The city of Natchez, Mississippi, was founded in 1716 as Fort Rosalie and was renamed for the Natchez people in 1763.

Pre-European settlement (to 1716)

According to archaeological excavations, the area has been continuously inhabited by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas since the 8th century. The original site of Natchez was developed as a major village with ceremonial platform mounds, built by people of the prehistoric Plaquemine culture, part of the influential Mississippian culture and active in this area from about 700 AD. Archaeological evidence shows they began construction of the three main earthwork mounds by 1200. Additional work was done in the mid-15th century.

By the late 17th and early 18th century, the Natchez people (pronounced "Nochi"), descendants of the Plaquemine culture, occupied the site. They used it as their major ceremonial center after leaving the area of Emerald Mound. They added to the mounds, including a residence for their chief, the "Great Sun", on Mound B, and a combined temple and charnel house for the elite on Mound C.

Many early European explorers, including Hernando de Soto, La Salle and Bienville, made contact with the Natchez at this site, called the Grand Village of the Natchez. Their accounts described the society and village.

The most thorough account was written by the French colonist Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who lived near the Natchez for several years, learning their language and befriending their leaders. He witnessed the 1725 funeral of the war chief, Tattooed Serpent (Serpent Piqué in French). The Natchez maintained a hierarchical society, divided into nobles and commoners, with people affiliated according to matrilineal descent. The paramount chief, known as the "Great Sun", owed his position to the rank of his mother. His next eldest brother served as Tattooed Serpent.

The site of the Grand Village of the Natchez is preserved as a National Historic Landmark; the Mississippi Department of Archives and History maintains it. The site includes a museum with artifacts from the mounds and village. A picnic pavilion and walking trails are also available on the grounds. Nearby Emerald Mound is also a National Historic Landmark of the Natchez and their ancestors.

Colonial history (1716–1783)

In 1716, the French founded Fort Rosalie to protect the trading post, established two years earlier in the Natchez territory. French colonists subsequently expanded settlements and slave-based plantations into Indigenous Natchez territory, including areas of major cultural and political importance to the Natchez people.Barnett, Jr., James F. (2007). The Natchez Indians: a history to 1735. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p.80. . French colonists frequently clashed with the Natchez people as colonial expansion displaced Indigenous communities and intensified competition over land and resources. This was one of several Natchez settlements; others lay to the northeast. The Natchez tended to become increasingly divided into pro-French and pro-English factions; those farther from the French had more relations with English traders, who came to the area from the British colonies to the east.

After years of escalating colonial conflict and encroachment, the Natchez, together with the Chickasaw and Yazoo allies, launched a coordinated military campaign against French colonial forces in November 1729. European colonists referred to the conflict as the "Natchez War" or "Natchez Rebellion". Natchez fighters and their allies destroyed French colonial settlements in the region. On November 29, 1729, Natchez fighters killed 229 French colonists during the attack on the settlement: 138 men, 35 women, and 56 children (the largest death toll by an attack on settlers in Mississippi's history). They took most of the women and children as captives. French colonial forces, together with allied Indigenous nations, carried out repeated retaliatory campaigns against the Natchez over the next two years, resulting in mass killings, the enslavement of surviving Natchez people, and the forced displacement of many others. After surrender of the leader and several hundred Natchez in 1731, French authorities transported Natchez prisoners to New Orleans, where they sold them into chattel slavery and deported many to plantations in Saint-Domingue, as ordered by the French prime minister Maurepas.Ginny Walker English, "Natchez Massacre 1729", State Coordinator, Mississippi American Local History Network, 2000–2001, accessed 3 May 2009

Many of the Natchez who escaped enslavement sought refuge with the Creek and Cherokee peoples, ultimately being absorbed into their people.The Natchez Indians ; by Barnett, Jim; Mississippi History Now; accessed August 2015 Descendants of the Natchez diaspora have reorganized and survive as the Natchez Nation, a treaty tribe and confederate of the federally recognized Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with a sovereign traditional government.

Following the Seven Years' War, in 1763, British authorities assumed control of Fort Rosalie and the surrounding settlement, which colonists had named after the Natchez people following their military defeat and displacement. The British Crown bestowed land grants in this territory to officers who had served with distinction in the war. These officers came mostly from the colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They established plantation estates dependent on enslaved labor and reproduced the hierarchical social order of the colonial Atlantic world. Before 1774, Lord Dartmouth who was Secretary of State for the Colonies and the previous First Lord of Trade, contemplated siting a civil government below Natchez at White Cliffs which would be the residence of a Lieutenant Governor reporting to Pensacola.Great Britain. Historical Manuscripts Commission. Dartmouth, William Legge, Earl of, 1731-1801. (1972). The manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth. Vol. 2, American papers. Boston, Mass. : Gregg Press. Series: British accounts of the American Revolution. The American Revolutionary series. pp. 125-126, p. 212. Montfort Browne visited Natchez in 1769 while he was Lieutenant Governor of West Florida; he received a grant near Natchez.Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks. (2021). Colonial Mississippi : a borrowed land. Series: Heritage of Mississippi series: v. 8. Jackson, Miss. : University Press of Mississippi. p. 78. .State of Mississippi. Delbert Hosemann, Secretary of State. (2017). A Bicentennial History of Mississippi. Flipbook. Secretary of State website. p. 21. Retrieved 5 August 2022. Bernard Romans' map Proposals dated August 5, 1773 from PhiladelphiaRomans Bernard. Philadelphia, August 5, 1773. Proposals for Printing by Subscription: Three Very Elegant and Large Maps of the Navigation to and in the New Ceded Countries. ... by Bernard Romans. Printed by William and Thomas Bradford, 1773. to likely subscribers indicated a purpose was to map the Mississippi River from Natchez to the mouth.Wroth, Lawrence C. "Some American Contributions to the Art of Navigation 1519-1802." Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 68, 1944, pp. 72–112. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25080376. Accessed 15 Dec. 2022. During the 1760s and 1770s, the merchants of Natchez handled trade with Indigenous nations for other merchants such as McGillivrary & Struthers of Mobile and others.Layton, Brandon. "Indian Country to Slave Country: The Transformation of Natchez during the American Revolution." The Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 1, 2016, pp. 27–58. JSTOR website Retrieved 14 Jul. 2022. The Provincial Council ordered the authorities of West Florida to lay out a town at the Natchez on the reserved land on February 27, 1776.Howard, Clinton L. "Colonial Pensacola: The British Period Part III: The Administration of Governor Chester, 1770-1781." The Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4, 1941, p. 386. JSTOR website Accessed 16 June 2026. On February 16, 1779, British authorities in London received several petitions from West Florida proprietors, merchants, and settlers to grant local courts at Natchez, encourage commerce, and make land grant reforms."Journal, February 1779: Volume 86." Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations: Volume 14, January 1776 - May 1782. Ed. K H Ledward. London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1938. 224-230. British History Online Retrieved 23 November 2022. In 1792, planters complained to the Spanish authorities that their produce was not properly priced by the town's merchants, to which the merchants responded by pamphlet, inviting the planters to treat with Peter Walker at the landing or with Alexander Moore at his plantation.Claiborne, J. F. H., and C. M. Lagrone. Mississippi, as a Province, Territory, and State; with Biographical Notices of Eminent Citizens. Vol. 1. Reprinted by Louisiana State University Press, 1880. pp. 139-140.

The Spanish commander, Juan de la Villebreuvre, on September 7, 1779, conquered Fort Bute; later, the garrison at Baton Rouge and Natchez's Fort Panmure to establish Spanish colonial rule, but a Natchez loyalist militia forced him to surrender Fort Panmure in May 1781.Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks. (2021). Colonial Mississippi : a borrowed land. Series: Heritage of Mississippi series: v. 8. Jackson, Miss. : University Press of Mississippi. pp. 85-87. . A few days later, Pensacola was lost by the British, and the Natchez revolt collapsed. After defeat in the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain ceded the territory to the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1783). Spain was not a party to the treaty, despite having seized Natchez militarily from British control during the war. Although Spain had been allied with the American colonists, it was more interested in advancing its power at Britain's expense. Once the war was over, they were not inclined to give up that which they had acquired by force.

In 1797, U.S. Major Andrew Ellicott raised the United States flag over Natchez as the federal government asserted United States control over lands east of the Mississippi River, above the 31st parallel, which had previously been governed by Spain and long inhabited by Indigenous peoples.

A 1784 census of the Natchez District recorded 1,619 residents, 498 of whom were enslaved Black people held in bondage under the plantation economy.

Antebellum (1783–1860)

In the late 18th century, Natchez was the starting point of the Natchez Trace overland route, an Indigenous trade and travel route that likely incorporated older buffalo migration paths which ran from Natchez to Nashville through what are now Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Produce and goods were transported on the Mississippi River by the flatboatmen and keelboatmen, who usually sold their wares at Natchez or New Orleans, including their boats (as lumber). A Mississippi River navigation guide published in 1817 stated, "The Natchez landing affords a pretty safe harbor for boats, it being in the shape of a half moon. The wind seldom disturb it unless indeed very high, and not then to any damage if care be taken to fasten well and keep the boat easy and evenly afloat." The boatmen made the long trek back north to their homes overland on the Natchez Trace. Residents referred to many of the boatmen as 'Kaintucks' because large numbers came from Kentucky and the broader Ohio River Valley. The Trace was traveled heavily until the development of steamboats in the 1820s allowed northward navigation (against the current) on the river.