Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 9

nineteenth-century southern market revolution. Antebellum southerners were beginning to
balance agriculture with industry—within an organic energy regime—long before Muir
passed through the region in 1867.
In Cumming's mind, the Augusta Canal could tame a short section of an unpredictable
river and fuel factories while achieving two other connected goals. First, as a transportation
conduit, the canal provided a limited bypass through the fall line. The canal was a limited
navigational solution because boats could enter the canal upstream of Augusta but could
not exit the canal into the Savannah River below Augusta. As a navigational waterway, the
canal facilitated movement of agricultural products between Augusta and upstream com-
munities. Once goods arrived in Augusta, they were off-loaded, processed in Augusta, and
reloaded onto Savannah-bound riverboats or Charleston-bound railroads. Traveling the up-
per Savannah River's reaches by boat was daunting; shoals, rocks, and unpredictable wa-
ter levels made travel hazardous at best. Despite many sources of water such as springs
and rainfall, seasonally fluctuating water flows hampered commerce on nearly every river
in the American South. Rivers typically ran low in the spring and summer and could rise
with autumn tropical storms and winter rains. Not enough rain made navigating the upper
Savannah River's shoals difficult with cargo-laden boats, and too much water could turn
rivers into torrents.
The Augusta Canal provided seven miles of safe passage through the Savannah River's
fall line and around one of the river's longest sets of shoals regardless of water levels. The
technology necessary for this endeavor, as for canals in other parts of the American South,
came from outside the region. A community of transnational engineers, including Loammi
Baldwin Jr., Charles H. Bigelow, James Bechno Francis, and William Phillips, who were
associated with designing water infrastructure in Lowell and elsewhere helped build the
antebellum South's water schemes to provide water security. 28
The engineers and individuals like Cumming who contributed to the southeastern hy-
draulic waterscape also demonstrate what the market revolution and transition to capitalism
looked like in one part of the American South. Scholars have typically reduced the market
revolution to a conflict either between the interests of coastal merchants and yeoman
famers or between cotton planters, poor yeomen, and slaves. 29 The Augusta Canal's ex-
ample illustrates that middle class, urban professionals—like Cumming and Phillips—do
not fit into those categories. According to historians Tom Downey and Bruce Eelman, these
individuals were the men of capital who shaped the southern waterscape and the antebel-
lum South's diversified market revolution. “Men of property”—those elite individuals who
owned slaves, stands of timber, or small mills throughout the South—represented one lay-
er of southern industrialists who increasingly ceded political power in the late nineteenth
century to the new group of capitalists. The men of capital—like Cumming and his South
Carolina neighbor William Gregg—symbolized the new southern industrialist mentality