page_title: Natchez revolt
section_title: French response
hierarchical_section_title: Natchez revolt / French response
caption_attribution_description: English: "Carte de Lousiane" from Dumont de Montigny (1753), "Mémoires Historiques sur la Louisiane". Annotated to show main locations relating to the Natchez Massacre. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b23006064/f1.item This &#32;image&#32;was created with Adobe Photoshop.
context_page_description: The Natchez revolt, or the Natchez massacre, was an attack by the Natchez people on French colonists near present-day Natchez, Mississippi, on November 29, 1729. The Natchez and French had lived alongside each other in the Louisiana colony for more than a decade prior to the incident, mostly conducting peaceful trade and occasionally intermarrying. After a period of deteriorating relations, however, Natchez leaders were provoked to revolt when the French colonial commandant, Sieur de Chépart, demanded land from a Natchez village for his own plantation near Fort Rosalie. They plotted their attack over several days and managed to conceal their plans from most of the French; those who overheard and warned Chépart of an attack were considered untruthful and were punished. In a coordinated attack on the fort and the homesteads, the Natchez killed almost all of the Frenchmen, while sparing most of the women and African slaves. Approximately 230 colonists were killed overall, and the fort and homes were burned to the ground.
context_section_description: News of the Fort Rosalie attack reached New Orleans in early December, and the colonists there began to panic. The city depended upon grain and other supplies from the Illinois settlement, and shipments up and down the Mississippi River would be threatened by the loss of Fort Rosalie. Governor Périer reacted to the massacre by forbidding the entry of a delegation of Choctaw people into the city, for fear that they were using the pretext of a friendly visit to launch an attack. He then ordered slaves and French troops to march downstream and massacre a small village of Chaouacha people who had played no part in the uprising in Natchez. His superiors in Paris reprimanded the leader for this act, which may have been intended to prevent any alliance between slaves and Native Americans against the French colonists. Many Louisiana colonists—Dumont de Montigny in particular—blamed Chépart (who was killed by the Natchez) and Périer for the massacre; Louis XV, the French king, ordered Périer back to France in 1732. Périer's replacement was his predecessor, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, whom the French state thought to be more experienced at dealing with the Native Americans of the region. A year earlier, the Company of the Indies had given up control of the colony to Louis XV because it had been costly and difficult to manage even before the rebellion.
  More serious retaliation against the Natchez began late in December and in January 1730, with expeditions led by Jean-Paul Le Sueur and Henri de Louboëy. The two commanders besieged the Natchez in forts built near the site of the Grand Village of the Natchez, a mile or so east of Fort Rosalie, which had been rebuilt. They killed about 80 men and captured 18 women, and released some French women who had been captured during the massacre of Fort Rosalie. The French relied on allied support from Tunica and Choctaw warriors. The Choctaw attacked the Natchez without the French, killing 100 and capturing women and children. This ruined the element of surprise for the French as the Natchez had already scattered. At first, the Natchez were well prepared for French retaliatory strikes, having stocked up several cannons as well as the firearms that they had used in the massacre two months earlier. The Natchez captured by the Choctaw and Tunica allies of the French were given over to the governor and sold into slavery, and some were publicly tortured to death in New Orleans.
  In late February 1730, with Louboëy seeking to catch the Natchez by surprise, the Natchez negotiated a peace treaty and freed French captives, but the French planned an attack on the Natchez fort the following day. The Natchez then brought gifts to Louboëy, but left their fort that night and escaped across the Mississippi River, taking African slaves with them. The next day, Louboëy and his men burned down the abandoned Grand Village fort as the Natchez hid in the bayous along the Black River. A subsequent expedition led by Périer in 1731 to dislodge the Natchez captured many of them and their leaders, including Saint Cosme, who was the new Great Sun, and his mother—the Female Sun, Tattooed Arm. The 387 captives, most of whom had belonged to the pro-French faction of the Natchez, were sold into slavery in Saint-Domingue. Many other Natchez escaped again, now taking refuge with the Chickasaw. Over the next decade, the few hundred remaining Natchez lived a life on the run, waging a low-intensity guerrilla campaign against the French. French historian Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix wrote in his history, "We were not slow in perceiving that the Natchez could still render themselves formidable, and that the step of sending the Sun and all who had been taken with him to be sold as slaves in Saint-Domingue, had rather exasperated than intimidated the remnant of that nation, in whom hatred and despair had transformed their natural pride and ferocity into a valor of which they were never deemed capable."
  The French continued to press for the destruction of the Natchez who now lived among the Chickasaw, traditional all
caption: Map published in 1753 by Dumont de Montigny in his Mémoires Historiques sur la Louisiane, with labels added to show locations of places mentioned in the text
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