Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  Three of the Revolutionary War’s decisive battles, in fact, turned on the control of strategic waterways—Washington’s surprise attack across the Delaware on the British garrison at Trenton at Christmas 1776, Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga on October 17, 1777, following Britain’s failure to secure the Hudson River, and Cornwallis’s final surrender at Yorktown on the Chesapeake Bay four years later when combined French and American forces cut off the British army from naval resupply or escape route. Even in precipitating the Revolutionary War, water had figured symbolically in awakening the public imagination on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 16, 1773, colonial radicals, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, dumped 342 chests of tea belonging to the East India Company into Boston harbor to incite against the company’s tea monopoly and British taxation. With the war enjoined in earnest in the summer of 1776, the central theater focused on strategic New York, America’s second-largest city after Philadelphia with 22,000 inhabitants. In addition to having an excellent harbor for supplying and deploying troops, New York was a vital choke point from which an army could strike east into New England, north up the Hudson River Valley, or west into New Jersey. General George Washington put his army’s best efforts into holding New York and was nearly destroyed in failing. The British made the city its central base of operations throughout the war.

  Defeated at New York, Washington’s Continental Army was forced to retreat through New Jersey. In early December 1776, Washington saved his beleaguered troops from destruction by escaping across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. Before crossing, he gathered all the boats he could find on the Jersey side. Since there were no nearby bridges across the river north of Philadelphia, British forces had no ready means to give chase without boats. Thus the defensive barrier of the Delaware River, and the onset of winter, deprived the British of early victory. Nevertheless, Washington’s defeats had demoralized his troops, whose enlistment tours were set to imminently expire, while sympathetic colonists began to succumb in large numbers to British offers of clemency. This desperate reality drove Washington to make an inspired gamble. On the frigid night of December 25, 1776, he ordered 2,400 weary, underclothed soldiers, horses, and 18 cannon to be ferried back across the icy Delaware into New Jersey. They started at 7:00 p.m., and the ferrymen worked all through the hours of darkness. By sunrise all were across, marching through the sleet and rain toward Trenton. In one of the most celebrated victories in American history, their surprise attack caused the surrender of 900 unprepared German mercenary troops employed by the British, along with their six cannon and 1,200 small arms. No Americans were killed. Only four were wounded, while two froze to death marching to the battle. The victory’s effects were electrifying. Reenlistments promptly increased and new troops surged to Washington’s side. Sentiment among wavering colonists was buoyed. The Revolution survived to fight another season.

  When the war resumed after the winter, the British ministry in London launched a new campaign to subdue the rebels. Two British armies, one moving south from Canada and the second moving north from New York, were to execute a pincer movement to take control of the strategic Hudson waterway. By controlling the Hudson, the British could sever the radicals of New England from the rest of the colonies. But slow and poor communication across the Atlantic from London hindered British execution. While 8,000 troops under General John Burgoyne launched the campaign from Canada, General Sir William Howe’s New York force became diverted by its seizure of Philadelphia and did not remobilize in time to close the southern pincer. Fighting alone, Burgoyne’s army became seriously encumbered by patriot resistance and its own heavy supply logistics. As it marched across the wild Hudson Valley terrain, rendered even less passable by the rebels’ systematic destruction of bridges, tree felling and stream diversions, Burgoyne’s army was slowed at times to covering but one mile per day. It had to rebuild over 40 bridges along the way. Nor did it help that Burgoyne, known as “Gentleman Johnny” for his playboy ways, traveled with a personal entourage some three miles long, including 30 personal baggage carts, his mistress, and numerous bottles of claret and port. Patriot troops led by General Benedict Arnold and Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys inflicted defeats that degraded Burgoyne’s forces, whose Mohawk Indian allies began to slip away. Finding few Loyalists en route and without Howe’s army in rendezvous, Burgoyne’s supplies and manpower ultimately gave out. Trounced in two bloody battles near Saratoga, Burgoyne surrendered his 6,000 man army on October 17, 1777.

  The Americans’ triumph reverberated across the Atlantic. Persuaded that the rebels had a chance, France’s Louis XVI finally acceded to ambassador Benjamin Franklin’s entreaties for a Franco-American alliance. In a late bid to head off just such an alliance, the British government prepared to offer the colonists everything they had asked for prior to the Declaration of Independence, including freedom from loathed Parliamentary taxation. But the conflict had escalated too far. On February 6, 1778, the French and American governments signed treaties dedicated to obtaining British recognition of America’s independence. Within two years other European nations joined what amounted to world war against England. In England itself the war was growing costly and politically divisive. But the autocratic King George III overruled all Parliamentary dissent—he insisted that the rebels be put down firmly and, if necessary, ruthlessly.

  The whole New World was now in play, including the fabulous wealth of the Caribbean islands, which were more preoccupying concerns to England and France than the fate of the relatively poor American colonies. Over the next couple of years, a military stalemate prevailed. Washington lacked the naval power to evict the British from New York, an effort the French were reluctant to undertake with their forces. The British, meanwhile, facing a hostile populace avoided undertaking unsupported invasions deep into the interior. The situation changed in the summer of 1780 when the British under General Lord Charles Cornwallis took Charleston, South Carolina, by amphibious assault. Cornwallis’s plan was to take the Carolinas and Virginia, where Loyalist sympathies were stronger, and to try to overwhelm the rebel colonies from the South. The Continentals, with substantial difficulty, managed to impede Cornwallis’s campaign. In the spring of 1781, Cornwallis began building a base at Yorktown, Virginia, a Chesapeake peninsula flanked by the York and James rivers, where he planned to receive supplies and troop reinforcements by sea. The Americans and French, however, seized it as a chance to entrap him.

  The denouement of the Revolutionary War began with France’s decision to wholeheartedly invest its navy at Yorktown. Having learned its lesson about the importance of sea power from its disastrous defeat in the Seven Years’ War, France had been straining its Treasury for a decade to build up its navy. By 1781, it had attained near parity with England’s. A French fleet under Admiral François de Grasse sailed from the Caribbean to blockade the Chesapeake Bay from British resupply. After an elaborate feint at invading New York that successfully misled the British as to the rebels’ genuine target, a large force of American and French troops were dispatched to confront Cornwallis. The crucial sea battle was fought in the afternoon of September 5, 1781. De Grasse’s 24 French warships outgunned 19 British ships, which sailed away to New York for repairs. With the Chesapeake blockaded, George Washington and the French generals, with a combined force twice that of Cornwallis’s nearly 8,000 troops, amassed for the siege of Yorktown. It began on September 28. Artillery bombarded the British position. Several raiding parties struck, one led by Washington’s favorite, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, later U.S. treasury secretary and influential Federalist. Although casualties were light, Cornwallis realized his plight was hopeless when his two small wooden forts were overrun and his army’s escape attempt across the York River failed in a squall. He was cut off from both naval resupply and retreat route. On October 17, four years to the day after Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, he put up the white flag to discuss terms. Two days later he surrendered his entire army. The war was over.

/>   The Revolutionary War was a decisive victory for the spread of liberal democracy. An influential republic was born in North America. In England the war subdued King George III’s bid to reassert personal monarchal authority, with the result that full Parliamentary government was permanently established in Britain on the eve of Britain’s influential age of empire. On the European continent, too, Louis XVI’s monarchy soon was toppled in 1789 by a French revolution inspired partly by American success and the repercussions of the treasury’s depletion in having spent so much to assist them.

  Although the war had been fought along the eastern seaboard, a principal battlefield of contention was the land west of the Appalachian Mountains leading to the expansive Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. For the founding fathers, the western frontier was the gateway to America’s destiny. British policy had long aimed at fencing in the colonists east of the Appalachians where they would stay more closely linked to England’s maritime empire. But native colonial leaders saw the beckoning Mississippi Valley farmland and intersecting navigable rivers beyond the mountains as the vital keys to a prosperous western empire of America’s own. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were among many land speculators in the western farming frontiers who believed it would be the main source of America’s wealth for years to come. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the expanding frontier of self-reliant, individualistic, yeoman farmers as the quintessence of America’s democratic character. The free land of the frontier was a safety valve that would attract settlers westward when urban conditions grew too squalid, thus protecting America’s uniqueness and inhibiting the transplantation of Europe’s class-based and industrial inequities to American soil. Jefferson and others also imagined an American continental destiny that fulfilled the old dream of a Pacific trade route to the Orient. Although the early U.S. political landscape was split by the sharp divide between industry-promoting Hamiltonian Federalists and agrarian Jeffersonian Republicans, both sides were united in the importance of securing western expansion.

  At the heart of fulfilling America’s westward destiny was control of the continent’s mighty river, the Mississippi. The Mississippi was America’s Nile, its twin rivers, its Indus and Ganges, its Yangtze and Yellow rivers. By length, the Mississippi-Missouri system was the world’s fourth longest at 3,740 miles, after the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangtze. Only seven rivers carried a greater volume of water. Most important was its fertile valley that stretched some 1,250 miles across America’s heartland between the Rocky and Appalachian mountain chains, north to Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi valley was double the size of the valleys of the Nile or the Ganges, and 20 percent bigger than north China’s Yellow River valley. It encompassed over two-fifths of the continental United States, draining hundreds of rivers and streams, including the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Platte, the Illinois, the Arkansas, and the Red. In the world only the Amazon and the Congo had a larger drainage basin. It alone could sustain American ambitions for a national empire.

  The Mississippi was both an arterial and a flooding, irrigable river. Its navigability offered the potential of a natural inland waterway transport network that could almost instantly integrate the scantly populated nation over unimaginably expansive distances that were virtually impassible overland. Especially from its western tributaries, the “Big Muddy” carried more silt than all but six world rivers that it spread as a thick fertile residue over midwestern farmlands during its many floods. At the confluence with the Ohio River, the Mississippi doubled in size and often stretched a mile and a half from shore to shore as it meandered through the floodplain in its lower reaches to its exit in the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans.

  The Mississippi was also a highly complex, turbulent river, driven by the peculiar dynamics of its size, diversity of its four component parts, deep channels, snaking pathways, tidal forces from the Gulf, multiple currents and velocities, and its penchant for massive flooding and unpredictable changes of course. An unusual feature of the lower Mississippi was that for its final 450 miles its riverbed lay below sea level to a depth of 170 feet at the port of New Orleans. One effect was that the higher water tumbled over itself at a much faster speed than below, sometimes generating such an enormous force that it sheared away and broke through entire riverbanks and the levees that man erected to try to contain it. At its mouth, the sediment loads spewed out by the river created gigantic sand bars that sometimes blocked shipping access to the Gulf of Mexico for weeks and months at a time.

  After 1850, the American government toiled relentlessly, much like the river irrigation civilizations of antiquity, building and rebuilding thousands of miles of levees and spillways in an effort to control the lower-Mississippi flooding and enhance its navigability. But every so often a surging flood overwhelmed man’s best artifices. The giant flood of 1927, driven by months of heavy rains, turned the Mississippi into an immense continental drain that obliterated the entire network of flood control levees created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Cities and farmland were submerged across the expanse of the Mississippi Valley in one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history. Half a million people were displaced. The force of the flow was so strong that it temporarily forced the mighty Ohio to flow upstream. At its mouth, New Orleans was saved from destruction only by dynamiting levees upriver to divert the floodwaters in other directions. The flood exposed the Army Corps’ disastrous error in trying to control the powerful river only with levees and without extensive reservoirs and cutoffs. The water engineers rebuilt, this time creating large spillways to accommodate the river’s extreme swells and reduce the pressure on the levees. The river was also straightened, heavily dammed and channelized so that nearly half its flow was contained within man-made barriers; at the same time, however, over 17 million acres of surrounding wetlands—now understood to be a critical, natural, buffering sponge against floods—were filled in for development. Once again, another great Mississippi flood in 1993 defied man’s ablest efforts to manage nature. Although only about one-third the force of the 1927 disaster, the 1993 flood nevertheless overflowed the levees, and turned 1.2 million acres of its natural midwestern floodplain into a giant lake that did not recede for months.

  America first gained access to the Mississippi in the 1783 Peace of Paris that ended the War of Independence. Throughout the long, complicated multinational negotiations, America’s main representatives, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, held out obdurately, and when necessary inveigled, to obtain U.S. domain over the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains as far as the Mississippi River. In the end, the parties agreed that the independent United States was to be bounded in the west by the Mississippi and in the north by British Canada. The southern boundary was Spanish Florida, whose elongated panhandle extended across the entire Gulf of Mexico, including the strategic mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans. The Spanish holdings formed a land bridge from the western side of the Mississippi to the Louisiana territory that France had reluctantly ceded to Spain in the 1763 settlement of the Seven Years’ War.

  The Peace of Paris left unresolved several territorial and commercial disputes that within a decade flared into renewed contentiousness with Britain. To avert war with England, and to safeguard the basis for America’s western expansion, Washington’s government in 1794 signed a controversial treaty that resolved many outstanding territorial and commercial disputes and formalized U.S. commerce with the British West Indies. The treaty paid the unanticipated dividend of encouraging Spain, which feared ulterior American and British designs on its Louisiana possession, to seek appeasement by agreeing to withdraw from many contested positions east of the Mississippi and granting America free navigation rights on the lower Mississippi and transit at New Orleans, the coveted gateway port to the Gulf and the Caribbean. Postrevolutionary France, which had resumed its superpower rivalry with England with the outbreak of a prolonged, new period of warfare during which Napoléon Bonaparte came to power,
however, viewed the 1794 treaty as a blatant tilt of America’s professed neutrality in favor of England. Franco-American relations deteriorated. By 1798, the two former allies were fighting what was in effect an undeclared naval war in the Caribbean.

  This was the belligerent backdrop to a series of dramatic events that unexpectedly led to one of the greatest land deals in history—the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. With it, America secured control of the whole Mississippi Valley. Yet in an age when colonial territories continuously changed hands with each shift in the balance of power among the great European nations, America’s legal grip on the mostly unoccupied Mississippi Valley remained vulnerable to reversal. Indeed, the grandiose plans of Napoléon, then rising to supreme power in France, included the establishment of French dominion over America’s west, Florida, and Canada. In expectation of a French invasion of America, America began actively fortifying its navy and army at the end of the eighteenth century. Invasion fears temporarily abated after Nelson’s victory in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile trapped Napoléon’s army in Egypt. But they soon rekindled following a failed U.S.-French peace negotiation and the revelation in 1801 of the secret retrocession to France by Spain of its rights to Louisiana. War fears heated in 1802 when Napoléon deployed tens of thousands of French troops to nearby Haiti to suppress the slave rebellion in France’s prized sugar- and coffee-producing colony. They became febrile later that year when Spain suddenly rescinded transit rights to U.S. traffic at New Orleans, effectively closing America’s Mississippi River access to the Caribbean.