Natchez Trace - Early 19th Century

Early 19th Century

Despite its brief span of use as a major route by people of the United States, the Trace served an essential function for years. It was the only reliable land link between the eastern States and the trading ports of Mississippi and Louisiana. This brought all sorts of people down the Trace: itinerant preachers, highwaymen and traders and peddlers among them.

As part of the "Great Awakening" movement that swept the country in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the "spiritual development" along the Trace started from the Natchez end and moved up. Several Methodist preachers began working a circuit along the Trace as early as 1800. By 1812 they claimed a membership of 1,067 Caucasians and 267 African Americans.

The Methodists were soon joined in Natchez by other Protestant denominations, including Baptist missionaries and Presbyterians. The latter accompanied the migration of Scots-Irish and Scots into the frontier areas. Both Presbyterians and their frontier offshoot, the Cumberland Presbyterians, were the most active of the three denominations in this backcountry area. They also claimed converts among Native Americans. The Presbyterians started working from the south; the Cumberland Presbyterians worked from the north, as they had migrated into Tennessee from Kentucky.

As with much of the unsettled West, banditry regularly occurred along the Trace. Much of it centered around Natchez Under-The-Hill, as compared with the tame sister of Natchez atop the river bluff (the current Natchez). Under-the-Hill, where barges and keelboats put in with goods from northern ports, was a hotbed for gamblers, prostitutes and drunkenness. The rowdiest of the men were the "Kaintucks", the crude frontiersmen from Kentucky who operated flatboats down the river, and later worked on the steamboats. They delivered goods to Natchez in exchange for pockets full of cash, and treated Natchez Under-the-Hill as what could be called an early 19th century Las Vegas. Then they would walk up the Trace the 450 miles back to Nashville. In 1810 an estimated 10,000 Kaintucks used the Trace to go north and start another river journey.

Worse dangers lurked on the Trace in the areas outside city boundaries. Highwaymen such as John Murrell and Samuel Mason terrorized travelers along the road. They operated large gangs of organized brigands in one of the first examples of land-based organized crime in the United States.