Natchez Class and Rank Reconsidered

Abstract

During the brief period from 1700 to 1731 French missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators recorded the features of Natchez social life. In 1731 a war with the French led to the surrender and sale into slavery of one sector of the tribe and the dispersal of the remainder, who later were assimilated into the Creek confederacy. In writing the first modern ethnographic reconstruction of Natchez society and culture, Swanton (1911) had to rely upon somewhat fragmentary accounts of the French, principally those of Penicaut, Du Pratz, Dumont, and Charlevoix (notes on early contacts are supplied in Appendix 2). The Natchez are the best described ethnographic example of the Temple Mound cultures of the Lower Mississippi valley, whose archeological record dates back to about 700 A.D. 1 As such, they provide the most striking instance of a stratified social system in aboriginal North America. The historical Natchez villages were scattered along St. Catherine’s Creek, which empties westward into the Mississippi River below the present city of Natchez, Mississippi. They comprised a population, in 1700, of about 3,500 persons in nine villages (Swanton 1911: 39-44). Over this population ruled a divine king, the Great Sun, 2 who administered the capital village directly and appointed a number of high officials, including a Head War Chief, a Master of Temple Ceremonies, two peace or treaty chiefs, a maize chief, an official responsible for public works, and four administrators for public festivities. Four of the other villages were each headed by a War Chief appointed from among the Sun nobility, the matrilineal relatives of the Great Sun. Of four lesser villages, one or two were inhabited by remnants of the formerly independent Tioux tribe and had their own village chiefs but were nonetheless under the authority of the Great Sun. In the central or Great Village, the residence of the Great Sun occupied a raised mound situated across the central plaza from a mound and temple devoted to Sun ancestors and the Sun deity. Former Sun rulers and the sacrificial victims who accompanied their death were interred in the temple. Among those sacrificed were a large retinue of lifelong personal servants, assigned as suckling infants to the Great Sun at his birth as an heir to the throne. Royal succession, as in many of the chiefdoms of the Southeast, was matrilineal.