Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

development… of enormous steamers on the river, which bears equally the dug-out or canoe of the black fisherman” and “all the phenomena of active commercial life… included in the same scope of vision which takes in at the other side of the Mississippi lands scarcely settled.” The Mississippi was almost more than a river: as Twain remembered it, the Mississippi was “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun” with “the dense forest away on the other side” and “the ‘point’ above, and the ‘point’ below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one.”1

Twain and Russell were not the only ones in 1862 concerned with the grandeur of the Mississippi River. Both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln had traveled, worked, and lived on the Mississippi and knew it well. Lincoln had grown up in Indiana and Illinois with the talk of the river and its great tributaries all around him, and in his youth Lincoln had conveyed cargoes of goods downriver on flatboats. Jefferson Davis’s sprawling plantation, Brierfields, occupied a portion of Davis Bend, eighty miles on the river above Natchez, Mississippi. But the immediate concern of both Davis and Lincoln with the river in 1862 was practical, not aesthetic or romantic. Whatever else the river was to Americans, it had been the great commercial highway of the American republic ever since Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase had acquired undisputed title to the territories it watered.

Before the Revolution, the economy of Britain’s North American colonies was hooked into Britain’s transatlantic trading networks, and the economic geography of that trade ran eastward, to the Atlantic seaboard. With the creation of the United States, and Britain’s surrender of all of its former colonial territory over the Appalachian Mountains, white settlers poured over the mountain passes into Kentucky, Tennessee, the Northwest territories, and eventually (after Andrew Jackson had ruthlessly cleared out the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indians) the Alabama and Mississippi territories. Rather than attempting to trade their agricultural surpluses back over the Appalachians, the new settlers discovered instead that it was much easier to trundle their goods down to the broad navigable rivers that drained the trans-Appalachian territories—the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, and Missouri Rivers. All of those rivers flowed west and south, away from the old Atlantic seaboard trading centers, and all of them emptied into the even broader southward flow of the Mississippi.

Taken together the entire Mississippi River system pulled into itself the commerce of 1.25 million square miles in a gigantic net that stretched to include Pittsburgh in the east and St. Louis in the west. The Mississippi was the commercial highway of the old Northwest and the new cotton lands of the Mississippi Delta, and it tied westerners and southerners into closer economic units than westerners enjoyed with the old East Coast. Pittsburgh, Wheeling, St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis, Natchez, and Cincinnati all grew rich on their trade southward on the river system. It was the river, too, that helped to throw Southerners into the lap of the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 1840s, since they had no wish to help the Whigs build canals and highways in the North when the river brought the nation’s commerce their way simply by force of nature. The South had in the Mississippi River system all the cheap water transportation it needed without the taxation necessary for funding “internal improvements,” and Southerners had no wish to see their western trading partners lured back toward the East by artificial networks of canals or turnpikes.

The river, however, was only a river until Americans actually learned how to use it, and the key to opening up the potential of the Mississippi River system was the steamboat. In 1811, the first steam-powered vessel on the Mississippi River system was built at Pittsburgh and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi. It easily beat out the travel time needed by flatboats to work down the rivers, and within a decade newer and faster steamboats cut the travel time from the Gulf to Louisville to under a week. By 1820, there were 89 steamboats operating on the Ohio and Mississippi; by 1840, there were 536. They could penetrate even the smaller rivers in the Mississippi system and cut the costs of shipping every kind of marketable good. In particular, the steamboats were a godsend to cotton agriculture. Baled cotton was bulky and expensive to ship to markets, and before the steamboats, shipping costs cut severely into its profitability. Prior to the 1820s, it cost as much as $5 to move 100 pounds of cotton downriver from Louisville. With the coming of the steamboats, the freight rates fell in 1830 to only $2 per 100 pounds, and in 1840 to only 25¢. Steam made cotton worth transporting to market, and cotton profits, in turn, underwrote the growth of steam navigation on the western rivers. Even the peculiar design of the riverboats was dictated largely by the need to build large, flat-bottomed river craft that could accommodate the space needed for shipping cotton.2

If the steamboat provided the means for getting the agricultural produce of the west to market, it was the port of New Orleans that provided the greatest marketplace—provided, in fact, one of the great international entrepôts of the world. Down the long river network to New Orleans went most of the grain, hogs, cattle, cotton, and other goods of Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, and Louisiana; then, in the 1850s, as Tennessee and the border states developed new iron and textile industries, the South’s infant industrial potential poured out onto the rivers and down to New Orleans as well. Up the river from New Orleans, beating against the sluggish brown current of the Mississippi, came the imported goods and manufactures that Southern and western agriculture depended on.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans was the sixth-largest city in the United States and the third-largest importer of goods,