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Memphis and its commercial importance.
The city of Memphis, from its high bluff on the Mississippi,
overlooks the surrounding country for a long distance.
The muddy waters of the river, when at a low stage,
lap the ever crumbling banks that yearly change, yielding
to new deflections of the current. For hundreds
of miles below there is a highly interesting and rarely
broken series of forests, cane brakes and sand bars,
covered with masses of willows and poplars which,
in the spring, when the floods come down, are overflowed
for many miles back. It was found necessary to
run embankments practically parallel with the current,
in order to confine the waters of the river in its
channel. Memphis was and is the most important
city of Tennessee, indeed, the most important between
St. Louis and New Orleans, particularly from the commercial
point of view. Cotton was the principal product
of the territory tributary to it. The street running
along the bluff was called Front Row, and was filled
with stores and business houses. This street
was the principal cotton market, and here the article
which, in those days, was personified as the commercial
“king,” was bought and sold, and whence
it was shipped, or stored, awaiting an advancing price.
The completion of the Memphis and Charleston railroad
was a great event in the history of the city.
It was termed the marriage of the Mississippi and
the Atlantic, and was celebrated with a great popular
demonstration, people coming from the surrounding country
for many miles. Water was brought from the Atlantic
ocean and poured into the river; and water taken from
the river and poured into the Atlantic at Charleston.
It was anticipated that this railroad connection between
the two cities would make of Charleston the great shipping
port, and of Memphis the principal cotton market of
the southwest. The expectation in neither of
these cases has been fully realized. Boss, in
common with planters and business men throughout that
whole region, was greatly excited. I attended
him and thus had the opportunity of witnessing this
notable celebration.
[Illustration]
Slavery and the war of the
rebellion.
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Beginning of the war.
I remember well when Abraham Lincoln was elected.
Boss and the madam had been reading the papers, when
he broke out with the exclamation: “The
very idea of electing an old rail splitter to the presidency
of the United States! Well he’ll never
take his seat.” When Lincoln was inaugurated,
Boss, old Master Jack and a great company of men met
at our house to discuss the matter, and they were
wild with excitement. Was not this excitement
an admission that their confidence in their ability
to whip the Yankees, five or six to one, was not so
strong as they pretended?
