The City of New Orleans and the Mississippi River c1885 (Library of Congress)

That Lawless Stream

A History of the Mississippi River

06.14.13

The Mississippi River is central to the American landscape and imagination. And for centuries, it has served as a battlefield in which our most complicated social and economic struggles have played out. So in this episode, the hosts set out to explore the Mississippi’s mighty imprint on American life.

From technological tales and political intrigues, to the personal stories of those caught up in the river’s thrall, they discover the crucial role the river has played in the American story – how access to its waters has both united and divided the country, and how it has always proved resistant to our full control.

Mississippi River; Mississippi River Valley; rivers

Segments

Paddle Power

We hear from people who’ve canoed their way down the Mississippi – and the challenges the river threw in their path.

Mississippi River; rivers; travel

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PETER ONUF: Major funding for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

ED AYERS: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Historys hosts.

BRIAN BALOGH: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh. And I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER ONUF: Yep.

BRIAN BALOGH: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED AYERS: Hello, Brian.

BRIAN BALOGH: And today, we’re going to take a trip along the mighty Mississippi.

PETER ONUF: The Mississippi River connects some of America’s most important cities, and for centuries has been a main artery of the country’s economy. But it’s also much more than that. For many, it’s also a source of inspiration and adventure. Every year, people hop into canoes and rafts and paddle down the river. It’s the aquatic version of the great American road trip.

JOE MAILANDER: We were camping out on the middle of the river on an island one night.

ED AYERS: This is Joe Mailander. He’s the lead singer in a band called the Okee Dokee Brothers. In 2011, he and his band mates were on a journey down the river writing and recording music for their latest kids’ album. On the last night of their 30-day trip, they were sleeping soundly in their tents.

JOE MAILANDER: When an S-0 tornado, or what they call a micro burst, hit our camp, this giant storm, at 2:00 AM, in the middle of the night. We had our camp completely leveled. The tent bowls broke. We were drenched. Our videographer’s tent actually was blown into the river with him in it.

PETER ONUF: John Ruskey also discovered that things don’t always go as planned on the river. When he graduated from high school, he built a huge raft with a friend and set out for Memphis. On their very first day on the river, disaster struck.

JOHN RUSKEY: There used to be, back in those days, a 350-foot tower.

PETER ONUF: Right in the middle of a mile-wide section of the waterway. They thought there was no chance they would get the tower. So they didn’t pay it any mind, until it was too late.

JOHN RUSKEY: We got swept right into it. The whole raft convulsed in the powerful waters. And it just destroyed the raft completely. You could have taken a potato chip and crushed it in your hands. And that’s what our raft looked like.

PETER ONUF: Ruskey and his friend were thrown into the freezing waters. They were washed up on a muddy bank, and eventually found shelter, lucky to be alive.

ED AYERS: Even travelers who have made it out of the river unscathed have found themselves haunted by the experience. After Eddie Harris completed his 2,500-mile canoe journey, he was feeling pretty good about it. So when some young men came to him for advice, he thought it was only right to encourage them.

EDDIE HARRIS: So I said to these guys, yeah, go ahead and do it. They were two young fellows. And they had camera equipment. And they wanted to take pictures and video in the river. And they started their journey. And in the middle of Lake Winnibigoshish, they had their accident. And they’d both drowned.

ED AYERS: Harris felt horrible about having supported their ill-fated journey.

EDDIE HARRIS: So horrible, in fact, that I went to the funeral of one of the boys and made a sort of apology to the parents. And the parents both embraced me and said, no, you encouraged him to do what he really, really wanted to do. And he died doing something that he loved.

PETER ONUF: We often mythologize the Mississippi River, seeing it as a place where boys become men, and men find glory. It calls to us, inspires us. People have dedicated and given their lives to it. But as anyone who has ever spent a spring near its flooded banks knows, the river has also frustrated our efforts to conquer it.

BRIAN BALOGH: So today on the show, we’re taking a deep dive into the river that Mark Twain once referred to as the lawless stream. From geopolitics to floods to exploding steamboats, we’ll trace the push and pull of the Mississippi River through American history. And we’ll try to do so with as few references to Mark Twain as we can possibly manage.

The Worst Steamboat Money Can Buy…

Ed talks with historian Walter Johnson about the rise of steamboats in the 19^th Century, and how the cotton economy fueled an ever more dangerous traffic.

Mississippi River; capitalism; cotton production; foreign trade; rivers; slave trade (domestic); slavery

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ED AYERS: Depending on your perspective, the power of the river can either be a hindrance or a blessing. If you’re trying to move down the river, well, the river currents are obviously a force for good. But if you’re heading the other direction, not so much.

PETER ONUF: And so you can imagine how revolutionary a change it would have been for people along the river when the first steam boats came along in the 18-teens. Suddenly a trip that would have taken weeks, like the trip from New Orleans up to Saint Louis, could be completed in a few days’ time. Observers at the time remarked that the new technology annihilated both space and time.

ED AYERS: And that’s not the only thing it annihilated. Over the course of the half century in which steamboats plied the Mississippi, tens of thousands of people unlucky enough to have boarded the wrong boat at the wrong time met their ends in all manner of grisly accidents. In 1856, a book called Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters itemized these accidents.

WALTER JOHNSON: America, explosion of. America South, burning of. Anglo Norman, explosion of. Atlantic and Ogdensburg, collision of.

ED AYERS: This book went on to reproduce, in all their gory detail, newspaper accounts of each of these accidents. You may or may not be surprised to learn that the book was a bestseller.

WALTER JOHNSON: The best one down here is “Phoenix, burning of. Phoenix number two, explosion of.”

ED AYERS: Our reader here is Walter Johnson, a historian at Harvard, who has just published his own book about the 19th century river economy. He sat down with me to explain what he thinks was really fueling all this carnage.

WALTER JOHNSON: There are about 1,000 serious steamboat accidents over the course of the period between about 1820 and 1860. And what that really amounts to is 5% of the boats in any given year are subject to a catastrophic loss. And so if you imagine that as a block of houses in your neighborhood, that means that one of the houses on your block every year would explode.

ED AYERS: So how long would a boat last?

WALTER JOHNSON: The depreciation on these boats is fantastically quit. The boats last anywhere from three to five years. At the beginning of the era, it’s said that there’s no better way to make money faster than the steamboat business.

And there are rumors of returns on investment of 200% per year. And so more and more people invest in steamboats. There’s more and more boats on the river.

And so in order to compete, steamboat owners try to run faster. And they try to run longer hours. They run through the night. Or they run deeper into the season.

And so running deeper into the season, you run more boats on less water. And you cause strandings. Running at night, you run boats into the trees that are buried in the bottom of the river, that are hidden by the river’s surface. Trying to run boats faster, longer, you create hotter engines and cause explosions.

ED AYERS: So in this hyper-competitive world, you’re a steamboat captain. And you’re trying to get your share of this and dwindling business while the profits are high. And you want to cut out the other guy. What are some of the things which you would do to make sure you get the maximum profit on your run?

WALTER JOHNSON: Well, there’s two things. And both of them make you want to run faster. This is a word-of-mouth economy. And so steamboats gain reputations. And one of the ways you get a good reputation is by putting out a good buffet.

ED AYERS: Some things never change.

WALTER JOHNSON: Right. And cabin passengers, the more privileged among the passengers, travel with all-you-can-eat privileges in the buffet. Well, that costs money. And because, I guess, along the Mississippi, wood is comparatively inexpensive, the response is to try and run the boat faster to cut down the amount of time that the passengers have to gorge themselves at the buffet.

The other and more famous way to get a reputation for speed is obviously by racing. And the races on the Mississippi are legendary today. And they were even more legendary in their day. People turned out along the river banks when there was going to be a big race to watch. And the results were posted in newspapers. And a reputation for speed is one of the ways, then, that boat owners compete for business.

There is a subsidiary reputation for safety, which I guess some travelers also are interested in. But that’s certainly not what comes through the 19th century literature of the Western waters.

ED AYERS: So the Volvos of the Mississippi.

WALTER JOHNSON: Exactly. The Sabre owners are going to travel more slowly and safely but make it there in time.

ED AYERS: Exactly. So in 1852, Congress passes an “act to provide for the better security for lives of passengers on board of vessels propelled in whole or in part by steam.” Very 19the century verbosity.

WALTER JOHNSON: Steamboat Act of 1852, right.

ED AYERS: Now it was a kind of consumer safety measure. But you write that it was, quote, “structured around a series of fables.” What do you mean by that?

WALTER JOHNSON: So what the Steamboat Act of 1852 tries to do is it makes captains responsible for everything that happens on their boat. And it sets up a series of licensing procedures for pilots and engineers. It provides for the inspection of boilers.

And so the Steamboat Act of 1852 addresses the problems on the boats without addressing the problems on the river. The problem on the river is that the boats are running too fast. And they’re running too many hours. And they’re running on not enough water.

And so all of the structural incentives that have made the steamboat economy so dangerous, both for boats and for capital– because by this time, it’s a difficult to make money off the steamboat business by 1852– remain in place.

ED AYERS: So the other question, and the obvious question, in many ways, is what is feeding this frenzy? I mean, obviously once they start racing against each other, sort of self-reinforcing. But what is the fuel, other than the wood that they’re burning here, that’s driving all of this, Walter?

WALTER JOHNSON: Well, it depends on how far back historically you want to go. But I think that really what is really driving this is the global cotton market. And so what’s happening from the 1820s on is that the southeastern tribes are being pushed off of their historic homelands by the United States’ government.

And that land is being privatized through the General Land Office. And so there’s a tremendous amount of investment and speculation in the land market. And that land is, in most people’s minds, perfect for the cultivation of cotton. And that cotton, they believe, can only be and will only be cultivated by enslaved people.

And so this process from the 1820s results in the internal slave trade, the shipment of about a million people from places like Virginia and Maryland to places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the greatest economic boom in the history of the United States up to that moment. The Mississippi Valley is the leading edge of the global economy in the 19th century. Cotton is the leading sector of the economy.

85% of the cotton that is produced in the Mississippi Valley is shipped to Great Britain. And 85% of the cotton that is processed in the mills in Manchester in the leading sector of industrial development in the world at that moment comes from the Mississippi Valley. And steamboats are both integral to that process and emblematic of it.

ED AYERS: Walter Johnson is a professor of history at Harvard. He’s the author of River of Dark Dreams, Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. We’ll post a longer version of our conversation at backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN BALOGH: It’s time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll take a closer look at one particular steamboat accident that’s mostly notable for what it crashed into.

PETER ONUF: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

Rivers vs. Railroads

Producer Jess Engebretson brings us the story of the Effie Afton disaster – an 1856 steamboat crash that led to a legal showdown between steamboat operators and railroad companies – and brought Abraham Lincoln into court.

Mississippi River; accidents; corporate power; railroads; rivers; ships; transportation infrastructure

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PETER ONUF: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED AYERS: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN BALOGH: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today we’re looking at the long, meandering history of the Mississippi River. We just heard about the near epidemic of steamboat accidents in the early days of river shipping. We’re going to take a closer look now at one of those accidents.

In 1857, the Rock Island Railroad Company was in need of a lawyer. They had just built a shiny new bridge over the Mississippi. The first bridge over the river, in fact, connected Davenport, Iowa with Rock Island, Illinois.

And almost immediately, a steamboat smashed into one of the bridge’s piers. The owners of the boat sued the railroad for damages. And so the railroad was on the lookout for someone to lead their defense, someone good.

ED AYERS: Abraham Lincoln is one of the best men to state a case forcibly and convincingly that I’ve ever heard. And his personality will appeal to any judge or jury.

PETER ONUF: By the late 1850s, Abraham Lincoln had argued plenty of suits for railroad companies. But something set this case apart. It pitted steam-powered trains against steam-powered boats, a battle between America’s two shipping powerhouses. One Chicago paper said the case would be “one of the most important ever to engage the attention of our courts.” And Lincoln signed one. Jess Engebretson has the story.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: It all started the year before. The steamboat Effie Afton, loaded with $1 million of cargo, slammed into one of the piers that supported the new bridge.

FEMALE SPEAKER: In her efforts to move away from the drawbridge pier, she swung around under the bridge, knocking down her chimneys and instantly setting the boat and bridge on fire.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: This is a report from an Iowan newspaper. Panicked passengers managed to crawl along a ladder onto the bridge. But the fire spread.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The bridge seemed burnt through, and fell into the river. The flames continued to rage with the greatest fury on the boat. There were a large number of cattle on board. And they were, with the exception of a cow, an ox, and a calf, burned up with the wreck.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: Amazingly, there were no human casualties. And maybe that stroke of luck helps explain the rivermen’s reaction.

FEMALE SPEAKER: There were about a dozen steamboats lying at the wharf. And they opened their whistles in a concert of music. It sounded like vast menagerie of elephants and hippopotamuses howling with rage.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: The steamboat captains weren’t howling with rage, though. In fact, they were thrilled that the bridge had burnt down. They were celebrating.

The people who lived along the river had hated the bridge since construction began three years earlier. They worried about what it meant for them. If eastern railroads could cross the Mississippi, would anything stop their spread? Would Americans even need the river trade a generation from now? One member of the Saint Louis Chamber of Commerce was not optimistic.

MALE SPEAKER: Here is the finest navigable stream in the world. And it is building up cities and villages every day on its banks. Suppose if this obstruction in our stream continues, where will we be in 10 years? Totally annihilated, our trade drawn off by the railroad.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: The case came to court in September 1857, a year and a half after the initial accident. And it hinged on one question. Was the bridge a material obstruction to river navigation? If so, it would have to go. Federal law guaranteed free navigation of the river.

More than 50 steamboat captains were on hand to testify for the prosecution. One by one, they lined up to explain how the bridge supports had created cross currents that made piloting a boat in that section nearly impossible.

MALE SPEAKER: This is a serious obstruction, a great obstruction, the worst obstruction on the Western waters.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: On the railroad side, Abraham Lincoln had lined up counter examples, locals who testified that the water ran smoothly between the supports, that there were no dangerous cross currents. One witness pointed out that in the 13 months since the bridge had been repaired, 958 boats had steamed passed it without any problem.

The testimony lasted two weeks. It took more than 1,000 pages to transcribe it all. And yet newspapers in Chicago and Saint Louis printed nearly the whole thing verbatim. And it’s not like it was a slow news week.

An American ship carrying 500 passengers and $1.6 million in gold had just sunk off the Carolina coast. But it was the Effie Afton trial that captured the country’s attention. Everybody was waiting to see whether the river or the railroads would come out on top.

MALE SPEAKER: There is a travel from east to west whose demands are not less important than those of the river.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: Here’s Lincoln, summing up the railroads position in his closing argument.

MALE SPEAKER: It is growing larger and larger, building up new countries with a rapidity never before seen in the history of the world. This current of travel has its rights, as well as that of North and South.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: The case ended in a hung jury, effectively a victory for the railroad company. No damages were awarded to the Effie Afton’s owners. It was a green light to other railroads. Go ahead and build those bridges. The courts won’t stop you.

So the railroads got to work. By the late 1860s, several new bridges spanned the Mississippi. The transcontinental was completed in 1869. And the steamboat trade entered its end game. Shipping goods by railroad was faster. And the railroad, unlike the river, never froze.

The old North-South trade axis had been flipped 90 degrees. And the rivermen’s worst fears had come true. The Mississippi was no longer the main route through America. It was just another obstacle on the relentless journey west.

ED AYERS: Jess Engebretson is one of our producers.

The Central Stream

Peter talks with Ed and Brian about the crucial role of the Mississippi River in global politics and markets – even in the age before steam.

Carribbean; Louisiana Purchase; Mississippi River; War of 1812; foreign trade; free market; rivers

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BRIAN BALOGH: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about the Mississippi River in American history. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th century guy.

ED AYERS: I’m Ed Ayers, 19th century guy.

PETER ONUF: And I’m Peter Onuf, 18th century guy.

ED AYERS: You know, guys, I try not to be parochial or kind of cocky about the importance of the 19th century and everything in American history. But I’m afraid the Mississippi River kind of inclines me in that direction. The rise of the steamboat trade on the Mississippi strikes me as such a pivotal event. Even its decline strikes me as equally pivotal. In other words, guys, we had both the beginning and the end of the importance of the Mississippi River along with Huck and Jim right in the middle of it all.

PETER ONUF: Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed– cut it out. Listen, why were the steamboats there in the first place? It’s because the Mississippi was so important before the steamboat. It was the key to the continent.

And this is the center of enormous controversy. Enter imperial struggle for control of the continent. We think of the Mississippi as being central to the United States. Well, it was a contested ground between the French empire, between the British empire, the United States, and its imperial ambitions.

And why is it so important? Think about it for a minute. All of the continent drains through the Mississippi River system– the Missouri, the Ohio, the whole heartland. And all of those bulky things produced by farmers and planters up the river can come down by this natural highway. It provides its own locomotion. And those things go out to the Caribbean, to the Atlantic.

And Napoleon has designs on the Mississippi River Valley. And why? Because he sees it as the breadbasket for French sugar-producing colonies in the West Indies– that is, that whole region. This is before the Louisiana Purchase. This is after the Peace of Amiens in 1802.

And he now has his sights on extending his quest for universal empire across the Western hemisphere. This is the great fear, is that Napoleon will be walking astride the earth, controlling everything. And the Mississippi is going to be key to the Western hemisphere, his Western design.

BRIAN BALOGH: So Peter, you’re saying he’s not even bothering with the East Coast, with Boston and Philadelphia. He’s got his eye on the prize. That’s the Mississippi River and everything that feeds into it?

ED AYERS: Peter, how would somebody, even Napoleon, control a vast area like the Mississippi River?

PETER ONUF: Well, you don’t have control the whole hinterland of the river. You just have to control the port of New Orleans, where all of that commerce flows down. It’s kind of a choke point, Ed. It’s where everything comes together.

And when Jefferson tries to buy Louisiana, he wants New Orleans. He doesn’t want the Louisiana Purchase. Who cares about that? Because that will flow naturally. The control of the hinterland will flow naturally.

What he wants right now in 1803, he wants control of New Orleans, because he wants to secure the union. Because the union could fall apart. If we don’t control the outlet to the sea, to the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean, then that whole region could be pried away from the United States.

You know, it doesn’t take that much to pry parts of the United States apart. Think of your civil war. Well, there are lots of almost civil wars before. And there are lots of separatist plots in the West.

BRIAN BALOGH: So Peter, is the real danger that people all the way up the river– farmers growing wheat, let’s say– that their allegiance would follow the flow of that wheat towards whoever controls the mouth of the Mississippi?

PETER ONUF: Yeah. Remaining loyal to the United States would run against the grain, so to speak, Brian.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER ONUF: Think of these people who settle in the Western waters, as they call them. They’ve already separated from their original states. Some of them, in fact, are the products of separatist movements. Tennessee used to be North Carolina. Kentucky used to be Virginia.

So why not a new jurisdiction? Why not connect with Spain, if Spain has control of that choke point?

BRIAN BALOGH: Especially because they have really more allegiance to the states than they do to something called the United States.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, it’s really weak. This is why the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 is so vitally important. It’s not just a point of national pride– hey, we beat the hated British, even if the war was already technically over. What’s really important is to consolidate American control in this region, because it could have flown apart. The Union could have collapsed. It was on the verge.

If the British control New Orleans, they control the Caribbean. They control the heartland of the North American continent, linking the British Caribbean with Canada, encircling the United States.

So Ed, all of the things you talk about in your century that are so important, well, the cotton kingdom was going to develop. And slavery was going to spread. And so we’d have an important history of the Mississippi. But it might not be American history. This is up for grabs as late as 1815, as late as the Battle of New Orleans, as late as Andrew Jackson’s triumph over a superior British invading force.

Listener Call 1

Peter, Ed, and Brian take a call from a listener, on the battle for the river during the Civil War.

American Civil War; Mississippi River; rivers

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ED AYERS: As we were putting together today’s show, a list in Connecticut named Matt got in touch with us with a question about the river’s role in the Civil War. He wanted to know how much control of the river actually mattered.

MATT: So about the Mississippi River, I know it’s very important to the geography and landscape. And during the Civil War, if it had changed hands more times, would that have affected the outcome of the war either way? I actually am a big alternate history buff. So those little questions, those what-ifs have always fascinated me.

PETER ONUF: I think, Ed, the question that Matt is asking, what if Vicksburg had not fallen, and the Union Navy hadn’t established control of the entire Mississippi?

ED AYERS: You know, that’s a big counterfactual. So what would it mean if one of the most important things that happened in the Civil War had not happened?

PETER ONUF: Didn’t happen.

BRIAN BALOGH: Hey, guys, just help a 20th century guy out and tell me where Vicksburg is.

ED AYERS: It’s Mississippi, Brian. And so it’s on the Lower Mississippi River. So what you’ve got, Brian, is the Confederacy extends, you may recall, to Texas and Arkansas, Louisiana. So part of the very strength of the Confederacy is its vast scale. And the whole idea that you’re going to conquer this area the size of continental Europe is one of the great defenses of the South. That would be impossible.

But from the very beginning, the plan is to drive a stake through the heart of the Confederacy to divide the east from the west by controlling the Mississippi River. And it starts off great, with New Orleans following all too easily from the viewpoint the Confederates. But what remains is the Gibraltar of the Confederacy, high on the bless of the Mississippi River in Vicksburg, Mississippi– the capacity to fire down on any of the arrogant Yankee ships and boats that want to try to use the Mississippi to go all the way from the Gulf to the upper South and into the North and the Ohio. So it’s so strategic.

PETER ONUF: So Ed?

ED AYERS: Yes.

PETER ONUF: The significance of the Mississippi is the North-South connection for the Yankees– that is, for the Union. They could split the Confederacy if the controlled that route. The Confederates need to go East-West to keep the two parts of Confederacy together.

ED AYERS: That’s exactly right. And it’s also the case that a lot of first southern slave holders were taking their slaves to Texas and Arkansas, places on the other side of the Mississippi River. So it’s crucial that they had this.

MATT: Right. Because what I just thought of is if the Confederates had the Mississippi, they could have conceivably sailed up the Mississippi and come into the North from coming from behind our lines, if we didn’t take control so early.

ED AYERS: Well, I’m glad you have a completely nonpartisan view of this. It’s your lines, huh? And of course, it is the United States’ lines. So I think collectively we can say ours. But nevertheless, yeah, I think that the Union Army and Navy has control over the rest of the river, too.

So I don’t think it’s too much of a threat that the Confederates are actually going to be able to go up passed Memphis or Saint Louis, say. I think this is more of the defensive position rather than offensive position.

BRIAN BALOGH: OK, guys. Let me ask another question, since I obviously don’t know anything about this. What was the reaction to the fall of Vicksburg? Was there some kind of big symbolism implicated here?

ED AYERS: What people tend to forget is that Vicksburg had been a dickens for the United States to take. They’d been working for months and months. In some ways, it’s not unlike the situations of the war that we find ourselves in today, Brian. People know where we are. We know what we’re trying to accomplish. We just don’t seem to be able to accomplish it, because it really is the Gibraltar. It’s on these high bluffs. How are you going to take it from below?

And so Grant is there trying to do all this. So everybody’s watching this. But what people are not expecting is some battle in a completely irrelevant place that takes place at exactly the same time called Gettysburg. So if you’d ask anybody in June, what’s going to be the turning point in the war, it’s going to be what happens in Vicksburg.

PETER ONUF: I think there’s a dimension of this that’s really important. That is that Southern expansionists– and Confederates did believe that they had an expansive future, they had a kind of manifest destiny– saw the Mississippi as the great avenue toward drawing in the upper Midwest into the orbit of the Confederacy. That is, the Mississippi was going to enable the Confederacy to control the heartland, that whole river system, because of the natural affinity of Northern grain producers for Southern slave owners and consumers.

This was going to be the grand future of the Confederacy. And by the time we hit Vicksburg in 1863, the Confederacy in that original sense hardly exists, because it’s on the defensive. It’s not expanding. In fact, it’s on the verge of contraction. And maybe people fear collapse.

ED AYERS: That’s great, Peter. And I think if you look at how people voted in 1860, you’ll see a lot of people who are trading with the South along the rivers of the Ohio and along the Mississippi are actually sympathetic to the South, because their market is the South. So I think that Peter’s exactly right, Matt, that the symbolic value of Vicksburg is probably more important, frankly, than the strategic value of it by the time that it falls in 1863.

MATT: No, I would agree with that.

ED AYERS: And it finally falls when they try an outrageous strategy of not trying to take it from the river anymore, but this incredible engineering feat led by Grant and his troops, to come around the back of Vicksburg and take it over land, through the swamps and bayous. So to answer your question directly, I think the Civil War would have turned out the same way regardless. But that doesn’t mean that the battle for the final control of the Mississippi wasn’t of enormous symbolic value to both the North and the South.

It took us a while. That was kind of like Grant’s attempt to take Vicksburg. It took us a while to circle around the topic.

BRIAN BALOGH: We went through swamp route. We went through the swamp route. So Matt, say hello to the Housatonic for me, speaking of rivers.

MATT: All right. I will do that the next time I see it.

PETER ONUF: Thanks a lot for calling.

MATT: All right, thanks a lot.

ED AYERS: Bye-bye.

PETER ONUF: If you’d like to be a caller on an upcoming show, have a look at our website to see the topics we’re working on. That’s all at backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN BALOGH: It’s time for another break. When we come back, we’ll hear from survivors of the largest flood in the history of the Mississippi, the flood of 1927.

ED AYERS: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

Listener Call 2

The hosts take a call from a listener, asking about the Cahokia Mounds – an ancient Native American city just across the river from St. Louis.

American Indians; Cahokia; Mississippi River; ancient civilizations; rivers

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BRIAN BALOGH: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED AYERS: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER ONUF: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today we’re following the twists and turns of the Mississippi River throughout American history. And we’re fielding a few calls from our listeners.

BRIAN BALOGH: Our next call has a little less to do with the river itself, and more to do with the history that happened along its shores. It’s from Dave, a listener in Waukegan, Illinois.

DAVE: Well, I know that you guys’ expertise is in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. But in 1250 AD, the city of Cahokia, in southern Illinois, actually had a larger population than London or Paris at that time. It was a major urban center for over 700 years, had a population of 20,000 or maybe more. And it’s located near modern day Saint Louis.

But most people in the US today, I think, don’t even know it exists. And what I wanted to ask you about– number one, why don’t more people know about this site and this Mississippian civilization that existed? And how have people interpreted these sites over the years?

PETER ONUF: Why didn’t people know about it and talk about it in our centuries. That’s why Dave is trying to put it to us. The mounds all over the Mississippi, Ohio River valleys were well-known. But they didn’t fit in to Anglo-Americans’ original scheme of historical development. They couldn’t really explain them. They were what we call in the biz anomalies.

The conventional view of looking at native America during the period of encounter was that they were encountering a pre-civilized natural condition of man. That ruled out any advanced civilization. So there was an inability to grasp these native civilizations.

The first mounds that were uncovered were in Marietta, Ohio. When Thomas Jefferson heard about these, he said, nah, they don’t exist. That’s just not real. There’s not a real civilization there.

The idea that native peoples who were supposed to be savage could be civilized just didn’t make sense to early ethnographers. Now by the early 19th century, it was well-known that there had been advanced civilizations in the Midwest. But there still was a difficulty in explaining where they came from.

DAVE: From what I understand, many of these people in the 19th century attributed these sites to just about anybody except for Native Americans– to Egyptians or to lost tribes of Israelites.

BRIAN BALOGH: They would have been very lost.

ED AYERS: Well, that’s one of the things I was getting ready to talk about, is that in the absence of actual knowledge, Americans have populated the rest of the continent with all kinds of possible histories. The Mormons early on believed that the Garden of Eden had been in Missouri.

It was a widely disseminated idea that something had happened here before the Europeans arrived. But they did not know, because there was nobody to even know the name. And Cahokia is not the original name. We don’t know what it was.

There seems to have been a break in the memory. And this probably as a result of disease. But we don’t know, it’s my understanding, about what might have happened to the people who built these remarkable series of mounds in Cahokia. Or we don’t really know what happened to the Anasazi– and that’s not even their real name either– in the Southwest. So what should we do to establish a narrative of connection to these folks?

DAVE: Well, I think right now there’s a lot of good research going on. I’m actually planning to go down to Cahokia to participate in the excavation as a volunteer. I’m not an archaeologist. I’m actually an engineer. But I figure I can dig as well as anybody else and follow directions as well as anybody else. So I’m hoping to help out.

ED AYERS: So Dave, what’s leading you to be willing to invest your time and energy, and I’m assuming sweat, this summer in working on this project.

PETER ONUF: Very much, yeah.

DAVE: Well, it it’s kind of amazing, growing up in Illinois and having this World Heritage site right here our state, and more so being a metallurgist. That’s my field. Cahokia is one of the few places in the Americas that had an advanced metalworking center. The people in Cahokia made a lot of things out of copper. And so there’s been a lot of recent research on the copper-working center in Cahokia. And so that’s something I’m very interested in.

PETER ONUF: So Dave, you’re thinking that the license plate should be changed in Illinois? Enough of this Land of Lincoln business– Land of Cahokia?

DAVE: Oh, no. I’m a big fan of Land of Lincoln.

BRIAN BALOGH: Well, maybe you can put Cahokia on the front license plate, Dave.

DAVE: Yeah.

PETER ONUF: All right. Well, we’re glad that you have such enthusiasm for our 19th century. We’re a lot more comfortable with that. So thanks for reminding us that something happened before us. And thanks for calling.

BRIAN BALOGH: Thank you, Dave. Happy digging.

DAVE: Yeah, thanks.

Federalizing Floods

Brian talks with sociologist Karen O’Neill about the federal government’s move into flood control in 1917 – as landowners along the Mississippi convinced lawmakers that their problem was everyone’s problem.

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PETER ONUF: This year, the Army Corps of Engineers will spend $234 million on flood control along the Mississippi. This, of course, does not include the sometimes billions of dollars needed to respond to major river-related disasters, like Katrina or the 2011 floods.

ED AYERS: But throughout most of American history, flood control was not a responsibility to US government was interested in. In fact, many believe that government involvement was unconstitutional. Other people said this is just a handout to a few landowners along the river, plantation owners.

BRIAN BALOGH: All this changed with the 1917 Flood Control Act, the first piece of legislation to say unequivocally that the US government was responsible for flood control along the Mississippi. And this change of heart was the product of a concerted effort by some of the people most affected by the flooding.

Karen O’Neill is a sociologist at Rutgers. She told me about the efforts of landowners along the Mississippi to funnel government dollars their way, government dollars that would lead to bigger and better levees.

KAREN O’NEILL: By the turn of the 20th century, you see these groups form what we really would recognize as interest group politics now. And they locate their headquarters in DC. They do letter writing. They do all sorts of things to make it look like their support is really widespread.

They try to get manufacturing groups, industrial groups upstream, and people from other locations as well. It really looks self-serving to be arguing that you should have flood control aid for our river. And so they often did things like get people from New York state, California, and other regions to help make that argument. And their goal, they really know that eventually they want to add these other rivers into getting federal aid.

So then you could make these broader arguments. And I think they were just much more persuasive to people.

BRIAN BALOGH: And presumably, there are more people actually living in towns along the river, as opposed to simply farmers.

KAREN O’NEILL: Yes. Although what’s really impressive is that from probably the 1880s on, there’s a pretty sophisticated use, and possibly cynical use, of photos of displaced sharecroppers and tenants. Because those people would be the ones who are certainly living most exposed to the risk. They are in these swampy areas that have just barely been drained enough to grow crops. They’re actually living there, as opposed to living off the farm.

And they get hit first. And so you’ll see these brochures that the advocates distribute widely. And they usually have pictures of many people up on what is the last few pieces of unflooded area, usually on top of a levee. And then there’s the sympathy aspect. So these photos happen again and again. And it certainly happens in the 1927 flood as well.

BRIAN BALOGH: If you had to sum up the impact of the 1927 flood on the very kinds of things we’ve been talking about, flood control, what was the effect of the ’27 flood?

KAREN O’NEILL: Well, the 1927 flood really humbled to the Corps of Engineers. They thought that their approach of building levees was effective. It turned out that even the levees that were built up to their standard couldn’t hold the river back.

You could have said at that point, it’s time to get humble and say, maybe we shouldn’t try to control the river. Or maybe we shouldn’t try to control it in quite this way. But they persisted, because they’re engineers. They’re hands-on people. And they see a task. And they want to do it.

So that was definitely a big part of it. The other was that it clearly was a national event. So you have in 1927 the presence of radio networks that hook up and broadcast live reports from the river flood. This goes on for months.

People went around giving speeches about it. And so it definitely felt like a national event. And this is the thing that people had to really push through, is to say, this is not a local problem. This is a national problem. And that’s a harder task to do than you might think. We actually still have debates like that today.

BRIAN BALOGH: Karen O’Neill teaches at Rutgers. She writes about controlling the Mississippi in her book, Rivers By Design.

Remembering the Rising Tide

Oral historian Jennifer Abraham-Cramer helps us understand the great Mississippi flood of 1927, using stories from survivors that she and her colleagues have preserved.

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ED AYERS: In 1927, just 10 years after the federal government took on the task of flood control, the Mississippi River flooded to an extent never seen before or since. The high waters left behind hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, and left 246 people dead.

PETER ONUF: Jennifer Abraham-Cramer is director of the T. Harry William Center for Oral History at Louisiana State University. She and a team of interviewers have been collecting stories about the 1927 flood from those who lived through it as children. She’s going to walk us through a few of those stories now.

TUPE HENRY: Oh, there was some talk about the levees wasn’t going to be able to hold it, because it was a pretty big flood, you know. But it just kept coming, not fast. The next morning, you’d get up, it was little bit deeper.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: Tupe Henry was interviewed by Hans Rasmussen in 2007. And Tupe was five years old at the time of the flood. And he was 85 years old at the time of his interview.

In 1927, he was living in the Louisiana Delta in a place called Lickskillet, which no longer exists, but which saw heavy flooding.

TUPE HENRY: You could watch it rise.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: He and his sister were playing in the water. He was pushing her on a tricycle in a lap around the house.

TUPE HENRY: And through that water, in the next round, it might be a half inch deeper. The next round, another half inch.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: Just a little bit higher.

TUPE HENRY: And eventually, they made us quit riding there, because they felt the water was too deep. And Mama stayed home scared that the water was going to take us. She was afraid of water, you know.

JOSEPH DUPONT: I remember a lot about the 1927 flood. My grandmother’s house was two blocks from the levee.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: Actually, I’ve got to tell you Joseph Dupont is one of my favorite interviewees. I interviewed him back in 2001 and 2002. And he was living in Plaquemines, Louisiana, which is in Iberville parish. And again, he, like Tupe Henry, was five years old during the flood. And he was 80 years old when I interviewed him.

JOSEPH DUPONT: And when the flood came, I remember the National Guard unit was brought here. And it camped. They put tents on the courthouse lawn. And they were there to patrol the levee.

Now as a kid, I couldn’t understand why they had to have soldiers walking up and down the levee. And they told me, well, they’re afraid somebody’s going to blow a hole in the levee. I said, well, why would they do that? They’d flood all themselves out. I couldn’t understand it. But what would happen is the people down river would come up river and plan an explosion to blow the levee to reduce the pressure of the water on them.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: Prior to the arrival of the Louisiana National Guard unit patrols, the townsmen in Plaquemines took turns patrolling the levees to prevent people from coming from the lower river parishes to blow their levees as the water continued to rise.

JOSEPH DUPONT: And my daddy had to go up there. The men took turns, and had to bring a pistol with them. Of course Daddy didn’t know much about pistols. But I remember he had his pistol. And they’d go up there on the levee. And they would do two hours at a time or something, to prevent people from coming up. They didn’t know where they would do it.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: Did they ever catch anybody?

JOSEPH DUPONT: No. No, they didn’t. But people were afraid they were going to come do it up here, because the water was so high.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: And eventually that exact thing did happen in order to try and save New Orleans in a place called Caernarvon. And it became known as the Carenarvon Crevasse. And it flooded much of just south of New Orleans, about 13 miles south of New Orleans, in fact. And this incident did make people fear for generations that it could happen again.

And you hear stories in Hurricane Betsy about the levees being blown, and people hearing explosions, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward area. And you hear it in Katrina as well.

VICTOR CRAWFORD: When the refugees started moving in, we’d pass right by the refugee tents on our way home from school.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: So Victor Crawford, one of the really interesting things about his story is that he is recalling the aftermath of the flood, and how the community responds, and relief efforts, and just sort of helping each other go on with their lives and to rebuild. So Vic Crawford’s memories center on, for example, his walks on his way home from school. He would pass the hundreds of Red Cross refugee tents.

VICTOR CRAWFORD: I think they said it was some 500 tents in that area at one time. I just looked like an army camped out. It was just right on the banks of the river.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: He also talks about how the community pitched in and helped the neighbors.

VICTOR CRAWFORD: Well, there was people that was in need, or they were hungry. My mama always had something cooked for everybody. I never knew when I went to eat dinner whether there was going to be 2 or 22 sitting at the table.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: They would share meals with the refugees who often paddled a boat out to their house.

VICTOR CRAWFORD: Anybody that came by was welcome to a meal at my house. Those people were having hard times.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM-CRAMER: Psychologists who study the way that people remember things point out that the brain has integrated causal relationships for distant happenings, but is more focused on the rich details of how and what when it comes to more recent memories. So when you hear stories that have been integrated into the person’s whole life story, they have been able to process the why, the cause and effect relationships, how experiences have shaped their lives, their identity in relation to that experience, so who they are and who they see themselves in the broader perspective.

And what sticks out is this sense of resiliency that starts early in the education of so many Louisiana residents. Lots of interviewees talk about drying off their furniture from the flood and starting their lives all over again. So you get this set of values that includes a sense of community cooperation and hardiness. And this continues through the upcoming difficult decades. It becomes part of this collective narrative about Louisiana toughness and resiliency that you’ll see all the way up through hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

PETER ONUF: Jennifer Abraham-Cramer is director of the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at Louisiana State University. You can find more of these interviews at our website, backstoryradio.org.

Web Extra: Extended Interview Walter Johnson

More from Ed’s conversation with historian Walter Johnson, about the decades in the early 19th Century when steamboats ruled the Mississippi. From steamboat drag racing, to why the “all you can eat buffet” could be very bad for the passenger’s health, Johnson gives us a fuller sense of the booming cotton economy in the South, and the frenetic river traffic it fueled.

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That Lawless Stream: A History of the Mississippi River

BROADCAST WINDOW: 06/14/2013 – 08/14/2013

ED AYERS: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. In 1927, Tupe Henry was five years old. He lived in Louisiana in a town called Lickskillet, just along the Mississippi River. That summer, the river crested. And it resulted in the largest flood in the history of the river.

TUPE HENRY: It just kept coming, not fast. The next morning you’d get up, it was a little bit deeper.

ED AYERS: Today on the show, a history of the Mississippi River. With its grand size, both literal and in the American imagination, the lawless stream has provided great riches to this country and great hardships.

MALE SPEAKER: The shrieks of the wounded and dying were reverberated from the distant shores. And many a ghastly and heart-sickening spectacle presented itself on the deck of the ill-fated vessel.

ED AYERS: As we conclude another high water season, then the Mississippi recedes once again, we’ll look back on the way the river has both shaped and been shaped by the people of this country.