Abstract
Rivers have often served as the strand that bind wide-ranging historical and literary accounts of people of a certain place and time. The well-known Rivers of America Series, for example, provided a forum for writers to trace human and environmental histories along waterways in North America. The most famous of the series, John Horgan’s prize-winning The Great River: The Rio Grande and the American Southwest, traced the human societies along that nearly 2,000-mile (3,051 km) waterway and provided one of the first scholarly, and exceedingly readable, examinations of the southwestern United States. John Sledge’s work, clearly inspired by this series, takes on the far shorter but also vitally important Mobile River in the south-eastern United States, and the city of Mobile, Alabama, which became one of the most important ports on the Gulf of Mexico. His engaging work is both scholarly and entertaining and will appeal to a general public and maritime historians.
As Sledge describes in his introduction, the Mobile River is only 45 miles long, making it one of the shortest rivers in Alabama, but it is the outlet for the sixth largest river basin in the United States – draining large portions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee – and the largest emptying into the Gulf east of the Mississippi River. The river proper begins at the confluence of the Tombigbee and Alabama rivers at Nannahubba Bluffs, now the site of large ThyssenKrupp steel mill. From there, the Mobile flows south before dividing into the Mobile and Tensaw channels and spreading into the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, which covers approximately 400 square miles, before draining into Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
The book is divided into two parts. Part one is a straightforward historical narrative of the river and the people who have lived along its banks. The first three chapters trace the European invasion of the Mobile basin. Spanish explorers entered the area by the early sixteenth century, but the indigenous peoples repeatedly forced the Europeans to abandon their attempts to construct forts and settlements. It was not until the French, who displayed a far more conciliatory approach to interacting with the inhabitants, founded what became the city of Mobile in 1702 that European settlement became permanent. Sledge covers the struggle between French, Spanish, and English for control of the area, the ascendancy of the British, and, after the American Revolution, the American conflicts with Spain over the boundary between Spanish Florida and the United States – conflicts complicated by the intrigues of Aaron Burr and war with Britain from 1812–1814. The actions of Mobile’s leaders and General Andrew Jackson eventually defeated the British and their native American allies, clearing the way for the American acquisition of the region by treaty from the Spanish after the ended. Sledge then traces the growth of the cotton and slave empire that arose in the Mobile River basin and the emergence of the city of Mobile as the most important cotton-exporting port east of the Mississippi. With such reliance on slavery and slave-grown cotton, it is not surprising that the city’s commercial leaders, reliant on slavery and slave-grown cotton, were among the state’s most ardent secessionists. During the Civil War, Mobile remained a vital east-west railroad junction and one of the few ports that remained in Confederate hands throughout the conflict. Confederate and state leaders devoted considerable financial resources for its protection, and slaveholders allocated considerable numbers of slaves to actually perform the construction of fortifications at the entrance to Mobile Bay, the sinking of iron-capped piles and submerged, mounted torpedoes to thwart any Union naval force that attempted to move upriver from the bay or downriver from the Mobile’s numerous tributaries. Only in April 1865 did Union Admiral David Farragut’s fleet force its way into the bay – an action known for the admiral’s famous command, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’ – and capture the city. The final chapters of Part 1 trace the efforts by the Mobile’s leaders to secure funding to rebuild the war-damaged city’s waterfront commercial area, improve railroad connections, and dredge the river channel though the bay, where a large underwater sandbar obstructed deep-draft ocean-going vessels. This section of the book concludes with a discussion of other infrastructure and engineering projects in the twentieth century, Mobile’s emergence as a fruit port, and the increasing environmental degradation of the river.
In Part 2, ‘Currents,’ Sledge takes a thematic approach, examining in more detail on workers on and along the river and the various ethnic groups that have lived along the river and played a part in the Mobile region’s history. In fascinating detail, he describes the kind of work done by captains, pilots, deckhands, and dockworkers from the nineteenth century to the present. In subsequent chapters, he focuses on African Americans, especially the creation and development of Africatown on the river; creoles, the descendants of Europeans and Africans who enjoyed considerable freedoms and rights during the period of slavery; and native groups such as a mixed-race Choctaw group. All have endured considerable exploitation and discrimination as the city and river developed commercially. Although this section of the book is well-researched and written, some readers may wish that Sledge had expanded these themes and incorporated them into the main narrative rather than take them up in a separate chapter. One other quibbling criticism may be lodged about the lack of a detailed map of the region. The two maps of the entire Mobile River system are overly busy, almost illegible, and resemble tourist maps, making them almost useless for readers who do not know the area.
Sledge, senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission, has written three other books on the city of Mobile and its institutions, and his mastery of the regional sources is evident in this deeply researched work. Although specialists in American or Atlantic World history may well be familiar with many of the events described, Sledge’s focus on the river and the city and his use of the rich documentary material give the work a fresh local perspective. The author states several times his affinity for the area, which comes across in this engagingly written, entertaining, and informative work. Maritime historians and anyone with an interest in human interactions along the world’s waterways will find it useful reading.