By 1860, Adams County — with Natchez as its seat — was the richest county in the United States by per capita wealth. The wealth was cotton. The labor was enslaved. More millionaires lived within a few miles of Natchez than anywhere else in America. They built the mansions tourists visit today. But the wealth wasn't created in Natchez; it was created on plantations in the surrounding countryside by tens of thousands of enslaved people who never saw the inside of those mansions except to serve. The Forks of the Road slave market processed an estimated 200,000 people. The Natchez District was the endpoint of one of the largest forced migrations in American history — the domestic slave trade that marched people overland from Virginia and the Carolinas to be sold in the cotton frontier. The mansions are beautiful. What paid for them was not.
