Blue Roads of America: a British Spy, a Confederate President and Cotton Cities of Mississippi and Georgia

We Brits sometimes ignorantly assume that the USA is a young country with little or no history. However, in my 40 years travelling in USA I rarely returned home without visiting a place with a history of which I had previously been ignorant. One lesson I learned was the crucial importance of rivers as the early highways of the United States.

Major John André

Let’s start with the tale of a British spy and the arch-villain of US history, Benedict Arnold. Our New Jersey friends, Chris and Bob Contillo, once took me for dinner to the ’76 House in Tappan, New York, formerly Yoast Mabie’s tavern, opened in 1668. Preserved in the basement is the prison cell where Major John André, head of the British Army’s spy service, spent his last days in 1780. André’s mission was to meet Arnold who, in exchange for a payment of £20,000, would arrange the surrender of West Point, which would have isolated New England from the rest of the rebellious American colonies.

André sailed up the Hudson river in a British naval vessel, and then was

Benedict Arnold

rowed in a small boat to his rendezvous by two local boatmen. After meeting Arnold, André made his escape, in civilian clothing, with papers that gave him a false identity, and others that described how to take West Point, all in Arnold’s hand. André seems not to have been a very capable spy. As he approached Tarrytown, New York, he bumped into three militiamen, whom he mistook for Hessians fighting for the British. André identified himself as a British officer and was promptly arrested. His captors took him to George Washington’s headquarters in Tappan where he was summarily tried and sentenced to death by hanging.

Since he died a failure, one might suspect that André’s reputation would be forever tarnished. However, he was apparently a handsome and dashing character, and popular culture soon started to create something of a legend around the major’s death. In 1798 André: a Tragedy in Five Acts, the first American tragedy on an American subject, written by William Dunlap, opened in New York City. Dunlap based his play on the English Romantic poet Anna Seward’s Monody on Major André, published in 1783. For those, like me, who do not know what a monody is, it is an ode sung in Greek tragedies to lament a death.

André's memorial in Westminster Abbey

Ninety nine years to the day after André’s death, the millionaire businessman Cyrus W. Field, who laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic in 1858, dedicated a granite monument in Tappan to the failed spy. However, by then André’s remains had already been disinterred and transferred to a rather grander monument in Westminster Abbey, which had been waiting for the gallant major’s return since 1782. Thus, despite the failure of his journey up the Hudson, André lies a hero in a building where many of the most significant Britons are honoured.

 

Field's monument to André in Tappan

Arnold's plaque in London

As for Arnold, probably the most reviled character in American history, he was rather better at escape than André. A blue plaque in London records, without a hint of irony, that “Major General Benedict Arnold American patriot resided here from 1796 until his death June 14, 1801.”

 

President Jefferson Davis

Another character with a rather mixed reputation is Jefferson Davis, the first and last president of the Confederacy. His Confederate White House is in Richmond, Virginia, hidden from all but the  most inquisitive visitor by a huge modern office block. My tour was led by a charming man with a wonderful southern accent, who proudly told his visitors that one of his ancestors had fought with Robert E. Lee. He clearly believed that the wrong side had won the War Between the States.

 

The Southern White House in Richmond, 19th century

Davis and his wife Varina lived in their White House from August 1861 to April 1865, when the

Lincoln in Richmond, Thomas Nast, woodcut, 1865

Confederates evacuated Richmond. After the Union troops had burned much of Richmond, Abraham Lincoln boarded a steamer on the Potomac River to the Chesapeake, and thence up the James River, to stroll through the capital of his bitter enemy. Davis was eventually captured as he fled with the papers and gold of the Confederacy. While his nemesis was soon to fall to an assassin’s bullet, Davis had a second career, after a brief spell in prison, touring gatherings of old Confederates to keep alive the Lost Cause, still lamented in the South to our day.

Varina Davis’ hometown was Natchez, Mississippi, set on top of a bluff above the Mississippi River. She was the daughter of a not very successful planter and slave owner. Her family home, the Briars was built in 1818, and is now a rather charming bed and breakfast, situated behind a very un-charming abandoned motel. A notice in the hallway proudly tells visitors that Jefferson Davis and Varina were married there in 1845.

 

The Briars, Natchez, home of Varina Davis, now a B&B

The Mississippi from Natchez Bluff

From the top of the bluff there are expansive views of low-lying land on the other side of the great river for miles, where slaves once toiled in the cotton fields. Natchez flourished as the place where Mississippi cotton planters could leave the heat of the cotton fields to relax in their town homes. I visited one of the homes. The charming Mississippi lady who was our guide told us of the history of the owners. The daughters were sent to Europe to acquire the required social skills, one of which was to play the piano. There was a pianoforte in the living room, which must have had a long and complicated journey from Europe.

 

The Rosalie Mansion in Natchez

Mammy's Cupboard, Natchez

Just outside Natchez is Mammy’s Cupboard, a diner in the form of a huge black mammie, whose enslaved human counterparts would have raised the cultured young daughters and sons of planter families. Customers enter the dining room through a door set into the Mammie’s skirt. The black mammie is  a classic stereotype, akin to the golliwog, but the Cupboard seems to escape censure for its racial overtones. The Cupboard is on highway 61, which parallels the highway of the planters’ day, known as the Natchez Trace. The Trace, a trail used by native Americans long before the arrival of Europeans, connected Nashville, Tennessee, from where the Cumberland River flows to the Ohio and the Mississippi, some 440 miles to the north, with Natchez. A number of mounds remind the traveller of the region’s pre-European past. Along this road,  from the early years of the 19^th century travelled wagons of essential supplies and trade goods. Dotted along it were inns and trading posts.

 

Map of Natchez Trace

Natchez-Under-the Hill, first half of the 19th century

Not all goods travelled by wagon along the Trace. Wooden flatboats, powered by the Mississippi’s currents (no CO² footprint) made the journey from Nashville to the landing at Natchez Under-the-Hill. Here the flatboat men sold the wood of their vessels to finance their trip home upriver, and a good deal of gambling, drinking and visits to the local brothels, away from the disapproving gaze of the planter families in their homes on the bluff above. Then the rivermen walked, or rode on horseback, to Nashville to begin their journey again.  

 

The Mississippi, and the Ohio flowing from Pittsburgh

Alvarado Avenue, La Belle, Missouri

To understand the economic geography and history of the USA one need only look at a map of its great rivers. The Ohio and the Mississippi flow north to south, and join their waters in Cairo, Illinois, providing the trade routes that drove the American economy. This lesson was impressed on me when I drove from Kirksville to Hannibal, Missouri, famous as the setting for Mark Twain’s novels. As I drove along state highway 6, I passed endless fields of corn, through towns such as Hurland (pop. 163), the rather more substantial La Belle (pop. 660), or the almost metropolitan Edina (pop. 1,176). My commuter train to London had a population that far exceeded that of most towns along the road. When I reached Hannibal, I realized that to get to any settlement of any size in Twain’s day the Mississippi riverboat was the only way to go. The arrival of the riverboat was a great event, since it brought goods, visitors and news from the growing cities. In Twain’s day Nashville was a city of some 7,000 souls. St Louis was home to fewer than 20,000 in 1840, but ten years later boomed to almost 78,000. Only about 1,000 residents lived in Hannibal. And inland for miles stretched farmland and the very occasional small settlement

Hannibal, Missouri, 1857

Rome, Georgia

Map of the Coosa river

Another southern town with a river history, and an historical connection to a political marriage is Rome, Georgia. The city was founded on the banks of the Coosa River in 1834 named for its seven hills. The Coosa flowed south to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf Coast. The slight inconvenience that the Rome was founded on land in the Cherokee was briskly resolved in 1838 by expelling the Cherokee to Oklahoma. Rome flourished as the port from which northern Georgian cotton planters could load their crop onto steamboats which sailed to Mobile, and thence to world markets. Prosperity ended when General Sherman’s troops marched into Georgia in 1864, destroying much of Rome’s productive capacity. Visitors to Rome are proudly told that President Woodrow Wilson met and married his wife Ellen, the daughter of a preacher, in Rome. Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, where his parents were slave owners, but spent most of his childhood in August, Georgia. His father was a founder of the Southern Presbyterian Church, which split from the Northern Presbyterians in 1861 because of a dispute concerning the loyalty of the church to the federal government. So, Ellen and Woodrow both had firm southern confederate roots.

First Lady Ellen Wilson

Another eminent lady of Rome was Martha McChesney Berry, the daughter of a wealthy cotton trader, who devoted her life to education. She started with a one-room in the abandoned Possum Trot church, and in 1902 founded Berry College, which I visited about 2006. Berry claims to have the largest contiguous college campus in the world: 27,000 acres of fields, forests, lakes and Lavender Mountain. The campus is home to some 2,000 students and perhaps 2,500 deer.

The former Possum Trot Church school

Berry College, Rome, Georgia

A modern visitor to Rome can visit the riverside and a few 19^th-century buildings. Perhaps the most interesting sight in contemporary Rome is a bronze statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf. The plinth carries a plaque in Latin, which in translation reads “This statue of the Capitoline Wolf, as a forecast of prosperity and glory, has been sent from Ancient Rome to New Rome during the consulship of Benito Mussolini in the year 1929.” The statue was temporarily removed in 1949, to protect from anti-Italian sentiment. The statue was proudly reinstated in 1952. Republican America may have cast off the oppressive rule of Old Europe’s monarchs, but the old culture of Europe continued to fascinate the new republic’s rough-hewn citizens long after they had won independence.

Mussolini's Romulus and Remus statue, outside City Hall, Rome Georgia