If any place embodied the "moonlight and magnolias" mythology of the Old South, it was Natchez, Mississippi. Perched on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, Natchez's small size (only 4,680 inhabitants in 1850) belied its economic importance. In 1838 Natchez-area growers sent forty thousand bales of cotton downriver to New Orleans. Moreover, the city's forty most prominent families, referred to as the "nabobs," included the largest and wealthiest cotton planters in the entire South and.some of the biggest slave owners in the world.

No one could accuse the Natchez.nabobs of hiding their wealth. At least forty large mansions graced the streets of the town or the wooded lanes of Adams County. Their names slid smoothly off the tongue—"Concordia," "Monmouth," and "Melrose." In conscious imitation of the English landed gentry, families like the Duncans, Surgets, and Quitmans furnished their homes with the...