Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

and it had to accommodate more than 3,500 steamboat arrivals during the year, with more than 2 million tons of freight that earned more than $185 million. It was from New Orleans that William Howard Russell could see “a grand slave confederacy enclosing the Gulf in its arms, and swelling to the shores of the Potomac and Chesapeake, with the entire control of the Mississippi and a monopoly of the great staples on which so much of the manufacture and commerce of England and France depend.”3

It was scarcely noticed that by 1860 some of the Mississippi River system’s grand predominance over the West was already beginning to slip away. Southerners in Congress could block the massive appropriations needed for building the rival systems of national roads and canals that would divert western trade back toward eastern markets, but they could not prevent state legislatures in the North from building canals of their own, such as New York’s Erie Canal, which linked the entire Great Lakes water system with the Hudson River and New York City. Nor could they prevent private railroads—the steam-powered mate of the riverboat—from extending their fingers over the Alleghenies into Ohio and Illinois and across the Mississippi into Missouri. The first commercial rail line began construction on July 4, 1828, with the laying of what would become the 73-mile track of the Baltimore & Ohio rail line; two years later, with the rail line complete, a former brewer and brickmaker named Peter Cooper put his own locomotive, Tom Thumb, on the B&O line and hauled the first load of thirty passengers around Baltimore. Within ten years, there was more railroad mileage in the United States than canal mileage, and over the next twenty years the railroads grew to the length of 30,626 miles of track.4

The first warning bell for New Orleans’s slipping control over the commerce of the continent rang on May 5, 1856, when the 430-ton side-wheel steamboat Effie Afton rammed a newly opened railroad bridge over the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois. The boat burned, and the vessel’s owners—her captain, clerk, and engineer—sued the owners of the bridge—the Rock Island Bridge Company, a subsidiary of the Illinois Central Railroad—on the grounds that the bridge was a hazard to navigation. The case came to trial in federal court in Chicago in July 1857 over whether “the defendants have constructed… a permanent obstruction to commerce on the river.” The real question was whether New Orleans river traffic deserved a better right-of-way than a Yankee railroad. The jury could not come to a verdict, however, and subsequent efforts to appeal the non-verdict to the Supreme Court (in 1863) and the Illinois state courts (in 1875) failed. The steamboat (and New Orleans) had lost.5

One of the lawyers for the Rock Island Bridge Company was Abraham Lincoln.

WAR ON THE BORDER

At the outbreak of the war, the importance of controlling the Mississippi River and its vast system of tributary rivers was obvious to both the Union and the Confederate governments. Indeed, the only really aggressive feature of General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan had been its insistence on redeeming the Mississippi River valley for the Union. So long as the Confederacy controlled the lower Mississippi River and New Orleans, the prevailing wisdom dictated that Northern farmers everywhere west of the Appalachians would suddenly face ruin, and angered farmers were very likely to take their anger with them to the ballot box at the next congressional elections unless Lincoln and his soldiers did something about it very quickly. By the same token, Jefferson Davis realized that the Confederacy would never be secure unless it could control not just New Orleans and the lower Mississippi but also the great tributaries, the Ohio and the Missouri.

The Ohio was, in Davis’s judgment, the natural northern boundary of the Southern Confederacy. The Ohio would offer a natural defensive moat for southern armies to resist invasion by the Federals. A Confederate presence on the south bank of the Ohio would further paralyze Northern commerce and force the Lincoln government to the negotiating table. Most important of all, the Ohio was fed, near its confluence with the Mississippi, by two vital rivers, the Tennessee and the Cumberland, which led deep into Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. Unless the south bank of the Ohio was firmly in Confederate hands, Federal steam-powered transports, supply ships, and gunboats could enter the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers without obstruction and use them as easy invasion routes into Confederate heartland.

In order to control the Ohio, the Confederates needed to control the border states, especially Kentucky and Missouri, and that was precisely what Abraham Lincoln was determined to prevent. He still hoped, well into 1862, that Confederate control of the upper South could be disrupted by appealing to pro-Union sentiment in eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, and northern Alabama and Arkansas. None of that would be possible, however, if Kentucky and Missouri, by falling into Confederate hands, stood in the way. “To lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln wrote to Orville Browning in September 1861. “Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”6

Thus the political race to woo the border states became the first round of the Civil War in the West, and in the case of both Missouri and Kentucky, it was a round won largely by the Union. At first all the advantages in the race seemed to belong to the Confederacy. Both Missouri and Kentucky were slave states and had important social and economic ties to the South, and every natural appearance indicated that they would join the Confederacy. Yet appearances proved deceiving, and for two reasons. The first was Lincoln’s carefully cultivated assertions that he had no intention of touching slavery in the states where it was sanctioned by the Constitution. Those assurances, however much they grated on the ears of abolitionists, persuaded border state Unionists not to