Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade

By Susan Gaunt Stearns

A groundbreaking study situating the Mississippi River valley at the heart of the early American republic’s political economy

Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism.

In Empire of Commerce, Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States’ untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Stearns’s perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments—the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase—and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9780813951256

Book preview

Cover Page for Empire of Commerce

Empire of Commerce

Jeffersonian America

Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Annette Gordon-Reed, Peter S. Onuf, Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, and Robert G. Parkinson, Editors

Empire of Commerce

The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade

Susan Gaunt Stearns

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

The University of Virginia Press is situated on the traditional lands of the Monacan Nation, and the Commonwealth of Virginia was and is home to many other Indigenous people. We pay our respect to all of them, past and present. We also honor the enslaved African and African American people who built the University of Virginia, and we recognize their descendants. We commit to fostering voices from these communities through our publications and to deepening our collective understanding of their histories and contributions.

University of Virginia Press

© 2024 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2024

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stearns, Susan Gaunt, author.

Title: Empire of commerce : the closing of the Mississippi and the opening of Atlantic trade / Susan Gaunt Stearns.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2024. | Series: Jeffersonian America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023052272 (print) | LCCN 2023052273 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813951232 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813951249 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813951256 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—Economic conditions—To 1865. | Industrial revolution—United States. | United States—Territorial expansion. | West (U.S.)—Discovery and exploration. | Shipping—Missouri River. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775–1800)

Classification: LCC HC105 .S74 2024 (print) | LCC HC105 (ebook) | DDC 330.973/05—dc23/eng/20231212

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052272

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052273

Cover art: The Jolly Flatboatmen (detail) by George Caleb Bingham, 1846. (Patrons’ Permanent Fund, The National Gallery of Art)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Mississippi River Trade to 1783

1 The Colonial River

2 Kentucky Land, Cash, and the Mississippi

3 The River at War

Part II. The Closure of the River and Sectional Crisis, 1784–1795

4 An Imperial Problem

5 Trading without the River

6 Chickasaw Country

Part III. Western Trade, Atlantic World, 1796–1803

7 Cotton and the Americanization of Natchez

8 American Trade in a Spanish Port

9 The Chickasaw Trace

10 Buying the Mississippi

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of more than a decade of labor, and during that time I accrued more than my fair share of debts. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I benefited from the guidance of Kathleen Neils Conzen. Only in retrospect have I realized how deliberately she helped shape my graduate experience, providing feedback on my work but more importantly by providing opportunities to discuss how each stage of my education was intended to help me develop my skills as a historian and scholar. I am indebted to her for believing in me and my project, and for teaching me how to identify the cultural background of a region’s European American settlers by examining the shape of barns, a lesson that I continue to pass along to both my students and my family on our travels. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Amy Dru Stanley, both for helping me define what type of historian I would like to be and also for assigning the paper that initially brought me to this project. I benefited too from the support of Christine Stansell, who provided a model of professionalism I continue to strive to emulate. I would also like to thank the other members of the faculty and my fellow graduate students, who helped shape this project.

I could not have completed this book without the generous financial support of several institutions. Travel grants from the Filson Historical Society, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, and the University of Chicago made it possible for me to perform the research necessary for completing my dissertation, and a Mellon Humanities Fellowship from the University of Chicago helped support me as I wrote up my findings. After graduating, support from the Economic History Association and the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia allowed me to expand on the project’s national and international significance. This project could not have been completed without the time and support I received from the Jack Miller Center and the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University, where I served as the Alexander Hamilton Postdoctoral Fellow. I am beyond grateful to Pamela Edwards, Joanna Grisinger, Shana Bernstein, Heather Schoenfeld, and Laura Beth Nielsen for their enthusiastic and unending support for me as both a scholar and a human being. I have also benefited enormously from the financial and intellectual support of the Department of History at the University of Mississippi, and especially from my colleagues, who gave me the time I needed to finally see this work through to fruition.

Completing this project took more than fifteen years; as a result, many, many people have read or commented on the project in whole or in part. In particular, I would like to thank Peter Onuf, Kristopher Ray, Kevin Barksdale, and Jonathan Levy for their reading of an earlier version of this text, and Mikaela Adams, Christine Sears, Michelle Orihel, Stephanie Frank, Theresa Rothschadl, Erika Vause, Natalie Inman, Sheila Skemp, and Cathy Matson for providing thoughtful and detailed feedback on more recent drafts. I would also like to thank Nadine Zimmerli, James E. Lewis, and the anonymous reviewer from the University of Virginia Press, whose feedback was invaluable in revising the final manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my parents, for their tireless support. I would also like to thank my children, Jacob and Oscar, without whom this book would have been finished several years earlier. Most importantly, I would like to thank my husband, Dan, whose sacrifices and encouragement have made this book possible.

Empire of Commerce

Introduction

On July 15, 1789, a group of eighteen men from the thirteen American states stood before the governor of Spanish Natchez and vowed their allegiance to King Carlos IV. In Natchez, such an event was a regular occurrence: between 1786 and 1790, over a thousand Americans agreed to become loyal vassals of the crown of Spain. Don Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, a graduate of Westminster College and the newly appointed governor of the Natchez district, first read the oath aloud in English. He then read the document aloud in Spanish, with each man placing his hand on the Bible in turn and promising to serve Spain faithfully, to take up arms in its defense, and to alert Spanish officials of any plots against Spanish sovereignty. In the growing riverside community, no one save the Spanish officials charged with noting the community’s comings and goings would have taken an interest in the small ceremony. Indeed, there might be little here to concern historians were it not for one name among those pledging fealty to the Spanish crown on that hot July day: Andrew Jackson.¹

In 1789, Andrew Jackson was twenty-two years old. Already employed as the attorney general of North Carolina’s westernmost district, Jackson was a man of huge ambition, searching the western countryside for sufficient land, wealth, and stature to overcome his humble origins. The Natchez district—the region surrounding the riverfront village bearing the same name—had much to offer such a man. A year earlier, Spanish officials had put into place generous land policies in hopes of attracting more American settlers to shore up Spanish defenses against the United States’ expansion into trans-Appalachia.² Promising land in proportion to the size of a man’s family—free and enslaved—Spanish policy proved attractive to land-hungry emigrants. In contrast to land almost anywhere within the thirteen states, Spanish land was a true grant: loyalty and labor were the only fees required. For a man like Jackson, with little capital but an abundance of energy and increasing numbers of political and business connections, life as a Spanish subject was undeniably appealing.

In popular memory, Jackson is described as the American Lion: the embodiment of a uniquely American mode of political thought, an image that Jackson worked to develop in the decades following the Battle of New Orleans.³ The fact that thirty years before Jackson was elected president he swore allegiance to the Spanish crown seems antithetical to our view of Old Hickory. But Jackson’s presence in Natchez can tell us much about the development of the American West. In 1789, Jackson was not an American and not a Democrat—two terms that would have been relatively meaningless in the contested borderlands of the Mississippi River Valley. Like all residents of the frontier, Jackson’s identity shifted and changed as he moved through a region claimed by the United States, Cherokee, Chickamauga, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Spanish polities.⁴ Wherever he was, Jackson looked out for his own interests, hoping to gain land and a fortune. He adopted the identity, and the loyalties, that he believed would move him closest to this goal.

Two months before Jackson pledged himself a loyal Spanish subject, George Washington stood before a gathered crowd in New York City and took the oath of office as the first president of the United States. Washington’s inauguration marked a new start for the new nation, under a constitution that remained contested (Andrew Jackson’s North Carolina would not ratify it until November 1789, six months after Washington’s swearing-in). Much remained unclear during Washington’s inauguration. He swore to protect a nation whose boundaries were unsurveyed and contested, boundaries that—like the new nation itself—existed on parchment but had yet to be given form. Over the next few years, Washington’s administration moved to put the precepts of an extended republic into place. Among the president’s biggest challenges would be figuring out how to deal with men like Jackson, and the promises and threats posed by the southwestern borderlands.

As Jackson’s presence in the Spanish village suggests, areas like Natchez mattered from the nation’s start. By becoming a Spanish subject, Jackson was responding to what was by 1789 a major problem for the more than 100,000 settlers who had moved to the West. In 1784, Spain had closed the Mississippi River to American trade. It was geology, far more than geopolitics, which dictated the importance of the Mississippi for western settlers like Jackson. The Appalachian Mountains form a watershed that separates the rivers that flow into the Atlantic from those flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. A drop of rain falling on the eastern side of the mountains would eventually flow into the Atlantic, while a drop of rain that fell west of the Appalachians would find its way first into the Kanawha, Licking, Kentucky, Miami, Wabash, or countless other rivers before flowing into the Ohio and then on to the Mississippi, which would carry it to the Gulf of Mexico. This geological bifurcation had important ramifications for western trade and settlement. Barring inevitable problems with spring floods and summer droughts, travelers heading south and west toward the new settlements in trans-Appalachia found geology worked in their favor: the current of the rivers propelled goods and people inexorably toward the Mississippi and the Gulf, where the port of New Orleans offered a potent lure as both a market for western goods and a transportation hub from which western produce could be shipped throughout the Caribbean or across the Atlantic littoral. In contrast, traveling east along the rivers—from what are now the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio back toward the eastern seaboard—necessitated arduous, constant, and backbreaking labor.⁵ In 1784, when Spain closed the Mississippi River to American trade, it foreclosed the possibility of western produce reaching eastern markets. Spain’s decision both reduced western land values and increased tensions between the United States, then developing along the Atlantic seaboard, and the settlers west of the Appalachians.⁶

The degree of fury created by Spain’s decision to close the Mississippi was wildly out of proportion to the size of the United States’ share of Mississippi River trade in the early 1780s. In both western settlements and in Congress, outrage over the closure of the Mississippi stemmed not from the immediate curtailment of trade but from two other causes. Settlers in the Ohio Valley, and those in the East who based their wealth on western land, had constructed a vision of western development predicated on market participation. Geographically isolated from markets to the East, and politically cut off from the marketplace of New Orleans, westerners demanded the federal government intervene to provide them with trade. Despite ongoing frontier violence, difficulties claiming and surveying land, and the challenges of establishing a new polity, from 1784 until 1803 gaining access to trade was a central political issue shaping the relationship between the new U.S. government in the East and the trans-Appalachian West.⁷

In western rhetoric and politics, market access equated to land. The legal and economic system imported from east of the Appalachians made market participation a necessity. To obtain legal title to land, settlers needed to be able to pay for it; to retain title, they needed to be able to pay their taxes.⁸ In a society that placed landownership at the gateway to both social and political power, the drive to obtain and protect their access to land became westerners’ chief demand of both the state and federal governments. The closure of the Mississippi eliminated westerners’ access to markets and hence their ability to claim western land, throwing their economy into disarray. As a result, the closure profoundly shaped their beliefs in the role that the government could and should play in protecting and providing them with market access.

Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, the U.S. government, Spanish officials, and the white residents of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys were preoccupied by what became known as the Mississippi Question—the American response to Spanish control of the river.⁹ As Americans debated how to react to the river’s closure, they also questioned and defined the evolving relationship between trans-Appalachia and the states clustered along the Atlantic seaboard. Spanish control of the Mississippi created a problem negotiated both by high-level government officials such as John Jay and Thomas Jefferson, and by men like Gabriel Bolong, a poor western farmer who was taken captive by the Spanish in 1795 and forced to build the forts meant to prevent Americans from using the river.¹⁰ It inspired some, like Jackson, to seek out opportunities under the authority of different regimes, while others, such as the citizens of Kentucky’s Democratic-Republican societies of the 1790s, responded by proclaiming their commitment to the republican principles of the United States—even as they contemplated withdrawing from the American union. With the ratification of the Treaty of San Lorenzo (better known as Pinckney’s Treaty) in 1795, the twofold problem of control of the Mississippi River and the role of the West within the emerging United States took on new urgency, as the incorporation of new regions, the development of new crops, and the creation of new commercial ties recast the position of the West within the broader union.

This book examines how western settlers and speculators, eastern and southern politicians, coastal merchants, Mississippi Valley planters, Ohio farmers, and the Chickasaw all helped shape the dimensions of American trade through the continental interior as each of these groups confronted the consequences of Spanish control over the Mississippi. It argues that commercial integration and geographic expansion were linked processes which occupied the core of the development of an American empire. Much like the British empire, the U.S. empire that succeeded it depended on the creation of a system of governance that would allow regions at a distance to become integrated into a centrally focused commercial network.¹¹ Recognizing the link between commerce and expansion as the heart of empire is key to understanding the progress and development of the early United States. In this view, the task of building an American empire required not only displacing Indigenous peoples, establishing a widely accepted legal regime, and distributing land but also constructing ties of exchange and commerce that could bind the periphery to the center.¹² The development of trade connections, often created in the absence of governmental approval, helped to legitimate the federal government in the trans-Appalachian West, even when the federal government was unable to act to exert western interests. As a result of the robust growth of the trade of the continental interior, the United States became more successful in asserting its interests abroad and secured the loyalty of its western settlers. Rather than radiating outward from a national center like the spokes of a wheel, the trade that would tie the United States together and allow for the continued expansion of an American empire floated along the Mississippi.

This book focuses primarily on the European American farmers, traders, merchants, and politicians who in the last two decades of the eighteenth century debated, contested, and used the Mississippi River to integrate the trans-Appalachian West into the Atlantic world. Not the story of one place, it instead follows the arc of European American colonization of trans-Appalachia between 1775 and 1803. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the West had expanded to include a region roughly bordered by the Mississippi to the west, the Appalachians to the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. The northern border was defined by those communities in what are now Ohio and Indiana that lay along the watercourses that emptied into the Ohio River. The book gives the most emphasis to the communities that voiced the greatest concern over access to the Mississippi: the region that in 1792 would become the state of Kentucky, the communities of Natchez and New Orleans along the lower Mississippi River, and the late-arriving but critical settlements north of the Ohio. It also engages with the experiences of the Chickasaw, whose lives were equally affected by Mississippi River trade and the inter-imperial conflict for control of the river. For the Chickasaw, the European Americans moving along the river represented both a threat and an opportunity. Most frequently, I refer to the European Americans in trans-Appalachia as westerners, although occasionally I use that term to refer to all residents of the trans-Appalachian West, whether identified with the United States, Indigenous nations, free or enslaved Africans, or Spanish colonists. Defining white settlers as westerners establishes a clear focus for the narrative: these people can only be deemed western when considered as a part of the union taking shape east of the Appalachian Mountains. Both the European American colonizers of the trans-Appalachian West and the polity emerging on the eastern seaboard acknowledged a connection between themselves, yet each group was uncertain what form that connection should take.¹³ Westerners shared a political heritage and often bonds of family or patronage with the residents of the eastern seaboard, yet experienced being part of the union differently from their cis-Appalachian cousins.

This book faces neither west nor east. Its purpose is broader: to examine the influence exerted by the West over the construction of the American republic.¹⁴ In placing the West at the forefront of the national story, I am nodding to Frederick Jackson Turner, who in 1893 proposed that the American experience emerged out of the milieu of what he called the frontier.¹⁵ In the decades following the Turnerian moment, several historians applied his concept to revolutionary-era trans-Appalachia. Pinckney’s Treaty and the western origins of the Louisiana Purchase both had their moment in the sun, generating works dazzling in scope and detail.¹⁶ There is much to object to in Turner’s thesis, from his misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples as part of a primitive society to his credulous reliance on an inchoate American character. Still, many scholars have rightly criticized Turner’s conception of frontiers as ethnically and racially chauvinistic without undercutting his claim that the West played a larger role than it is usually granted in narratives of American state formation.¹⁷ Any picture of the United States in the 1780s and 1790s that neglects either the trans-Appalachian West or the new nation’s capital is incomplete: the West played an integral role in shaping both the form of the American polity and the contours of the developing nation.

In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to the political economy of the early American republic, examining how issues like taxation, commerce, customs duties, insurance, and accounting reverberated across commercial and political society.¹⁸ The story of the trans-Appalachian West has usually been told as a separate story. From Furs to Farms—as one recent account of transformations in Illinois country frames it—delineates how the West’s economic activities have largely been regarded.¹⁹ Scholars of the West have tracked time and again the disruptions and creativity spawned by the multicultural world of the fur trade gradually giving way to a world dominated by white commercial agriculture.²⁰ Land and land speculators played a key role in transforming territory from Indigenous homelands to white property; the largest land speculator was, of course, the American state, which from 1787 onward was committed to selling off the public domain to repay the crushing debts incurred by the American Revolution. In partnership with land speculators and the settlers they attracted, the central government played a crucial role in transforming the landscape of the West by creating the apparatus for European Americans to purchase western lands.²¹ Neither the economy nor the politics of the West stood apart from those of the rest of the nation. Meanwhile, European American speculators, farmers, and heads of state constructed financial and political models for both the West and the nation based less on the realities of the contested landscape and more on the dimensions of a west they hoped would someday exist. In insisting on its existence, they willed a west of Anglo-American farmers producing for Atlantic world markets into being.

The enactment of Pinckney’s Treaty in 1796–97 transformed the relationship between East and West. The treaty redrew the lines around the American polity, bringing the district surrounding Natchez into the American fold, opening American access to New Orleans and the Mississippi, and fully encompassing the Chickasaw homeland. Just as Natchez was becoming part of the United States, the district’s plantations pivoted from growing tobacco to producing cotton. Meanwhile, the enactment of the treaty coincided with the end of a decade of interracial violence in the Ohio Country.²² With peace, the European-American population of the Northwest Territory—and hence its agricultural production—expanded rapidly. Flour as well as corn and its byproducts whiskey and salt pork became increasingly important to the national economy.

Cotton challenged the geopolitical status quo, elevating the importance of Mississippi River trade and of trans-Appalachia more broadly. Cotton heightened the interest of eastern merchants in the Southwest; in turn, these merchants added their voices to those of western farmers agitating for greater federal intervention south of the Ohio River.²³ It might seem ironic to argue that cotton—a crop intrinsically and consequentially associated with the South—played a vital role in linking the West to the rest of the nation. But scholars have repeatedly highlighted the centrality of cotton in the development of the United States. The crop may have been regional but the labor that made mass production possible, the federal laws that safeguarded slavery, and the merchants on both sides of the Atlantic who profited from its sale were not.

Historians taking stock of the relationship between capitalism and slavery have examined the role of cotton production in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, three of the regions discussed in this book. Their work has informed my own, as it has yielded profound insights into the role that enslavement played in the construction of not just a regional but a national economy, as well as the role that enslaved people played—no less foundational for being involuntary—as the central engine of American economic development. Cotton and slavery were at the core of U.S. imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century: they dominated American international relations while simultaneously weaving together a new economy that would rapidly span the globe. Slavery, these scholars have shown, was both a labor system and a property regime, creating wealth not only for enslavers but for Americans more broadly, as slaves were insured, mortgaged, and tortured to extract as much money as possible in the unrelenting immoral calculus of the trade in enslaved bodies. In unraveling the role of enslavement as the driving force behind national and international economic and political power, these historians have reoriented how we understand slavery and its relationship to both national development and western expansion. Slavery and the white supremacy that supported it are as American as apple pie and representative democracy.²⁴ Yet for all these works’ considerable explanatory power, they enter the story late—once the lower Mississippi Valley had already ceased being western and begun to be southern. The forces driving the development of the Cotton Belt were in place by the turn of the nineteenth century. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, American settlements in the lower Mississippi Valley were already importing hundreds if not thousands of enslaved people from Kentucky and North Carolina, inaugurating a domestic slave trade encapsulated in the phrase sold down the river.

By 1803, Andrew Jackson began to transport enslaved people from the Cumberland to Natchez. Cotton planters from the Mississippi Valley and cotton merchants from the eastern seaboard were already engaged in insuring their shipments in eastern markets and making their voices heard in Congress, a fact embodied in the 1803 congressional decision to send James Monroe to Paris to negotiate for the purchase of New Orleans. At the same time that cotton was exploding, new avenues for older western produce like flour and salt pork were taking shape on the staple-producing islands of the Caribbean. Western speculators, including the federal government, were dependent on the success of this new Caribbean trade to secure the loyalty and livelihood of western settlers in the Ohio Country and elsewhere. The Louisiana Purchase was thus less the starting point of the cotton juggernaut than it was its first victory, a victory claimed through the collaboration of western farmers, southern planters, and Atlantic merchants.

This book is structured around three key diplomatic decisions with important consequences for the development of trans-Appalachia. The first, Spain’s closure of the river in 1784, created a crisis that threatened the unity of the United States. Both westerners and easterners contemplated seceding from the union as each group sought to pursue its own interests, alarming committed nationalists like James Madison and helping to precipitate the drafting of the Constitution. The second crucial moment was the ratification of Pinckney’s Treaty in 1795, which changed the role of the West within the political economy of the nation by opening the Mississippi to American trade. Continued Spanish control of the river repeatedly stymied European American visions for the river’s trade. As western produce—including cotton—grew increasingly important to the entire American economy, foreign control of the Mississippi became untenable to both western farmers and eastern merchants intent on trading the produce of the trans-Appalachian West throughout the Atlantic world, even as the increased river traffic created by the treaty reoriented the economy of the Chickasaw people toward servicing American traders. Finally, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 achieved the outcome westerners had been advocating for two decades: the Mississippi became an American river.

Part 1 surveys the relationship between trade and expansion in the era prior to Spain’s closure of the Mississippi, tracing the development of European American trade along the river before the closure and the prominent position of the Chickasaw within that trade, before examining the role that westerners hoped the river would play in bolstering the super-heated western land market of the 1770s and 1780s. Part 2 investigates the period following Spain’s 1784 closure of the Mississippi, unpacking Congress’s reaction to the river’s closing and the influence of the so-called Mississippi Question on the drafting and ratification of the Constitution before exploring westerners’ anger toward the emerging Federalist administration and the variety of ways that westerners tried to circumvent the river’s closure. For the Chickasaw, the decade following the end of the Revolution was one of profound change, as the diplomatic and economic basis of the Southwest shifted in the face of a growing European American presence in the region. The section ends by contrasting the Chickasaw response to Pinckney’s Treaty with the response of Kentuckians. For both groups, the passage of the treaty would prove transformative.

Part 3 of the book focuses on the integration of trans-Appalachia into the Atlantic world and the national economy under the terms of Pinckney’s Treaty. The year 1795 saw not only the passage of the treaty but also the advent of peace in the contested Northwest Territory. The end of the violence drew a flood of western settlement and investment in western lands; much of that land was purchased on credit, and western farmers needed markets to repay debts to both speculators and the federal government. Meanwhile, in 1797, the village of Natchez transformed from a Spanish outpost invested in tobacco production to a U.S. settlement dedicated to cotton. Getting Natchez cotton and Ohio flour to world markets depended on the cooperation of eastern merchants, whose trade in cotton to Europe and flour to the Caribbean increasingly tied trans-Appalachia within the Atlantic world. These ties then reverberated from the lower Mississippi River Valley north through Chickasaw country, as the Chickasaw reoriented their economy to take advantage of the opportunities created by increased western trade. In 1802, those ties were abruptly cut as Spanish officials once more closed the Mississippi to American trade. Instead of dividing the nation, as the 1784 decision had, the Spanish decision in 1802 united the states of the East and the West, as calls for war against Spain emerged from across the political spectrum. The resulting Louisiana Purchase accomplished westerners’ long-term goal: the federal government moved to give them unmitigated access to the Mississippi.

The Mississippi Question helped shape the form that the American empire would take as western land acquisition, along with western loyalty, depended on securing access to markets. Addressing the Mississippi Question is a necessary precursor to understanding the development of the Deep South and Indian removal in the antebellum era. Its consequences reverberated throughout the century that followed, influencing the lives of European American farmers, northern and southern Indigenous peoples, European factory operatives, and enslaved people throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Few things would matter more to the America of Andrew Jackson’s presidency than the events unfolding along the Mississippi River of his youth.

Part I

Mississippi River Trade to 1783

In the 1840s, Presbyterian minister John Dabney Shane interviewed a loquacious nonagenarian named Joshua McQueen. Although a minister by training, Shane’s true passion lay elsewhere: fascinated by the history of the Ohio River Valley, he spent years crisscrossing Ohio and Kentucky interviewing aging pioneers.¹ As Shane learned, McQueen had received an impressive education. His travels, first as a member of the Continental Army and later as a hunter and trader in trans-Appalachia, had brought him into contact with people from an astonishing number of backgrounds. Throughout the 1770s and early 1780s, McQueen had navigated his way across the eastern half of a contested American continent. He had crossed the Delaware with George Washington on Christmas Eve 1777 and wintered at Valley Forge. His brother had been held captive first by Shawnee and later by British troops north of the Ohio River. McQueen knew that in New Orleans they served their meat with rice and a bottle of bear’s oil; he had spent a season rowing against the current of the Mississippi with a motley crew of French, Spanish, and Native laborers. Although McQueen was no scholar of Latin and Greek, he could communicate in English, French, and some dialects of Algonquian. In 1782, after being discharged from the army, McQueen and two companions floated down the Ohio River bound for the village of Natchez on a boat carrying Pennsylvania flour. They never arrived. Instead, the three men were captured by British Loyalists operating from Chickasaw territory before being rescued by the arrival of Spanish troops.²

Eighteenth-century cartographers imbued the Mississippi with many different meanings. On maps drawn by Spanish officials following the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the Mississippi divided the Spanish dominion in the Southeast, a region that included all territory west of the Mississippi, extending north along the river as far as modern-day Kentucky and encompassing the newly won colonies of East and West Florida. Claiming the lower Mississippi Valley by virtue of their conquest of the British during the American Revolution, the Spanish viewed the river as a Spanish asset. By contrast, in penning his map of the United States of America, as settled by the peace of 1783, London mapmaker John Fielding rendered the Mississippi as less a river than a wall, the western side of which abutted nothing more than blank paper. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, competing visions of the Mississippi clashed against the realities of life in a borderland. No polity could assert its will for long.³

Other maps situated the river differently. In a 1786 meeting among South Carolina officials, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, Chickasaw chief Piominko carefully traced the boundaries of his people’s lands on a map he requested from U.S. officials. The Mississippi comprised the Chickasaw’s western boundary. For the Chickasaw and Choctaw, two dominant Indigenous polities whose territories bordered the river on its eastern shore, the Mississippi was most commonly known as Balbaha’ Ásha’ Okhina’ (Foreign speakers are upon it).⁴ The name was apt. In the eighteenth century, the river was truly a polyglot locale. Voices could be heard in Mvskokean, Siouan, Algonquian, English, Spanish, and French. However it was the Chickasaw who wielded tremendous power over those who moved along the water. For Piominko, the Mississippi was as much a part of Chickasaw territory as his home at Long Village near the modern-day city of Tupelo, Mississippi. Piominko would carry this map, a statement of Chickasaw sovereignty, until his death in 1799.⁵

Andrew Jackson had a very different mental map of the Mississippi. For the European American colonizers of the trans-Appalachian West, settling in such places as Kentucky, the Cumberland, or the Holston River Valleys, the Mississippi represented the primary pathway for getting the produce of western farms to Atlantic world markets. European American migration to the West, as well as speculation in western lands, exploded in the decades following the American Revolution.⁶ Despite endemic violence between European Americans and Indigenous peoples, white settlers and speculators alike believed that the region’s rich soil offered a pathway toward prosperity. As Gilbert Imlay, an early Kentucky booster, predicted, from their location in the centre of the earth westerners were bound to become at once the emporium and protectors of the world. The Mississippi was central to that process.⁷ Westerners like Imlay imagined a future of agricultural production for world markets, predicated on widespread landownership and participation in a republican form of governance. They envisioned a grand future for both themselves and the region—a future