In 1860, Natchez was one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, and in surrounding Adams County, with a population of 19,000, nearly 70 percent were enslaved, with a few individuals holding the vast majority of those people and forty-one wealthy individuals each owning eighty-nine or more slaves. When the Civil War began, fifteen companies of Confederate militia formed in Natchez, many equipped with uniforms and weapons by wealthy planters. After Union forces captured New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Union gunboats steamed up the Mississippi River and briefly occupied Natchez in May 1862, then Union troops returned on July 13, 1863, and held the city throughout the war. The Union Army used at least two Natchez buildings as military hospitals, Natchez Marine Hospital and The Gardens, a plantation house, and one army report listed a city hospital and a pest house in Natchez used by the military. During the war, 1,784 Union personnel died and were buried in the city. Early in 1866, Capt. E. B. Whitman began gathering information to reinter Union soldiers buried across the Military Division of Tennessee, which included Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. He placed newspaper notices seeking locations of Union graves, received replies from citizens, chaplains, soldiers, and officers, and made three major expeditions across the region, stopping at hundreds of battlefields and engagement sites. Because of his work, thousands of Union dead were moved to twelve new national cemeteries, and in May 1869 he submitted a detailed summary of the project to the quartermaster general with sketches, site plans, and data on interments and service affiliations. In 1866, the government purchased 11 acres near Natchez City Cemetery, and remains were brought there from elsewhere in the city and from sites in Mississippi and Louisiana. By the 1870s, 3,085 soldiers were interred there, though only 305 were identified. The cemetery was enclosed by a brick wall about 1880, and in 1931 the original brick lodge was replaced and an octagonal rostrum constructed. Landsman Wilson Brown, a Natchez native and Civil War Medal of Honor recipient, is buried there; he was honored for gallantry aboard the U.S.S. Hartford during the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, and died in 1900.
