Cotton City: Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile

by Harriet E. Amos Doss

Overview

Antebellum Mobile was a cotton port city, and economic dependence upon the North created by the cotton trade controlled the city’s development. Mobile’s export trade placed the city third after New York and New Orleans in total value of exports for the nation by 1860. Because the exports consisted almost entirely of cotton headed for Northern and foreign textile mills, Mobile depended on Northern businessmen for marketing services. Nearly all the city’s imports were from New York: Mobile had the worst export-import imbalance of all antebellum ports.

As the volume of cotton exports increased, so did the city’s population—from1,500 in 1820 to 30,000 in 1860. Amos’s study delineates the basis for Mobile’s growth and the ways in which residents and their government promoted growth and adapted to it. Because some of the New York banking, shipping, and marketing firms maintained local agencies, a significant number of Northern-born businessmen participated widely in civic affairs. This has afforded the author the opportunity to explore the North-South relationship in economic and personal terms, in one important city, during a period of increasing sectional tension.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817390280
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	10/21/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	330
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Harriet E. Amos is Assistant Professor of History, The University of Alabama in Birmingham.

Read an Excerpt

Cotton City

Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile

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By Harriet E. Amos

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 1985 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9028-0

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CHAPTER 1

Old Town, Young City

MOBILE is becoming a place of great importance," reported Niles' Register in 1822, "and it is possible, may soon be one of the most populous of our southern cities." Niles' Register based this prediction on the town's growth from 300 at the time of American occupation in 1813, to 809 at the city's incorporation by the new state of Alabama in 1819, and to 2,800 in 1822. Hope of financial gain lured most newcomers to the Alabama port as the Cotton Kingdom pushed into the Southwest. News of Mobile's growth as a young American city attracted the attention of "distant adventurers of every description," including attorneys, doctors, merchants, and mechanics, who, according to a local physician, "have fled hither as to an Eldorado."

After years of stagnation under foreign rulers, could Mobile capitalize on its geographical and historical advantages to become not just a resettled boom town but a major seaport? This question intrigued new residents and visitors from other parts of the United States and foreign countries. Both groups remarked on current conditions and future prospects of Mobile by drawing comparisons between the Alabama port and other cities. In the early 1820s neither the architecture nor the society built by Mobilians equaled that of older American ports, yet appearances improved throughout the decade.

With its multinational population, American Mobile initially lacked community cohesion. Legacies remained of foreign colonial rule: French, 1702 to 1763; British, 1763 to 1780; and Spanish, 1780 to 1813. After 1813 a "new population" headed to Mobile "to make money." These inhabitants, according to an American officer of occupation in 1817, were generally "a mixture consisting of the Creoles (principally coloured), and emigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, and different parts of the United States who are governed entirely by personal interest; and exhibit very little of what may be termed National feeling." Adam Hodgson, a merchant from Liverpool, found Mobile in 1820 "an old Spanish town, with mingled traces of the manners and language of the French and Spaniards."

Mobile appeared to many visitors in the 1820s as more of a rough frontier town than a long-established city. "Indeed, for a place that has been so long settled, more than a hundred years," observed Welcome Arnold Greene from Rhode Island in 1824, "there is little evidence of improvement in the way of polish and refinement as I suspect of any town of but half that age, in our country, would display." At the time of Greene's visit, Mobile had 240 houses, 110 stores and warehouses, 30 brick buildings, 2 churches, 3 hotels, and several buildings used for other public purposes, certainly all the structures expected in a small city then. However, neither the construction of homes nor cultivation of gardens created a settled appearance for Mobile, according to the standards of visitors from the eastern United States.

In architecture Mobile displayed a hodgepodge of styles, some used by Creoles during the colonial era and others introduced by recently arrived New Englanders. Construction of early residences and public buildings apparently was more often controlled by utility and expediency than by aesthetics and durability. Creole-style wooden houses suited to the hot, humid climate, with long, sloping roofs and galleries on the front, predominated in the older sections of the city. Most private homes were made of wood, while most public buildings such as the theater, bank, and federal and county courthouses were built of brick. When contractors tried to use brick for townhouses, they sometimes were not able to get enough to complete the construction. Thus newly built brick houses might have a layered look, with the first two stories of red brick and the third of yellow brick. It is no wonder that their appearance failed to make a favorable impression upon visitors from New England and Britain.

Even more than their makeshift architecture, Mobilians' behavior offended British visitors in the 1820s. Portraits drawn by these Englishmen corroborated observations European tourists generally made of the habits of Jacksonian Americans. Boorishness received particular attention in visitors' journals. Adam Hodgson reported that he "saw much more of men than of manners" at a Mobile tavern where he took his meals with thirty or forty other men, mainly assorted agents and clerks. He began to believe the story he had been told, that travelers proceeding westward in America might take their longitude by observing the decreasing amounts of time spent at meals. Five to six minutes was the average time in Mobile, Hodgson estimated. Margaret Hall confirmed Hodgson's observations. At a "noisy, bustling public table" in a boarding house she watched while "sixty persons dispatched their unchewed dinner in the course of twenty minutes." A private dinner in the home of a prominent local attorney failed to make a much more favorable impression upon Mrs. Hall, who considered the dining table overloaded with badly cooked food.

In their materialistic value system, Mobilians, like other Jacksonian Americans, stressed above all the pursuit of wealth. Refinement in social manners mattered little while newly established merchants competed furiously for business. Business opportunities attracted a large number of merchants to Mobile; in 1817, for instance, 42 merchants competed for the patronage of 600 residents plus settlers headed for cotton lands upstate or elsewhere in the Southwest. By 1822, when the city was, according to the Mobile Register, assuming a settled character, merchants who leased stores or rented warehouses from year to year still scrambled for business. Some shopowners actually beckoned people from one store to another, even ones across the street from each other. Trying to dissuade merchants from these unseemly practices, the Mobile Register urged them to adopt self-restraint for the sake of the good image of the city.

Opportunity seekers initially came alone to the port city, so Mobile abounded with young single men. The disproportionate male-female ratio retarded urban growth and social development. Throughout the 1820s young white males outnumbered white females in Mobile more than two to one. Many of the young men worked as itinerant agents of cotton firms based in New York. As one local resident described them, they were "mere birds of passage — here in the winter and off in the summer." An "occasional epidemic ... frightened away the unacclimated," he added. The sexual imbalance in the population, plus the itinerant habits of the cotton merchants, retarded urban growth in Mobile as elsewhere in the cotton South before 1830.

Social development also proceeded slowly while single males predominated in Mobile. One young physician found companions for card games and supper parties among bachelor merchants from the North. "The want of female society is sensibly felt in Mobile," Dr. Solomon Mordecai reported in 1823, "as it would be in all places where the population as here consists of single gentlemen."

Recognizing the potential of Mobile to become more than a rough frontier town, some residents supported social activities found in established cultural centers of the South. They attended horse races and theatrical productions. They organized Masonic lodges that gave balls. Sponsors of these activities soon emerged as social leaders. While the common people of Mobile were as coarse and rough as the buildings in their city, according to one visitor from New England, "the better class who have come here to seek their fortunes" included "a few whose gentlemanly manners, united to a full share of natural talents and acquired intelligence, would be creditable to any place." Solomon Mordecai, one of these gentlemen, predicted in 1825 that Mobile would become "the Charleston of Alabama."

Mobile's future as a city depended in part upon the fate of a rival city across Mobile Bay, Blakeley. This boom town was the brainchild of Josiah Blakeley, a native of Connecticut who had moved to Alabama during the late Spanish period. When he eventually concluded that the port of Mobile had only limited possibilities for business, he decided to establish his own seaport to produce greater financial returns for his investment. In 1813 Blakeley bought a site for his town on the Tensaw River on the east side of Mobile Bay, opposite the town of Mobile. He obtained permission the next year from the Mississippi Territorial Legislature to lay out a town on his land. Following the plan of New England townships transplanted to the Southwest, Blakeley reserved two parcels of land for public use, one for a park and one for public buildings. A few lots may have been sold as early as 1813, but most sales occurred in 1817 and 1818. Blakeley, who died in 1815, never witnessed the settlement of his town.

As a boom town from 1817 until 1820, Blakeley, in direct competition with Mobile, attracted entrepreneurs from across the United States. Town promoters in early Alabama usually did not employ a booster press, but Blakeley published its own, the Blakeley Sun. In 1818 the Sun boasted that 100 houses had been built in the area, which had had only one the previous year. Reprints of this claim appeared in newspapers as far away as Dayton, Ohio. New Yorkers and New Englanders in particular moved to Blakeley to open commercial firms or businesses that served commerce. Twenty-one merchants from seventeen firms petitioned the United States Congress in December 1818 to establish Blakeley as a port of entry and delivery. They reminded Congress that the town's population of 300 people had all moved there since November 1817, a fact that indicated to them a great potential for growth. Congress did not grant the petition until 1822, but the Alabama General Assembly did pass an act in 1820 to regulate the port and harbor of Blakeley. Commerce between Blakeley and Mobile increased enough by early 1819 to justify ferry service between the two ports. By 1820 a visiting merchant from Liverpool observed that Mobile and Blakeley were "contending violently for the privilege of becoming that great emporium which must shortly spring up in the vicinity of this outlet for the produce of the young fertile state of Alabama."

Alabama's "great emporium" became Mobile instead of Blakeley. After 1824 Blakeley declined quickly as a port. While Mobile exported most of the cotton produced in south Alabama, Blakeley exported 4 percent of the crop in 1825 but only 1 percent the next year. In 1827 the collector for the new port moved his records to Mobile. Blakeley remained as an official United States port of entry until 1831, when Congress repealed the 1822 legislation that had established the customs district of Blakeley. Blakeley became a ghost town that never again challenged the commercial preeminence of Mobile in south Alabama.

As a port, Blakeley had initially appeared to offer geographic advantages superior to those of Mobile. For this reason historians have had trouble explaining Blakeley's decline in conventional terms of natural advantages. One theory maintained that Blakeley declined while Mobile thrived because improvements in approaches to the harbor of Mobile eventually made it more accessible to the bay than Blakeley. According to this view, the dredging of the Choctaw Pass allowed vessels of the size that had been going to Blakeley to proceed directly to Mobile. That made the wharves of Mobile more convenient to the bay than those of Blakeley. But the Choctaw Pass was not dredged until 1831, several years after Blakeley was virtually defunct as a port, so the dredging could have had no appreciable effect on Blakeley's demise. Besides that, the harbor at Blakeley was not as easy to reach from the bay as town promoters suggested. Vessels sometimes had to remain in Mobile Bay for a week to get winds strong enough to propel them up the Tensaw River to Blakeley. Geographic determinism, as it turns out, does not explain the failure of Blakeley.

Another theory explained Blakeley's decline in terms of its reputation for unhealthiness as yellow fever ravaged the town in 1819, 1826, and 1828. Although the epidemic of 1819 prompted temporary evacuation, survivors returned to Blakeley. Before the outbreaks of yellow fever in 1826 and 1828, commerce had already declined drastically.

Runaway land speculation has also been suggested as an explanation for Blakeley's demise. As speculators drove up land prices in the frontier seaport, the lower and more stable prices for land in Mobile attracted an increasing number of the merchants who came to south Alabama. The Mobile City Directory for 1855–56 subscribed to this view. So did the nineteenth-century journalist Bernard Reynolds, who presented Thomas Hallett as an example of an ambitious merchant who headed for Blakeley only to settle ultimately in Mobile. Hallett, according to Reynolds, arrived in Mobile Bay "determined to open a commercial house" at Blakeley. When Hallett tried to secure a location for his business, he found such extravagantly high prices placed on lots in Blakeley that he "determined to try his fortune in Mobile." Reynolds interpreted the arrival of Hallett as "the signal for a complete change in the relative positions, in point of importance, of the two places" since "trade soon flourished in Mobile and languished in Blakeley." Certainly land speculation contributed both to Blakeley's rise and to its decline. Deflation in land values caused by the Panic of 1819 halted Blakeley's growth, yet the same thing happened to other towns that eventually recovered and grew even faster in the 1820s than they had before 1819.

Blakeley declined and Mobile survived ultimately because of Mobile's earlier founding. As the New York American noted in 1823, "Blakeley has every advantage over Mobile, except that of being begun when this was already established." Urban growth may be explained by factors other than site and situation, and urban historians and urban geographers now agree that the case of Mobile illustrates this fact. Nineteenth-century America's largest cities tended to be the long-established ones, which took advantage of their early leads. In the final analysis, that first century of Mobile's existence, even under colonial rule and in relative commercial stagnation, laid the foundation for the city's survival and growth.

With the demise of Blakeley, Mobile dominated settlements on Mobile Bay. Yet Mobile ranked second among ports on the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. From its position of superiority, New Orleans complimented Mobile in a patronizing way. For instance, in 1822 the Louisiana Gazette of New Orleans noted that, after almost a century "buried in obscurity and little esteemed," Mobile had dramatically become "a sea-port of the second order." Responding to this description, the Mobile Argus maintained that Mobile had "all the characteristics of one of the first order." Not only did Mobile have a large, rich hinterland, but its residents reportedly felt "no servile imitation, no mark of colonial dependence." In other words, Mobilians had the attitudes of citizens of a first-class port. The Argus recognized that Mobile was "destined to carry on a large foreign trade" as well as to maintain close trading relationships with New York and New Orleans, both first-class ports. Mobile, striving to become a first-class port, competed with New Orleans in a rivalry that intensified over the years as gaps in development narrowed between the two Gulf cotton ports. In this process Mobile sought release from the colonial dependency that had characterized the city's first century.

Since its founding in 1702, Mobile had remained basically a trading outpost for successive French, British, and Spanish colonial rulers. Commercial and security advantages had persuaded a French Canadian soldier named Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville to select Mobile Bay as the site for a French colony in southern Louisiana. Mobile Bay possessed an adequate harbor at Massacre Island and resources in timber and inland water connections that appeared superior to those of Biloxi Bay or the lower Mississippi River, which had been considered as alternative sites. Mobile suited the security considerations of French officials, who wished to found a settlement to protect their interests in Louisiana against European colonial rivals and to make inroads into Britain's monopoly on trade with the Indians of the Southeast. Not only was Mobile Bay located close to the path of the British advance southward from Carolina, but it also provided a communication link with major Indian nations in the interior via the Alabama-Tombigbee River system that flowed into the Mobile River on its way to the bay. The name Mobile came from the French rendering of "Movile," the Spanish version of "Mobila," which was the name that the natives gave to the bay. In French and English, mobile serves as an adjective meaning "capable of moving or being moved."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cotton City by Harriet E. Amos. Copyright © 1985 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS,
TABLES,
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
1. OLD TOWN, YOUNG CITY,
2. COTTON CITY,
3. CITY FATHERS,
4. WORKING PEOPLE,
5. MUNICIPAL FINANCE AND DEFAULT,
6. CITY SERVICES,
7. SOCIAL SERVICES,
8. PURSUIT OF PROGRESS,
9. TEST OF LOYALTY,
APPENDIX: CLASSIFICATION OF OCCUPATIONS,
NOTES,
ESSAY ON SOURCES,
INDEX,

Editorial Reviews

A well-written and well-researched monograph on Mobile’s ante-bellum urban development.”—Journal of Southern History



“An unusually good study of southern city—thoroughly researched, carefully organized, and well written.”—Leonard P. Curry



“This is the best study of ante-bellum Mobile produced to date, and makes significant contributions to our understanding of the urban old South. Amos thoroughly documents her contention that the more prosperous merchants dominated both the economic and social life of the city. The research is impressive, the bibliography is excellent, and the book is well organized.”—Melton A. McLaurin

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