The city was named for the Natchez people, who with their ancestors, inhabited much of the area from the 8th century AD through the French colonial period.

Established by French colonists in 1716, Natchez is one of the oldest and most important European settlements in the lower Mississippi River Valley.

(It later traded other territory east of the Mississippi River with Great Britain, which expanded what it called West Florida).

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).

The strategic location of Natchez, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, ensured that it would be a pivotal center of trade, commerce, and the interchange of ethnic Native American, European, and African cultures in the region; it held this position for two centuries after its founding.

After unloading their cargoes in Natchez or New Orleans, many pilots and crew of flatboats and keelboats traveled by the Trace overland to their homes in the Ohio River Valley.

In the decades preceding the Civil War, Natchez was by far the most prevalent slave trading city in Mississippi, and second in the United States only to New Orleans.

Their company, Franklin and Armfield sent an annual caravan of slaves, called a coffle, from Virginia to the Forks of the Road in Natchez, as well as sending others by ship through New Orleans.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the city attracted wealthy Southern planters as residents, who built mansions to fit their ambitions.

Their plantations were vast tracts of land in the surrounding lowlands along the river fronts of Mississippi and Louisiana, where they grew large commodity crops of cotton and sugarcane using slave labor.

Following the Union victory at the Battle of Vicksburg in July 1863, many refugees, including former slaves, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, began moving into Natchez and the surrounding countryside.

However, as the war continued, the plan was never effectively implemented and the leased plantations were crowded, poorly managed and frequently raided by Confederate troops who controlled the surrounding territory.

Hundreds of people living in Natchez, including many former slaves and refugees, died of hunger, disease, overwork or were killed in the fighting during this period.

][8][9] After the American Civil War, the city's economy rapidly revived, mostly due to Natchez having been spared the destruction visited upon many other parts of the South.

The vitality of the city and region was captured most significantly in the 80 years or so following the war by the photographers Henry C. Norman and his son Earl.

Despite its status as a popular destination for heritage tourism because of well-preserved antebellum architecture, Natchez has had a general decline in population since 1960.

[20] Both schools in the Natchez campus provide skills which has enabled community students to have an important impact on the economic opportunities of people in Southwest Mississippi.

Various movies have been shot here, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), Crossroads (1986), Raintree County (1957), Horse Soldiers (1959),[33] Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1981),[34] The Ladykillers (2004),[35] Get On Up (2014)[36] and Ma (film) (2019).

Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2019 novel, The Water Dancer, alludes constantly to the threat, in antebellum Virginia, represented to slaves by the possibility of being sold "down Natchez way," that is, into harshest slavery.