VICKSBURG Chapter Twelve

 

As early as 1743 French King Louis XV required settlers in his Louisiana colony to build levees to restrain the Mississippi River floods - from the French word "lever", meaning to "raise on top". By 1803, when the Americans paid $15 million for the colony, there were 1,000 miles of levees protecting individual towns and plantations. By the middle of that century that millage had doubled. And the greatest advocate for levees in the state of Mississippi was a 46 year old transplanted Illinois native, a Kentucky lawyer and an opportunistic politician, James Lusk Alcorn.

Assembled over 2 decades, Alcorn (above)'s "Mound Place" cotton plantation, just east of Friar's Point, Mississippi, was worked by 93 African-American slaves, and was valued in 1860 as being worth a quarter of a million dollars. He always kept his eye on the bottom line and biographers described Alcorn's politics as "a Whig up to 1859, a Union man in 1860, a secessionist in 1861, a fire-eater in 1862, (and) a peace-man in 1863..."  Protecting his plantation was The Great Levee. At 18 feet high and 100 feet thick, it was the largest levee in the state.  It had been built in 1856 by the state Levee District, using slaves contracted from Mr. Alcorn's plantation. And the President of the Levee District, the highest paid employee in the state, just happened to be Mr. James Lusk Alcorn.

This massive earthen structure, 8 miles downstream from Helena, Arkansas, had lowered the water level in the oxbow Moon Lake just behind it by 8 feet, offering up hundreds of new secure acres for Alcorn's cotton.  But it also slammed shut what had been the Yazoo Pass (above, below), a 14 mile long "... narrow, snag filled slough..." that led to the 115 circuitous miles of  the Coldwater River...

...and then to the Little Tallahatchie River.  About 250 miles below Moon Lake, the Tallahatchie River joined  the Yalobusha River to form the Yazoo River at the small community of Greenwood, Mississippi.  This was a back door used by small Mississippi delta farmers to avoid the markets in Vicksburg, and instead sell their cotton and produce to the upstream ports of Helena and Memphis, Tennessee  The Great Levee chocked off these small farmers, cementing the wealth of  James Alcorn, at their expense. Men such as Alcorn projected the image of slavery steeped in tradition. In reality, it was a short cut to power built on other men's labors, both white and black.

And this was where things sat in late January of 1863 when 43 year old Federal Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter (above) learned that the rebels were building 3 gunboats in Yazoo City, 330 miles up the Yazoo River and 80 road miles northeast of Vicksburg. The Yazoo construction yard, rescued and transplanted from Memphis before its fall, included 5 saw and planning mills, carpenter, blacksmith and machinery shops, and,  reaching expectantly across the mud for the Yazoo River,  were three wooden ways, upon which were laboriously being built what would one day, hopefully,  be the wooden gunboats C.S.S. Yazoo, the C.S.S. Mobile, and a 310 foot long yet to be named ironclad, locally referred to as the Yazoo Monster.

Admiral Porter wanted to destroy that trio before they were finished. And since Pemberton was installing heavy guns atop Snyder's Bluff, closing the mouth of the Yazoo River to the Federals, Porter needed a back door.  Some 60 road miles north of Yazoo City (above) was Greenwood, at the head of the Yazoo River, and at the bottom of the Yazoo Pass. So, in late January Porter dispatched 27 year old Acting Naval Lieutenant George Washington Brown, to see if the back door at The Great Levee could be pried open again.

Brown's ship was the 155 foot long stern wheeler, the "Forest Rose" (above).  Pittsburgh built, she was a "tin-clad" gun boat, and in 2 years the U.S. Navy had bought, converted or built 60 of these "Brown Water" or "Mud Navy" ships to control the shallow and narrow bayous and backwaters of the Mississippi flood plain. The Rose's slopping wooden front was thick enough to absorb small arms fire. Her wood sides were reinforced with boiler-plate up to an inch thick. She carried two 30 pound rifled cannons and four 24 pound howitzers. With her two boilers, she could sail and maneuver at 6 knots in just 5 feet of water. After the Fort Hindman operation, the Rose had been stationed in Helena, to deal with partisan threats to the Federal supply line.  But on Monday, 2 February 1863, she steamed downstream to the Great Levee, accompanied by a 25 year old wunderkind, already a Lieutenant Colonel of Engineers, James Harrison Wilson and 400 "pioneers" - soldiers with shovels.

Lieutenant Brown later said that he - meaning he, and Colonel Wilson and the pioneers - buried a 50 pound can of black powder in the levee, "It blew up immense quantities of earth, opening a passage for the water...We then sunk three more...and set them off simultaneously, completely shattering the mound...". Colonel Wilson reported that "The opening was 40 yards wide, and the water pouring through like nothing else I ever saw except Niagara Falls..." 

By Wednesday morning of 4 February the breech was 75 yards across, and the Forest Rose was able to enter Moon Lake 48 hours later. But it was already too late.

When the Rose tied up for the night at the junction of Moon Lake and the Head of the Pass, they captured 3 locals in a dugout canoe. They told Brown that for days a force of Confederate soldiers and 100 slaves had been chopping down trees to obstruct the Pass. In fact is was just 50 slaves under a Confederate naval Lieutenant, Francis Sheppered. 

Clearly, the move to re-open the Yazoo Pass had been anticipated by the rebels, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis (above). On Thursday, 29 January, the Mississippi native had telegraphed from Richmond, asking General Pemberton, "Has anything or can anything be done to obstruct the navigation from Yazoo Pass down?" Clearly the answer had to be "Yes."

There was a growing chorus of warning cries. In charge of the construction of the Yazoo City gunboats, 45 year old naval Commander Isaac Newton Brown (above), wrote to Pemberton, "...if the Yazoo Pass remains unobstructed it may at high water afford the enemy a passage for their gun boats...if the trees along its banks were felled from both sides across the channel, which is seldom 100 feet wide, they would offer serious impediments to its navigation."  And James Alcorn warned Pemberton when Yankee troops occupied his plantation the first week in February.  Of course, being a businessman, he also told the Yankees they should have no trouble using the Yazoo Pass. 

But it was not until Tuesday, 17 February that Pemberton dispatched all the help he could - 1,500 men and the 44 year old profane and disruptive one armed North Carolinian fire plug, Brigadier General William Wing Loring (above).

A correspondent for the Chicago Times noted later that, the Federals were assembling at Helena a powerful expedition - nine gunboats and twenty-seven transports containing over 3,000 infantrymen under 39 year old prickly General Leonard Fulton Ross, - all in the greatest possible secrecy . "A casual observer....can form no possible idea of the character or magnitude of this expedition," the Times wrote hopefully, "as he can see but one or two boats at a time...And on this I base my strongest hopes for the success of the movement." But it took 3 weeks before the Navy and the Army were ready to move.

On Sunday, 22 February, the Times correspondent accompanied the expedition into the Pass. finding the Coldwater River so narrow that it "...affords no opportunity for vessels moving in opposite directions to pass each other...." The writer noted, "On the eastern bank there are two or three fine plantations; but, with these exceptions, the surroundings are an unbroken forest... Wild ducks and geese abound here in profusion...The water being deep, cool, and comparatively clear, abounds with fish of all kinds."

It took another 3 weeks, in constant rain  to even approach Greenwood and the Yazoo River because the rebels had, "...filled the channel with logs, trees, stumps, and all manner of obstacles." This, was troubling because, as the Times warned "If we do not take the enemy by surprise,...God help us!" The fear was that partisans or rebel cavalry would block the Pass before and behind the fleet, trapping them strung out single file in the confines of the Coldwater or the equally narrow Little Tallahatchie River.  If that happened, warned the Times, "There will be no escape for any of us..."

What was awaiting the Federal Fleet in Greenwood was not the Yankee's worst nightmare. But it was almost as bad - a triangle of cotton bales covered in earth, optimistically called Fort Pemberton.

- 30 -

GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter One

 

I have always been confused by Patrick Henry. He is famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death”, a bold statement that should have gotten a lot of press. Yet nobody at the time recorded him saying it.  

He also supposedly said “If this be treason, let us make the most of it”, another bold statement which, again, nobody wrote down at the time. What is fact is that he was always suspicious of the power of government. We largely have him to thank for the Bill of Rights, today a beacon of freedom for billions of people world wide. But he was also the CEO of the Virginia Yazoo Company, which sold swamp land to war veterans, trusting customers and unsuspecting tax payers. The Yazoo Company and its fellow scams shows that from the moment it was born the United States was a nation dedicated to the success of rich liars cheats and thieves.

My guess is the Yazoo Indians were only joking with French explorer Robert de La Salle.   In 1682, la Salle asked about the water at the edge of their town and the Yazoos told him it was a river, A 180 mile long by 100 mile wide “river” which did not so much flow into the Mississippi River, as seep. It was a swamp.  But the last laugh was on the Yazoo Indians because La Salle named the “river” after them. And after the Revolution, that patriot Patrick Henry used his freedom of speech to fleece a lot of unsuspecting would be capitalist by selling them Yazoo swamp land.

Now, even in 1789 nobody was interested in buying a swamp, So the American crooks decided to call their inventory the Yazoo Lands, instead.  Besides patriot and ex-governor Patrick Henry's Virginia Yazoo Company, there was the Tennessee Yazoo Company and the Carolina Yazoo Company. And together they formed the first American lobbying firm, what they called "The Combined Society".  It's stated purpose was  “By means of certain influences...to obtain from the State (of Georgia) large grants of land...for the end of making a large sum of money...” They were certain they could obtain a deed from Georgia, because although Georgia did not claim the swamp, Georgia was also flat broke.

Georgia had paid for its share of the American revolution by claiming lands westward to the Mississippi river and beyond, and used them as collateral to borrow gold and silver from European speculators. The problem was that land was mostly swamp during part of the year, and during the rest of the year was completely swamp. And that sliver of semi-dry land was was already claimed by the King of France.

The solution was first suggested by an ex-militia Colonel named Thomas Marston Green, sr. (above).  He'd been farming out in the Pine forests when a bunch of Spanish soldiers and surveyors showed up looking to inventory the lands they had just bought from the French. Colonel Green realized that after such an inventory would come the taxes. And Thomas hated paying taxes.  Luckily Green had no objection to collecting taxes. 

So in the fall of 1784 Green showed up in the then state capital of Louisville, Georgia, suggesting the state take over his plantation as "Bourbon County", now encompassing all land between the present Georgia border and the Mississippi river south of the Yazoo river. Thus it would be the largest county in the United States, and Marston Green would, of course, run it, selling any land he did not want and splitting the take with the state. And on 7 February, 1785, the rich white men running Georgia passed the Bourbon County Act, and waited for everybody not as smart as them, to buy into this hairbrained scheme. 

The greedy Thomas Marston Green decided to speed things along. He gathered a little army of 32 gullible fools  and led them on a march into the Spanish outpost of Natchez (above) on the Mississippi river. 

Once there he informed the Spanish Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos (above) that the American state of Georgia now owned everything south of the Yazoo river, and the Spanish should just get out.  

Governor de Lemos wasted no time in having all the idiots arrested, and shipped down river to New Orleans (above) where they could safely rot in a prison (below)

The state of Georgia lifted not a finger to rescue their new governor of Bourbon County, let alone his little army.  The only person who showed up in New Orleans (above) to plead for the release of any of these idiots was Martha Green, Thomas' long suffering wife. The journey to New Orleans left her in such a pitiable state, that shortly after her arrival she died. Governor de Lemos felt so sorry for the late lady and her now motherless children, that he sent Thomas home with a warning - don't do it again.  

But de Lemos also decided the upstart Americans could no longer use the port of New Orleans to ship their produce to market. That made the settlers in western Georgia, very unhappy.  In 1788 the state of Georgia backed down and repealed the Bourbon County Act. The port of New Orleans was re-opened to Americans.  But that still left Georgia flat broke.

- 30 -

GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter One

I have always been confused by Patrick Henry. He is famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death”, a bold statement that should have gotten a lot of press. Yet nobody at the time recorded him saying it.  

He also supposedly said “If this be treason, let us make the most of it”, another bold statement which, again, nobody wrote down at the time. What is fact is that he was always suspicious of the power of government. We largely have him to thank for the Bill of Rights, today a beacon of freedom for billions of people world wide. But he was also the CEO of the Virginia Yazoo Company, which sold swamp land to war veterans and unsuspecting tax payers. The Yazoo Company and its fellow scams shows that from the moment it was born the United States was a nation dedicated to the success of rich liars cheats and thieves. 

My guess is the Yazoo Indians were only joking with French explorer Robert de La Salle.   In 1682, la Salle asked about the water at the edge of their town and the Yazoos told him it was a river, A 180 mile long by 100 mile wide “river” which did not so much flow into the Mississippi River, as seep. It was a swamp.  But the last laugh was on the Yazoo Indians because La Salle named the “river” after them. And after the Revolution, that patriot Patrick Henry used his freedom to fleece a lot of unsuspecting would be capitalist by selling them Yazoo swamp land.

Now, even in 1789 nobody was interested in buying a swamp, So the American crooks decided to call their inventory the Yazoo Lands, instead.  Besides patriot and ex-governor Patrick Henry's Virginia Yazoo Company, there was the Tennessee Yazoo Company and the Carolina Yazoo Company. And together they formed the first American lobbying firm, what they called "The Combined Society".  It's stated purpose was  “By means of certain influences...to obtain from the State (of Georgia) large grants of land...for the end of making a large sum of money...” They were certain they could obtain a deed from Georgia, because although Georgia did not claim the swamp, Georgia was also flat broke.

Georgia had paid for its war of revolution by claiming lands westward to the Mississippi and beyond, and used them as collateral to borrow gold and silver. The problem was that land was mostly swamp during part of the year, and during the rest of the year was completely swamp. And sliver that was hardly ever swamp  was owned by native American tribes,  like the Yazoos, and claimed by the King of France.

The solution was first suggested by an ex-militia Colonel named Thomas Marston Green.  He'd been farming out in the Pine forests when a bunch of Spanish soldiers and surveyors showed up looking to inventory the lands they had just bought from the French. Colonel Green realized that after the inventory would come the taxes. And he hated paying taxes.  Luckily Green had no objection to collecting taxes. So in the fall of 1784 Green showed up in the state capital of Louisville, Georgia, suggesting the state take over his plantation as "Bourbon County".  It would be the largest county in the United States, and Marston Green would, of course, run it, selling the land he did not want and splitting the take with the state. And on 7 February, 1785, the rich white men running Georgia passed the Bourbon County Act, and waited for the money to roll in. 

Unfortunately, Green went home and told the Spanish to get out because Georgia was now running things. They threw him in jail. And as long as Georgia was taking that attitude, the Spanish decided Americans could no longer use the port of New Orleans to ship their produce to market. That made the settlers in western Georgia, very unhappy.  In 1788 the state of Georgia backed down and repealed the Bourbon County Act.  But that still left Georgia flat broke.

The next answer they tried in the fall of 1788 was the infamous Pine Barren Land Speculation, in which a dozen rich white men surveyed (badly) about thirty million acres of Georgia and sold it off (quickly), mostly to smaller speculators,  Everybody thought they were going to get rich. The problem this time was that Georgians occupied only about nine million acres. And for the new fast spaces claimed, there were a lot of duplicate titles, and five or six owners for every section of land. Over night land prices went from sky high to bargain basement,  inspiring a fake advertisement, offering, “ Ten millions of acres of valuable pine barren land in the province of Utopia, on which there are several very sumptuous air castles, ready furnished”.

This business model would later be called a Ponzi scheme, and the only people who got rich were the ones at the top, and none of that money trickled down to the state of Georgia. So in 1789, this time under the Governorship of an arrogant fire plug named George Mathews, they tried it for a third time,  only bigger. And this was when Patrick Henry got into the game.

It was enough to make you wonder why the American people continue to have such childlike faith in capitalism, considering how often they keep getting screwed by it. It's a morality play, of sorts, if the moral is "There's a sucker born every minute".

Patrick Henry had never been much of a business man. When he was 18, the “indolent, dreamy (and) procrastinating...ill-dressed young man” impulsively married the equally impulsive, plump and buxom Sarah "Sallie" Shelton.  He went to work for Sarah's father in his Hanover Tavern, but after a few months as a barkeep Patrick decided on a career which would not require so much physical labor. With only six weeks of study he passed the Virginia bar. The parents of the bride were so thrilled, they set the fecund couple up with some land and slaves – an instant entrance into Virginia's upper class. It was the perfect foundation for a politician. But, alas, Patrick would be short of money his whole life. Which is why he formed the Virginia Yazoo company.

The 53 year old Patrick Henry assembled a slightly odd group of investors. At 53, droll and humorless, Paul Carrington was a long time member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and a judge of the Court of Appeals. At barely 30 years old, Abraham Venerable was an up-and-comer in Virginia society, while 50 year old Francis Watkins was the clerk for the local courts.

But the key investor, the actual money behind the original Virginia Yazoo Company was David Ross, who had already assembled 100,000 acres in Virginia, buying up plantations and farms abandoned by loyalists during and after the revolution.  Ross also owned 200,000 acres of Kentucky, and several thousand more in what would become Tennessee (claimed at the time by North Carolina). He was a very land rich young man. And, oddly, he was Scottish

See, after the 1746 battle of Culloden, Scotland was under the royal lash, and David Ross stood to inherit nothing from his father's now looted Scottish estates. So in the middle of the 1750's he joined the horde of Scots emigrating to the American colonies. But where most Scotsmen chose the less settled Carolinas, and arrived with little but the clothes on their back, David Ross chose Virginia and arrived with contacts in the colonial government, and with cash,  Almost immediately he invested in the Oxford Iron Works along the Potomac River and the Antietam Iron Works in Maryland. He then began buying land and planting tobacco. It is hard to escape the suspicion that David Ross's family had sold out their fellow Stuart supporters, perhaps his own cousins. It is what the losing side of a rebellion often has to do to save the family fortunes.

Most years the iron works struggled to get by, and the tobacco barely covered operating expenses.  To really build a fortune, Colonial Virginia planters - such as the gout ridden George Mason - used their large plantations as collateral to buy cheap Indian land north of the Ohio River. The new owners then surveyed it quickly, subdivided it in haste and sold it off in 100 to 600 acre sections to land hungry farmers at inflated prices.  To quote from Wood Holton's 1994 paper in 'The Journal of Southern History:  “Land speculation was a principal source of income for the Virginia gentry, the 2-to-5 % of families who stood atop the colony's pyramid of wealth and power...During the frontier years, absentee landholders owned three-quarters of the region's total acreage...little acreage was left for residents. ”

The only draw back was that the invasion of English farmers set off the French and Indian War, which brought the sale of western lands to a halt for nine long years.  Then  in 1763, after the peace was signed, King George III issued a Royal Proclamation that henceforth no colony could lay claim to any land west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. Individual farmers were still free to negotiate with tribes for acreage on Indian lands, but their property rights would not be recognized by the English crown, meaning the land could be handed down father to son but could not be resold, ending speculating in Indian lands.  Wood Holton argues it was this loss of income which spurred Virginians, like the “great land-monger” George Washington, and speculators Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Patrick Henry, to support the American Revolution

Even before the American victory at Yorktown, in June of 1779, Virginia and her governor Patrick Henry, joined the other southern colonies in reviving virtually all of the land claims rejected by George III's government. George Mason rehired his old employee Daniel Boone to began “exploring” new lands to the west of Boonesborough, paying him in land -  from which Boone earned $20,000, a hefty fortune during the revolution. And on 20 November, 1789, the Virginia Yazoo Company, headed by Patrick Henry and David Ross,  along with the Tennessee Company and the Carolina Company, formally applied for land grants from the state of Georgia for tracts along the Yazoo River/swamp.  

To the wealthy speculators who were also the founding fathers, this is what they meant by the word “freedom”. And that is the morality play we shall now follow.

- 30 -