Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 7

ive moment for antebellum Piedmont cotton production. 17 But the increased output also
led to soil depletion, erosion, land consolidation, and outmigration. Farmers—those who
owned no or few slaves—who could not keep up with soil improvement or land rotation
cycles or purchase new land and slaves moved farther west into Alabama and Mississippi.
Between 1810 and 1850, there was a massive white exodus and a corresponding increase
in black labor throughout South Carolina's and Georgia's Piedmont. Some of those plant-
ers who remained assumed leadership positions in the region, and those who continued to
farm in the bottomlands—the agricultural reformers like Calhoun—enjoyed greater returns
on their crops because of direct links to markets in Augusta and Savannah. 18
Calhoun's access to the Savannah River facilitated his grasp of power in the local mar-
ketplace, but it also linked him to the region's unpredictable water flows. The summers
between 1832 and 1834, according to his journals, were particularly dry. Calhoun's cotton
and corn suffered ten weeks without rain from May through August 1832. The Savannah
ran “unusually low and for a long time” in the fall of 1833, and Calhoun again was “want-
ing rain” to sustain his cotton in October 1834. 19 When the Savannah River was flowing,
Calhoun's hired white and slave laborers could manufacture material items necessary to
keep the whole operation running, but they also constantly reacted to the river's behavior.
Flooding—or “freshets”—damaged floodplain fields, and the river rose “as high nearly as
in Dec. 1831 which exceeded any Freshet for many years before.” 20 Calhoun repeatedly
contracted with individuals to reinforce and maintain his dams because he was “uneasy
about … [their exposure] to the whole force of the River during freshets.” Calhoun's per-
sonal proto-industrial activities did not necessarily contribute to a southern market revolu-
tion on a scale equivalent to what emerged in Massachusetts's Lowell mills. But his experi-
ence illustrates the complex quality of his relationship with capital and the Savannah River.
The waterway could run dry or flood, and both events threatened to ruin his financial in-
vestments. Calhoun—a man rich in real property but perpetually short of cash—apparently
dreamed of building a large textile mill on the Millwood site. But he ultimately left that
task to downstream investors and “men of capital” with access to deeper pockets. 21
Lowell of the South
By the nineteenth century, the Savannah River valley looked like other American river val-
leys with small agricultural and growing industrial communities. The Savannah River had
flowed freely until the decades before the American Civil War, and the Augusta Canal di-
version dam signaled the beginning of a new relationship between water and power—and
a new organic energy regime—in the southern Piedmont.
The city of Augusta, affectionately anointed “the Lowell of the South” by the Augusta
Chronicle 's editors, successfully redirected the Savannah River's energy-rich current on a