Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 14

tury. These new developments all required increased energy supplies and endless capital
reserves. In response, southern boosters stumping for the New South continued to turn to
the region's rivers for organic energy supplies and social power.
Throughout the discussions over how to build and fund the Augusta Canal, supporters
used the canal as an example of how the city could define itself. The canal would enable
Augusta to diversify its agricultural and industrial economy and to free itself from depend-
ence on other cities and regions. Augustans shared a sentiment with others that coalesced
into a “New South Creed” and mantra in the decades between Reconstruction and the early
twentieth century as southerners looked for additional means to build a profitable and pro-
ductive economy. 49 Soon after the American Civil War, visionaries proposed new ways to
power southern society, and we can see this in an unlikely source.
From Waterpower to “E-lec-tricity”
As John Muir traveled the agricultural, industrial, and postbellum South in 1867, he en-
countered a landscape in transition. Muir had breezed through Augusta, Georgia, on his
own march to the sea and perhaps never understood the workings of the Augusta Canal or
the existence of the diversion dam and subsequent loss of the shad fishery. 50 If he had, Muir
would have immediately recognized that the Savannah River was not like the free-flowing
Chattahoochee River on which he sailed and harvested wild grapes for his muscadine wine.
While that section of the upper Chattahoochee River was unencumbered and free flowing,
the industrial Savannah River was dammed, redirected, and turned into a renewable organ-
ic energy machine before the American Civil War. Muir certainly would have encountered
mill dams on the middle Chattahoochee River in Columbus, Georgia, had he proceeded to
the Gulf of Mexico by boat as he had contemplated. Perhaps Muir was even surprised or
uncomfortable with the industrial and technologically modern South he discovered and the
people he met.
One of the individuals Muir encountered on his travels between Augusta and Savannah
provided a window into the South's future. Muir stopped to sleep or eat with folks who
had resources and interest in his cash, and at one of these stops Muir encountered a nascent
New South booster named Mr. Cameron. In comparing Muir's interest in botany, Cameron
disclosed his own: “My hobby is e-lec-tricity.” Cameron—well in advance of the majority
of his contemporaries—held a vision for a future South where “that mysterious power or
force, used now only for telegraphy, will eventually supply the power for running railroad
trains and steamships, for lighting, and, in a word, electricity will do all the work of the
world.” 51 While Cameron did not explicitly link his electric dreams with the early indus-
trial Savannah River or consider the larger implications of an electrical society for human
labor and nature, his unsolicited and prophetic outlook meshed with the industrial advocacy