The Devil’s Punchbowl: Debunking the social media myth of a Civil War massacre

There’s a harrowing story about African Americans fleeing to the newly liberated city of Natchez, Miss., in 1863. These formerly enslaved people, the narrative goes, expected that the Union soldiers occupying Natchez would welcome and protect them.

Instead, the Union forces put them into a concentration camp. Some 20,000 perished. The story has a name: “The Devil’s Punchbowl,” referring to an imposing pit along the Mississippi River where the refugees were supposedly walled in and left to die.

It’s a story that pops up regularly on social media. But the truth is far more complicated.

“Most of the information that is being promoted out there simply is not true,” Roscoe Barnes, a local historian, told Yahoo News. Instead, he said, years of exaggerations have created a myth built on misunderstandings and pro-Confederate propaganda.

“Yes, there were people that died, but there were Blacks and whites who died because of an epidemic. It was nothing like a concentration camp,” he said. “There were a lot of people that suffered because of the conditions. But nobody was being tortured or punished because of their race.”

The truth about the Devil’s Punchbowl

What’s not up for debate, according to Barnes, is the fact that thousands of newly freed African Americans from the South traveled north, seeking out Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War in search of refuge and protection from Confederate forces.

Mimi Miller, the executive director emerita at the Historic Natchez Foundation, told Yahoo News that thousands of these African Americans chose to go to Natchez because it was the largest city in Mississippi at the time and an important river port.

It was also, crucially, controlled by Union forces, while most of the state remained in Confederate hands.

The war was still raging in 1863, even as the Union effectively took control of the Mississippi River that July. Thousands of formerly enslaved people streamed into Natchez and other towns and cities now freed from Confederate rule, creating further complications for the occupying Northern troops.

“Natchez had a huge influx of self-emancipated enslaved persons, and the Union was not equipped to handle that, so they established refugee camps,” Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-Clifford M. Boxley, an activist and Natchez scholar, told the Natchez Democrat last summer.

Boxley, a leading authority on the Devil’s Punchbowl, says many did die in the crowded camps. Sanitation was substandard. Drinking from the Mississippi River could lead to disease or death. The administration of the newly occupied territory was haphazard at best.

But, he says, the deaths weren’t unique to African Americans. Union soldiers and white residents of the town also died during this time, albeit in smaller numbers.

Boxley believes that the myth of what happened in Natchez has more to do with “anti-Union Army sentiment” still prevalent in the city. “What I’ve been saying for years is this is concocted Confederate propaganda,” he told the Natchez Democrat — a statement he reiterated to Yahoo News.

A social media phenomenon

In 2014, WJTV, a news station in Jackson, Miss., aired a segment about the Devil’s Punchbowl that helped fuel the idea that Union forces had built a concentration camp in Natchez. Although a post about the report remains on the station's Facebook page, the report itself has since been deleted and gained a new life on social media. Now it continues to spread misinformation about what happened in Natchez.

The segment features two Mississippi residents promoting the myth: a “paranormal researcher” named Paula Westbrook and Don Estes, a former director of the Natchez city cemetery.

“They were begging to get out: ‘Turn me loose, and I’ll go home back to the plantation!’” Estes says in the segment.

Several years after the news report aired, Jim Wiggins, a history professor at Copiah-Lincoln Community College in Natchez, described the WJTV segment as “a disgrace.”

The story of what happened to the African American refugees in Natchez “is genuinely heart-rending,” Wiggins wrote, “but calling this a ‘concentration camp,’ and multiplying the fatalities by 10 to add zing to a breezy human-interest story is an insult to the actual victims.”

Estes and Westbrook did not return Yahoo News’ request for comment.

Kaitlin Howell, the digital executive producer of WJTV, told Yahoo News that the reason the original report is no longer on its website is that “the story probably got lost” as the site moved from one hosting service to another over the last few years. She added that she cannot confirm anything in the original post.

The one remaining story on the station’s website about the Devil’s Punchbowl is a feature story from 2020 with no mention of a concentration camp.

A very real tragedy

Although conditions in the refugee camps were difficult, Barnes said, the freed African Americans were not forced to stay. Union soldiers were so overwhelmed by refugees, he said, that they encouraged some to return to their plantations and try to forge new relationships with their former slaveholders.

In his book “The Black Experience in Natchez,” Ron Davis, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, recounts how Union soldiers were totally unequipped to deal with the “tidal wave of humanity” arriving in Natchez after they occupied the town in July 1863.

Some of the formerly enslaved were recruited to the Union Army. Others would work on plantations as paid workers.

The plan for the refugee camps, Davis wrote, was to have them “operate as temporary shelters and employment agencies, as much as welfare centers. … Northern schoolmarms, moreover, would be recruited to teach in the camps.”

“Tragically, almost nothing that happened to Natchez Blacks during the war went according to plan. The leased plantations were poorly managed, subject to Rebel raids, and beset with all the horrors of a Civil War. … Army barracks and refugee camps were poorly equipped, undermanned, and overwhelmed by sickness, disease, and racism. It is a wonder that any of the Black participants in the above ventures lived through them.”

The main refugee camp in Natchez, Davis wrote, “contained as many as 4,000 refugees in the summer of 1863. … In the fall of 1863, 2,000 had already perished.”

But as squalid as the conditions were for refugees in Natchez, this was, Wiggins wrote, “not a concentration camp (with all that is implied by that term).”

“Throughout history, those fleeing war and oppression have been channeled into makeshift sites providing inadequate shelter and wretched sanitation. As a result, from ancient times to recent times, refugee camps have frequently been incubators for epidemic disease.”

As Boxley noted, the collapse of the Confederacy and the start of Reconstruction brought some relief for the refugees: “Natchez, by 1865-66, was still under the control of the Union Army. Natchez was well on its way to Reconstruction. We had Black elected officials, Blacks on the Board of Aldermen.”

Why the Devil’s Punchbowl myth lives on

Emmitt Y. Riley, a Mississippi native and an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at DePauw University, says one reason that Civil War myths like the Devil’s Punchbowl live on is “the Eurocentric nature of our education system,” which he said has undervalued and twisted Black history.

Given the horrific treatment of African Americans, Riley argues, it makes sense that people would believe that the Devil’s Punchbowl was a real event.

“What slavery, Jim Crow and anti-Blackness has really meant across time — it was primarily predicated on torture, on fear, on marginalization, on dehumanization,” Riley said. “And so, for Black people who grew up in this particular environment, who witnessed lynchings, who witnessed the degradation of Black bodies on a daily basis, these are the stories that were handed down to their children.”

Local historians like Barnes, however, also blame the rise of social media apps for spreading misinformation.

“There are a lot of urban legends that will not die, and in the age of TikTok and YouTube, they go viral,” he said. “One reason why people believe it is because it’s on the internet, and once it’s there, it doesn’t die.”