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Fair to Middlin'
The Antebellum Cotton Trade of the Apalachicola/Chattahooche River Valley
By Lynn Willoughby The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1993 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8979-6
CHAPTER 1
A Cotton Economy
THE PORT CITY OF APALACHICOLA, FLORIDA, ON THE Gulf of Mexico exported its first bale of cotton in 1822. The future of this small port held promise. The city lay at the mouth of "the largest and longest river system in the southeastern United States." This waterway (composed of the Chipola and the Apalachicola rivers in Florida and the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers in Georgia and Alabama) dissected rich cotton lands only then being opened for white settlement as the Creek Indians were pushed out of their homelands.
The region was a frontier in its truest sense. Florida did not become a United States possession until 1821 or a state until 1845. As late as 1840 the Apalachicola newspaper reported sporadic Indian attacks on the valley's newcomers. As the Indians were gradually forced off their lands, eager white cotton farmers moved in quickly to claim it, to clear away the pine trees, and to plant the seeds that they believed would make them wealthy in the rich red earth.
Apalachicola, first called "West Point," was incorporated in 1829. By 1836 fifty thousand bales of cotton were being exported from there, and it had become the third largest cotton port on the Gulf of Mexico behind New Orleans and Mobile. By 1840 forty-three imposing brick and granite cotton warehouses guarded Apalachicola's river bank, each thirty feet wide and three stories tall.
As the port grew, it faced a competitor from the west. The town of St. Joseph, Florida, was created for the sole purpose of stealing Apalachicola's cotton trade. A railroad (Florida's first) was built from Iola, on the Apalachicola River, to St. Joseph, on the Gulf of Mexico, in order to bypass the older port. The railroad was completed in 1839, and for a couple of years the upstart gave Apalachicola a run for its money, but a yellow fever epidemic in 1841 was so deadly that the town was abandoned, leaving Apalachicola as the sole recipient of the river trade. The decade of the 1840s would prove to be Apalachicola's golden years.
The city's year-round residents numbered only around one thousand, but in the cotton marketing season, which was at its peak between December and April, the population multipled several-fold. The winter populace was a cosmopolitan lot of mostly northerners and foreigners who came there for the sole purpose of making their fortunes in cotton. When the summer breezes brought the mosquitoes and the heat, they were gone again to their homes in more healthful climes. In addition to the businessmen, thousands of seamen from all over the world also thronged the waterfront during the busy season, thus adding to the congestion of the streets already obstructed with cotton bales and bustling with activity.
Apalachicola was a flurry of activity during the commercial season. Hundreds of bales of cotton spilled out of the warehouses and clogged the streets. The auction bell clanged as draymen rushed the bales from the wharves to the compresses to the warehouses and back again. Cotton factors, whose job it was to sell the cotton, held court in their counting rooms on the second floor of their warehouses. Here they laid out samples for prospective buyers, and they dashed off letters to their associates in New York and Europe notifying them of an ensuing shipment. They arranged for the bales to be mended or repacked, insured, and stored. They dickered over the lowest ocean freightage, and they arranged financing so that neither they nor their clients had to wait for the cotton to reach the English textile mill before they received compensation. They sent other letters upriver to the farmer who waited to hear what his year's labor would bring. All day long their clerks bent over the precious accounting books that brought order to the entire operation. Long into the night, lamplights glowed from the upstairs windows of the counting rooms on Water Street.
These people were as obsessed with the staple as were their counterparts in Mobile, where one visitor claimed: "people live in cotton houses and ride in cotton carriages. They buy cotton, sell cotton, think cotton, eat cotton, drink cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children. In enumerating the charms of a fair widow, they begin by saying she makes so many bales of cotton. It is the great staple, the sum and substance of Alabama."
A resident of Apalachicola during its preeminence as a cotton port later recalled that he had enjoyed the heady days there when money was easy, "[w]ater was scacer [sic] than champagne, and jolly good fellows were plentiful as blackberries." This was not just the opinion of one man. A northerner who worked several cotton seasons in Apalachicola reported that even though the place had its drawbacks, the port abounded in good food and "mighty good liquors" and "plenty of fellows that will eat & drink with [you] night & day."
But the summer off-season was another matter. The town virtually closed down. Steamboats no longer jockeyed for their place at the wharves. Businesses closed. The streets became deserted. Those few who did remain in town, "seemed to drag along as though each step were the effort of an involuntary struggle. ... Everything was quiet, quiet, quiet, and but for 'dame fashion,' 'bustle' would have become an obsolete idea."
The pulse of this community was quieted or quickened according to the state of its major artery, the river. The waterway originated as two Georgia streams, the Chattahoochee and the Flint rivers, which flowed from north Georgia in a southwesterly direction roughly paralleling each other through southwest Georgia until they converged at the Florida and Alabama boundaries. From this point of their confluence to where the waters reached the Gulf of Mexico, the river was known as the Apalachicola. In Florida a smaller stream known as the Chipola originated west of the larger course near the Alabama line and paralleled the Apalachicola for about fifty miles before the two united and wound their way to the Gulf.
The river was the highway that linked the port with the rich cotton fields of Georgia and Alabama and, beyond them, the industrial and commercial city of Columbus, Georgia. Until the railroads came in from east and west to break up this unit in the 1850s, residents throughout the valley seemed to face inward toward the river that would take the cotton to market or mill. It was not a perfect transportation network. In the dry summer months the streams dwindled to a thread, carrying less than two feet of water in many places. Every summer commerce halted until the river again resumed its usable state.
Fortunately for those involved in the cotton trade, the rise of the river generally coincided with the harvest of cotton. Planters usually began picking cotton in August. After the cotton was ginned to remove its seeds and compressed into bales, growers could store the nonperishable bales on their farms indefinitely until the river was capable of transporting the crop to market. Generally the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee River system became boatable by Christmas and remained so until May or June.
Many bales of cotton passed through the port of Apalachicola during this short business season. Total cotton receipts there generally increased in the 1840s from a low of about 55,000 bales in 1840 to around 140,000 in 1853. Railroad incursion into the valley in the latter year siphoned off cotton to other ports, but a surge in general cotton production in the late 1850s compensated for the cotton Apalachicola lost to Savannah and Mobile, and by 1860 receipts had again climbed to over 130,000 bales.
Most of Apalachicola's cotton was destined for Liverpool, England, the seaport of the great Manchester textile mills. One quarter of the cotton that eventually reached England was detoured through New York, which needed southern cotton to fill the holds of its Europe-bound packets. Southern cotton dealers also needed New York to provide financial backing for its shipments to England. Apalachicola cotton dealers also shipped regularly to Havre, France; Providence, Rhode Island; Boston; and Baltimore.
Apalachicola was not the only cotton market on the river. At the opposite end of the river stood Columbus, Georgia. Laid out in 1828 for speculative purposes as soon as Georgia received legal claim to this land from the Creek Indians, it quickly became "the boom town of west Georgia." For many years, Columbus perched on the western edge of "civilization," for Indians continued to hold onto their lands on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee throughout most of the 1830s. As late as 1844 one traveler learned that the settlement across the river (modern-day Phenix City, Alabama) had been nicknamed "Sodom" because of the rough crowd that assembled there. Columbus itself was a bawdy town where liquor flowed and the druggist proudly displayed the latest models of stilettos. It was a town of dichotomies; some travelers remarked on its dirty run-down hotels, while others were taken with its natural beauty.
Regardless of its origins, Columbus soon became one of the major commercial centers of Georgia. Located at the fall line, the town lay at the head of navigation of the Chattahoochee River. Paths cut into the forest in all directions allowed those farmers living within a day's ride to haul their cotton by wagon into the city where steamboats waited at the docks to carry the staple to the coast. Many local farmers found Columbus to be a convenient market for both selling their cotton and buying their supplies, and a brisk "wagon trade" developed there.
During the fall and winter months the crude roads that stretched out from the city conducted wagon after wagon loaded with cotton from the surrounding fields. By 1845 the city's population, numbering almost five thousand, greatly outnumbered that of Apalachicola. It boasted two hundred businesses including twenty-six drygoods stores, fifty-seven provisions stores, and five cotton warehouses. Yearly cotton receipts in Columbus from 1840 to 1855 averaged about seventy thousand bales, and over 100,000 after 1855.
Columbus was primarily a cotton marketing center, but it was more diversified than its sibling city at the Gulf. Apparently the men of capital in Columbus were more willing to put their money into manufacturing enterprises than were their counterparts in most areas of the South. By 1849 five textile factories used the water power provided by Columbus's breathtakingly beautiful falls to spin local cotton into yarn and shirting. There was also a paper mill, a flour- and gristmill, two foundries, a machine shop, and a factory that made cotton gins.
By 1860 Columbus had a population of nine thousand. In textile production, it was second only to Richmond in the South. Those businesses advertising that year included six banking institutions, seven cotton commission businesses, and eight cotton brokers. Forty-six groceries served the thriving wagon trade.
Both Columbus and Apalachicola owed their existence to the hinterland lying between them. The triangles of land between the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers in Georgia and the Chipola and Apalachicola rivers in Florida were prime cotton lands, and the area, once opened to whites, was settled rapidly. By 1840 the population of those Georgia counties lying between the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers below the fall line was almost ninety thousand. Ten years later there were 185,000 people living in the entire river valley.
As the white population increased, lesser trading towns sprouted along the riverbanks. Eufaula, Alabama, located about forty-five miles below Columbus on the Chattahoochee, was another significant regional cotton market, for it often served as the head of navigation during the dry summer months. Like Columbus, it began as a raucous frontier town built on the foundation of a Creek Indian town. White cotton farmers had been so eager to begin cultivating this land that they had not even paused to purchase it first, precipitating a local war.
Albany, Georgia, at the head of navigation of the Flint River, was an important trade center for the forwarding of cotton to the Gulf by barges, as well as for the ancillary grocery trade. Marianna, Florida, at the head of navigation of the Chipola River was another. Scores of minor markets were situated all along the river system wherever individuals built steamboat landings and waterside warehouses.
On the Alabama side of the river, there was a brisk wagon trade at Otho, Abbeville, Columbia, Franklin, and Seale. In Georgia there were markets at Fort Gaines on the Chattahoochee and Bainbridge on the lower Flint, but almost every boat landing had a warehouse and resident entrepreneur. There were twenty-five landings on the Apalachicola and Chattahoochee rivers between Apalachicola and Columbus.
In the lonely pine forests of Georgia, Alabama, and north Florida, these wharves served as gathering places for farmers and planters, travelers, and occasionally the idle daughters of nearby plantations. The sporadic arrival of a steamboat, announced by the blast of a whistle or the firing of a gun, brought people scurrying toward the landing to watch the slaves load and unload the steamboat. Since many of these landings were located on steep bluffs, this process was quite interesting to observe. Long wooden slides, which extended from the top of the bluff to the river's edge, were used to conduct the cargo down the hill. Bale after bale of cotton, as well as other heavy freight (even pigs), were sent tumbling down the steep incline and into the bowels of the boat. When at last the freight was stored and the shouting had stopped, the steamer noisily pulled away from the dock and disappeared around the bend in a cloud of smoke, leaving the onlookers to return to the relative quiet and isolation of their work until the next steamer announced itself.
Many men made their living executing the various specialized tasks necessary in moving the cotton from field to mill. As one way of distinguishing them from each other, cotton merchants can be classified as being either buyers or sellers. Cotton factors were paid a commission of 2.5 percent by the grower to sell his cotton. Although the farmer retained ownership of the staple, the factor acted in his own name. The rationale for this custom was that the factor had incurred expenses in transporting and storing the cotton before sale and had usually given the grower a partial payment in advance of the sale. Therefore, he acquired a lien on the cotton "which gave him the right to deal with it in a manner that would protect his acquired interest."
Commission merchants were paid a commission of 2.5 percent for buying commodities for someone else. Eventually the terms factor and commission merchant were used interchangeably (as they are throughout this book) because the same man charged with selling a planter's cotton at harvesttime was usually also the one who had bought plantation supplies for the grower throughout the season, carrying the debit on his books until the cotton sale compensated him.
However, in the 1840s businessmen were more likely than any other time to use the terms literally. For example, the officers in the firm of Flewellen and Butt of Apalachicola called themselves "Factors and Commission Merchants" in their advertisements, saying, "we shall be sellers, not buyers of Cotton; and will give prompt attention to the filling of all orders for Bagging, Rope, Family supplies, etc." Likewise, Sims and Cheever of Albany, Georgia, who also specialized in buying cotton and purchasing supplies on commission, referred to themselves as "Factors and General Commission Merchants" in their advertising.
This distinction made between factors and commission merchants was particularly necessary in Apalachicola, for there existed a marked division of labor within the port. In addition to the factors who sold cotton, there was a large class of merchants who bought cotton on commission for northern and European concerns. Indeed, a contemporary commented in 1845 that the Apalachicola market was controlled by those working for northern manufacturers.
Commission merchants retained to buy cotton, rather than to sell it, have generally been ignored by southern economic historians. Norman Sydney Buck wrote in 1925 that there may exist a "separate class of buying factors," but he found he did not have enough evidence to make a conclusion. No one since his study has mentioned American "buying factors." However, at least eight different Apalachicola firms acted as commission merchants for New England textile mills alone. L. F. E. Dugas of Apalachicola worked solely as a commission merchant, buying cotton for commission houses in New York, France, and Charleston. For his efforts he received 2.5 percent of the gross amount of the sale.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fair to Middlin' by Lynn Willoughby. Copyright © 1993 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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