The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture by Wilson Charles Reagan Melosi Martin

Author:Wilson, Charles Reagan, Melosi, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Streams and Steamboats

Waterways help explain much of the demographic, economic, and social history of the South. The Potomac, Ohio, and Missouri rivers formed a rough boundary for the slave states and the Confederacy. Seven thousand miles of the Mississippi River system with its tributaries from the Ohio and Tennessee southward to the Big Black and the Red rivers flow through the central agricultural region of the South. Smaller river systems from the Trinity at Galveston Bay to the Alabama at Mobile Bay and the Suwannee in Florida drain the Gulf Coast states. On the Atlantic seaboard, 20 river systems from the York and James to the Cape Fear, from the Pee Dee to the Broad, and from the Savannah to the St. Johns have offered transportation from fall line towns to tidewater ports. Few southerners in the past acknowledged that the Ashley and Cooper rivers joined at Charleston harbor to form the Atlantic Ocean, but almost all farmers recognized the opportunities existing in fertile river valleys. Niles Weekly Register reported in 1818 that two-thirds of South Carolina’s farm exports were grown within five miles of a river and that all of the market crops were produced within 10 miles of navigable water.

More than 12,000 miles of navigable rivers flowed through the South. Henry Hall, reporting on American boat building in the tenth census (1880), noted that southern rivers were seldom closed by snow or ice and that the “noble” Tennessee alone provided a transportation route of more than 800 miles. Although most southern rivers were “subject to variations in depth,” Hall emphasized that they were “all good highways.” He could have added that captains of small boats, boasting that their steamer could make way on a “heavy dew” or on the “foam from a barrel of beer,” converted innumerable shallow streams into back roads, if not good highways.

Rafts, flatboats, and keelboats transported farm produce downstream from the early colonial period to the mid-19th century. Only an occasional keelboat on narrow rivers or a sailing vessel on broader sheets challenged the currents until the steamboat New Orleans reached its name city in 1811 and thereby inaugurated a new era in transportation. Steamboats, whether the grand floating palace or the meanest little workaday “trade boat” peddling notions and necessities along shallow rivers, served the South for more than a hundred years. Regardless of size or opulence, steamers brought the sound of modernity to southerners along the meandering rivers. The loud puffing of the tall chimneys, the clanging bell, the steam whistle, and an occasional calliope interrupted the quiet farm life and transformed sleepy river towns and landings into centers of excitement and activity.

The commercial activity associated with steamboats in New Orleans is well known. But the same activity, although reduced in scale, occurred at thousands of landings. The antebellum cotton port of Apalachicola, Fla., is representative of the excitement. Sail and steam vessels brought cargoes to Apalachicola merchants in the late summer and early fall. As autumn changed into winter, the Apalachicola

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