The United States was born in the 13 colonies founded by settlers from the British Isles on the eastern seaboard of North America. But how the new nation developed was decided by a river running to the west of these colonies, according to a new book.
Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade (University of Virginia Press, 2024) is written by Susan Gaunt Stearns, associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi. It discusses how trade along the river influenced the young country.
“This is not the traditional story. It really disrupts narratives of early America that focus on Massachusetts and Virginia, and it adds a lot of players to the story that aren’t the traditional players we necessarily think about. What I ultimately argue in my book is that the Mississippi River issue is hugely divisive and hugely important to the beginning of the country,” Stearns was quoted in a statement by the university.
The book offers new insights on the trajectory of the nascent US.
As the country expanded westwards from the eastern seaboard, the Mississippi marked its frontier at first. The Mississippi Valley was the equivalent of the American Old West in that era, just over the Appalachian mountains.
The Mississippi was America’s first major highway, with agricultural goods from its farmlands being transported to the population centres that needed them by boat.
In 1784 though, a pivotal event took place.
It was just a year after the Treaty of Paris. Under it, Britain recognised the US as an independent country bringing the American Revolution to an end.
Colonial Spanish authorities, who controlled the port of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi, closed it to American trade that same year.
“In 1784, Spain closes the Mississippi River to American trade. How do you close a river? ... Spain controlled New Orleans, and if they can control access to the port, they can prohibit people from tying up their boats. They can prohibit people from entering the harbour, then they’re going to be able to effectively control the entire river just by controlling that one location. So, if you control New Orleans, you control the river,” said Stearns.
The academic pored over and reviewed newspapers from Lexington, Kentucky, from the late 1780s. She found that the river dominated local conversation.
The only way to make enough money to buy the land settlers had claimed was to sell their goods. But without a river, there was no market.
Stearns then probed further and her book takes the reader through a number of important events in US economic history including the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Whiskey Rebellion and the younger years of Andrew Jackson (‘Old Hickory’), the nation’s seventh president.
The statement describes the book as being “full of lively quotes pulled from countless firsthand accounts of travel to, and on, America’s greatest river, it transports the reader into the lived experience of the Mississippi world”.