal for the trade. Natchez sat at the center of a booming cotton region, steamboats connected the city to the Mississippi River system, and roads leading into Natchez carried travelers and commerce from across the South.

Beginning in the 1830s, Forks of the Road developed into a collection of slave-trading businesses. Enslaved people were brought south from the Upper South and held here until they were sold, sometimes individually and sometimes as families or groups, before being taken to plantations throughout Mississippi and the surrounding region.

The scale can be difficult to comprehend. Over roughly three decades, more than 200,000 people passed through the market, many of them between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.

Then the Union Army, led by Brigadier General Thomas E. G. Ransom, reached Natchez approximately nine days after the fall of Vicksburg, seventy-two miles north of the city. Local residents were taken completely by surprise. Federal forces occupied Natchez on July 13, 1863, bringing the slave market at Forks of the Road to an end.

Shortly after the occupation began, Ulysses S. Grant arrived in the city and established his regional Union Army headquarters at Rosalie Mansion, a grand 1820s home overlooking the Mississippi River.

Word quickly spread about the Union forces at Natchez. Tens of thousands of newly freed people and freedom-seekers, many of whom had been bought or sold at Forks of the Road, flocked to the Union lines. Able-bodied men quickly enlisted, and most were organized into the 6th Mississippi Infantry (African Descent), later officially redesignated as the 58th U.S. Colored Infantry.

From August 1863 to April 1866, the regiment spent most of its service assigned to the Post of Natchez within the District of Vicksburg. Its primary mission was constructing and defending Fort McPherson, a massive Union fortification built on the bluff above Natchez. The presence of an armed, garrisoned Black regiment also served as a powerful deterrent against Confederate attempts to recapture the city.

Union soldiers later dismantled the old slave pens. The buildings disappeared, and over time much of the landscape was absorbed into the growing city.

That is why Forks of the Road can be difficult to understand when you first arrive. There is no preserved slave pen to walk through and no large building marking what happened here. Instead, you are standing in the surviving geography of the place, at the same crossroads where thousands of people once arrived without knowing where they would be taken next.