Shortly after 1 p.m. on Monday, March 20, we arrived at the New
Orleans Marine Terminal to embark on the American Queen steamboat for the river
cruise portion of our Road Scholar trip.
The embarkation and processing went very smooth. Our stateroom
assignment was on the third deck, the “Alabama” stateroom, #335. It was a good location, about in the middle
of the deck, around the corner from stairs and elevators, but close enough to
get to them easily. We were also right
across from the little theater room our group used for lectures while
onboard. Our stateroom had a private
veranda, which was nice to have to sit outside without the distraction of
people walking by on the deck. It also gave us the ability to leave one of the exterior
double doors open at night and get fresh air.
The term “stateroom” is entirely an American steamboat invention, as the
first passenger boats in the 1800’s named their passenger sleeping rooms after
states in the union. The 4th
deck was normally an open space not subdivided into rooms and used for
gatherings. As it was the biggest room
on the boat, it was called the “Texas” deck for the biggest state in the Union.
As the trip went on, I looked for a “Montana” stateroom but Suzy found it
before I did. Every state was represented, as well as the navigable rivers in
the U.S. and some notable river port towns. The “American Queen is a modern
reproduction of a classic paddle wheel steam boat of the mid-1800’s. It is propelled by a large rear wooden paddle
wheel driven by a steam engine that dates from the 1920’s and reconditioned
when this boat was built. I had a chance to go down to the engine room and see
it in action. Click here to see a short video of the engine room It is 19th
century technology that still works well.
The only thing different is that the boilers are fired with diesel oil
rather than coal or wood. It has a large steam whistle that gets blown for
signaling and when we depart a stop made along the river. It also has a steam
powered calliope which gets played as we leave a stop. On one day, they allowed volunteers to take a
crack at playing and yours truly waited in line to play a few notes. I later
received an honorary certificate good for playing a steam calliope on all
navigable rivers in America.
Our group was assigned seating for
dinner at the early seating, 5:15 p.m., and we had two tables reserved for
us. By this time we had been introduced
to our lecturer/historian for the trip, Mr. Brian Altobello, from New
Orleans. He has been an educator in the
New Orleans Schools most of his career and currently does part-time curriculum
development giving him the free time to do one-week trips with Road
Scholar. We were his first group so we
took it easy on him! After a delicious
dinner served on china with linens and real silver, we took in the
entertainment in the showroom. It was an
introduction to key staff and a representative sample of the on board
entertainment we would have during the trip. After that, we went back to our stateroom and
settled in for the evening with the veranda door open and watched the lights on
the river of the commercial traffic go by as we fell asleep.
Tuesday, March 21, we were awake at
6:30 as it got light about then. Our
room attendant had arranged to bring us coffee at 7 a.m. every day, so we
wanted to be ready for that. We cleaned
up, had breakfast and assembled in the Mark Twain Lounge with our Road Scholar
Group for our morning tour activities.
We had tied up early in the morning at the levee next to a large former
sugar cane plantation called Oak Alley. It got its name from the 200+ year old
live oak trees planted on either side of the road to the plantation house, forming
an arch. Our tour was set to see another
plantation, called “Laura”, after one of the owners who lived on it the longest.
Our Road Scholar bus from New Orleans and the same driver was waiting for us having
driven up from New Orleans overland. He took us to “Laura” where we met a local
guide ho gave our group its own tour.
The plantation is now owned by the State of Louisiana and consists of
the plantation house, several outbuildings and a bit of associated acreage. The
outbuildings included several former slave cabins, later sharecropper dwellings
after the Civil War. They were generally inhabited by the same former slaves
working for minimum wages and paid in scrip redeemable only at the plantation
store A private agribusiness company
owns the farmland now and still raises sugar cane, but the work is totally
mechanized now, requiring little human labor. “Laura” is representative of a
Creole plantation. It was founded in
1803 by a Frenchman named Duparc from Normandy who left France under a cloud
having killed a man in a duel. He was
known to be a violent man, but married and had three children. One son died as
a very young man, the other named Plagy Duparc (pronounced “fleshy” doo-park)
married and had children as did the sister Elizabeth, who ended up outliving
everyone and eventually inheriting the whole operation which was huge by this
time and very profitable. Laura was
Elizabeth’s only surviving heir and lived to be 102 herself, having been born
during Lincoln’s presidency and dying during Kennedy’s. At age 74 she wrote
down her remembrances of her life on the plantation, which along with business papers
gave a good historical record for the provenance of the place. The last heirs
sold “Laura” to the state of Louisiana in 1985 and it has been under
restoration since. The house was built of
cedar wood, logged by slaves in the swamp, cut and dressed into the beams and
lumber used in the home and marked with Roman numerals, moved to the home site
and reassembled using the Roman numerals as the way to match up what pieces
went together. The house is built up on pilings with the ground floor used as open
storage as it will flood when the river overflows. It also makes the home cooler with
ventilation as does the design and placement of windows and doors. The colors are authentic to the Creole décor
style of the time and the interior has many European French touches as Creole
people were either French or of French descent. In fact our local guide defined
Creole at that time as anyone born in Louisiana who spoke French and was
Catholic. The whole region from New
Orleans to Baton Rouge was sugar cane plantations fronting the Mississippi on
both banks, owned by wealthy landowners and worked by slaves. Sugar cane was
processed by plantation mills and shipped by boat up or down the Mississippi.
Some planters maintained town homes in New Orleans and most sent their older
children to France to boarding schools.
Up until the Civil War, the Duparc family had freed none of their
slaves, however, Plagy Duparc fathered three children out of wedlock with one
or more slave women as baptismal records of the local Catholic Parish recorded
the names of the parents of these mixed race children. It was not clear to me, but I believe these
offspring were then treated as “free people of color” and not slaves
themselves, but had to make their own way in the world and had no share in any
inheritance when Plagy died.
The home itself was remarkable as it
had stayed in one family so long and had not suffered the ravages of the Civil
War. Most all the furniture, china and décor were original family pieces. One
interesting feature of the home was several long windows with a Dutch door at
the bottom of the frame which, when the window was fully raised, could be opened
allowing egress to the wrap around porch. Another feature was a large fan on a
rope and pulley system over the dining room table with the rope running to the
dining room door. A slave child would pull on the rope and the fan would move.
This kept flies away from the table and provided those seated at the table with
some moving air. Because of fire safety
and to reduce excess heat in the house, plantation kitchens were separate from
the home and usually had rooms above for domestic slaves to live in close to
the house. While we can all admire the
nice house and the obvious wealth of the owners, it is sobering to note that
this was all made on the backs of slave laborers, then after the Civil War, on
the labor of sharecroppers who almost always were indebted to the “company
store” to the point they never could make it off the plantation. Things only changed when the mechanization of
farming and the civil rights movement came together to make this kind of labor
as unneeded as it was unattractive to those working.
After the tour we were running a bit
behind schedule so we went directly back to the levee. Suzy and a few others took a quick look into
the Oak Alley plantation as it was just across from the boat. I opted for lunch
back on the boat in the dining area known as the “Front Porch”. It is on the 3rd
deck at the front of the boat and offered buffet style meals three times a day,
along with a serve yourself soft ice cream dispenser, with tables both inside
and outside on the deck. Suzy returned
shortly before we cast off to head on upriver, had her lunch and we reconnected
back at our stateroom. We had our first
lecture from Brian on the history of New Orleans, which although we were long
gone, helped put things we had already seen and done there in perspective. In summary, New Orleans was French from the
early 1700’s, then Spanish from 1759 to 1803, then briefly French again until
the Louisiana Purchase later in 1803 when it became part of the USA. It remained so despite the best efforts of the
British to take control of it in the War of 1812 during the famous Battle of
New Orleans in 1814 making a national hero of Andrew Jackson. The French provided the buildings, the
culture and the Napoleonic code of law which still is the basis for Louisiana
State law, unlike the rest of the U.S. states which generally more or less
follow English common law. The Spanish
provided good administration and their culture and some of the spicy cooking
flavors which remain to this day. Because of this mix of cultures, New Orleans
had a more laisses-faire attitude toward race than more English colonial
states. Although there were slaves, there were proportionally more “free people
of color”- mixed race citizens who had their own neighborhoods and
culture. One of the more interesting
aspects of this was the socially accepted practice of white men having mixed
race mistresses established in homes paid for by the man. Children of these mistresses were also free
people of color and many of the female children when they became young women
would continue the tradition. The
mothers of the women put together large social balls attended by the young
women and the men where they would mix and pair up based on affinity. The
mother would then do up a contract equally binding on both parties and
recognized by local courts. The men
might be single or even married to white women, who apparently went along with
the arrangements.
After our lecture we were free to
relax until dinner, which again was a fine dining experience. We enjoyed the
entertainment once again that evening and called it a night. The weather was conducive for leaving the
door open to view the lights of the river traffic going by as well as lights
along the shore.
Wednesday, March 22, I awoke in the
predawn light to see the boat’s front searchlight plying the shore of the river
looking for the tie up spot for our stop at St. Francisville. The town is a
quaint old town with a lot of history. It is now primarily a tourist stop and
bedroom community for Baton Rouge, but has a lot of charm about it. Some 1700
people live in the town now. It is said to be a town that is two blocks wide
and seven miles long with a lot of quaint shops and historical homes. John James Audubon had spent several years in
the area working on his bird paintings. At this point we had gone north far
enough to leave behind the French Catholic part of southern Louisiana and
passed into the English Protestant settled portion. The town was founded by Spanish monks from
the Order of St. Francis who were looking for the high ground on the bluffs
above the Mississippi as a burial ground for their order. Most all of the
post-colonial era plantation owners were Episcopalian in this area and the town
has one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the state. It has a large church
graveyard with many old stones and a few above ground tombs. One of the most interesting is the grave of a
Union Navy gunboat commander who contracted a fever during the Civil War siege
of the town and in his delirium committed suicide. His last request was for a Masonic
funeral, so the Union forces went under a flag of truce and spoke with the Senior
Warden of the Episcopal Church in St. Francisville, who was a Mason, and
arranged for a service to be conducted with all the Masonic rites and
rituals. Once that was done, they went
back to war against each other. However when the Senior Warden, who was a
Confederate Officer in the war, passed away years later, he asked to be
interred with the Union officer and so the marker slab lists both their names.
Another interesting piece of history
is the Parish (county) of West Feliciana that St. Francisville sits in.
It was at
one brief point in history part of a separate “country” known as the “Free
State of West Florida”. Back in the early 1800’s, Florida still belonged to
Spain. The panhandle portion of Florida extended across what is now south
eastern Louisiana. After the Louisiana Purchase,
the people who lived in the area declared their independence from Spain, raised
a militia, made a constitution, produced a currency and had their own flag, a
large white 5-pointed star on a blue field.
The mini-country lasted 74 days at which point they asked to be annexed
to the United States, which the US government was more than happy to do and
those five Parishes became part of the state of Louisiana. This predates the Texas secession from Mexico
by several decades, but it is thought the flag ended up being the inspiration
for the Lone Star flag of the Texas Republic.
Plantations in this area had begun
growing tobacco in the late 1700’s, which did not do well, so the next cash
crop tried was Indigo in the early 1800’s, but the processing of the plants to
get the purple dye was found to be poisoning the slaves who did the work. The
plantations then switched to cotton growing in the 1830’s. Cotton thrived in
the alluvial soil, but still was tedious to pick and clean. However, with the invention by Eli Whitney of
the cotton gin, cleaning the seeds from bolls became much easier and cotton
production took off with bales of cotton weighing some 500 pounds being shipped
up and down river by steamboats which would tie up along the plantation’s levees. This increase in production also meant more
labor was needed to hand pick and cultivate the cotton and unfortunately this
lead to more slaves being purchased to work the fields. The number of slaves in the cotton producing
portions of the South mushroomed and with cotton bringing good prices, the
plantation owners became very wealthy. After
the Civil War, most plantations went to the sharecropper form of production and
managed to make a small profit until the boll weevil infestation of 1909 ruined
the crops. The Great Depression took the
price of cotton to the basement and many of the sharecroppers could no longer
survive on the land and began the great migration of African-Americans to the
industrial cities of the north where manufacturing was hiring. Our visit to a
plantation in the St. Francisville area took us to Rosedale, a large plantation
home and grounds now owned by the State of Louisiana. One family owned the
plantation from the early 1800’s to 1955 when went into decline. In 1967, a
wealthy Texas oil heir purchased the property and began to restore it for
tours. She eventually got too old to continue and sold it to the State of
Louisiana. The plantation agricultural land was sold off to agribusiness, with
some surrounding acreage leased for cattle. The docent who conducted our tour
is the property manager. We met her at the main house where she greeted us in
period costume and gave us a great tour of the home then let us spend some time
exploring the grounds on our own. Having
one family own the home for most of its lifespan contributed to having a lot of
original furnishings and pieces. Our
same bus and driver dropped us off back in town where we could follow our own
touring desires. We visited the Grace
Church and the town’s museum, then caught a shuttle bus service that met the
boat at all the stops and returned us in time for another early afternoon
departure.
After getting back on the boat, we
had our lunch on the “Front Porch”, took a rest, and then had a talk by our
historian on Natchez, Mississippi. The
name comes from the American Indian tribe that lived in the area when it was
settled. We would be stopping for part of a day there the next morning. We had our early dinner once again and
enjoyed our entertainment of 1950’s music with an opportunity to do some
dancing, sock hop style, followed by a continuation of the music in the boat’s
main bar in the stern with two large porthole views of the paddlewheel turning
and churning us up the river. We had a soda and danced some more to some good
live music, but eventually headed back to our cabin and turned in for the
night.
On Thursday, March 23, we arrived in
Natchez, Mississippi and tied up at the city landing on the main levee around 7
a.m. Our Road Scholar bus and driver
picked us up after breakfast and we bussed through town to the townhome of a
prosperous plantation owner, who like many plantation owners had their main
homes near or in town and smaller places on the plantations to live while
checking on the work being done. The name
of the home is Longwood. It is a unique
structure, 5 stories tall with a cupola on top and octagon in shape. It enclosed 30,000 square feet and used
750,000 individual bricks as well as countless board feet of cypress lumber. It
was started in 1859 and had builders from Pennsylvania doing the work. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the
builders dropped their tools and supplies and headed north to join the Union
Army. With the blockade of Mississippi,
the cotton could no longer be shipped out. The owner became distraught over his
financial ruin and died in 1863 at 46 years of age from the stress, leaving a
widow and young family behind to fend for themselves. The home was never finished above the first
floor, but that was still quite a large space and the family lived there as the
widow raised produce and livestock on the property around the home and managed
to scratch out a living. As the family
line died out, the home became vacant and our guide, who is a Natchez native,
remembers playing in the upper floors with group of her friends who made it a
stopping point before or after school. Eventually, the Garden Club of Natchez
purchased the property and now run tours and a gift shop on the premises. The ladies
who conduct the tours wear period costumes including hoop skirts. The property
and grounds are maintained and the exterior of the home has been refurbished,
but there are no plans to ever finish off the upper four floors.
From there we bussed back into town
and stopped to tour Stanton Hall. This
is another imposing town home built for the main residence of a wealthy cotton
broker who emigrated from Ireland and made his fortune buying and selling the
cotton produced by the plantations on the Mississippi. The home has a massive
entrance that makes quite a statement.
The home is 5 stories, with the main floor being the floor the general
public would be allowed to be on, with the rest preserved for the family. The main floor has 17 foot ceilings and fancy
dental crown molding throughout. The
main hall of the first floor is 1100 square feet itself. The upper stories have lower ceilings and
less décor, but still are quite spacious.
The family owned the home until 1938 and sold it to the Natchez Garden
Club for $9,100. It served as a small
private college for a while but has since been restored for touring but is also
available for weddings and receptions of all kinds. Much of the furniture and appointments are
original, to include what at the time were very modern chandeliers, called
gasoliers, made out of highly decorative wrought iron and burning gas generated
by a coal gas plant in the city which was piped like natural gas is today. The
chandeliers at the time were all gilt with gold, but have since been
electrified and the gold gilding has mostly worn off. Unfortunately, no
photography is allowed inside the home, so I was unable to take pictures of the
stunning interiors, but I was able to pick up some picture postcards in their
gift shop. The property has a tall black wrought iron fence around the property
which covers more than half of a city block.
Our bus then took us to visit Trinity Episcopal Church, which
featured a large organ installation but also very large stained glass windows,
two of which were designed and made by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The two windows were exceedingly beautiful
and were easy to pick out from their others based on their colors and
workmanship. The window depicting the
Resurrected Lord Jesus has folds of cream colored glass that give his robes the
look of flowing and movement. The main
altar stained glass window was crafted by a French rival of Tiffany, who
excelled at creating vivid blues in glass and this window is stunning itself
because of the color. It was interesting to note that the area we would call
the choir loft at the back of the church was reserved for slaves to sit if they
came to a service with their owners.
We then bussed out to the edge of
the city and arrived at an African American Church, The Antioch Baptist Church,
where we were warmly greeted by one of the members and ushered into the
Sanctuary for a Gospel hymn sing by the choir.
It was inspirational music well done and got us all in the spirit. Click here to see and hear the church choir sing The choir master/organist asked for volunteers
to come sing with them and I went up right away to his amazement. He said that was the first time a man ever
took the lead in coming forward! Click here to see some of us join the choir in singing Several other people did and after we sat back
down and heard a few more numbers, he invited folks to come forward and be out
front with the choir coming out of the choir seats, joining our tour members
two by two. Most of our tour group took advantage of that, Click here to see the big finale but I stayed back to
video the others as I had had my shot at singing. We said our goodbyes and headed back through
town to the river landing. Along the way, we passed the location of one of the most
horrendous fires in U.S. history in terms of loss of life. It was an African American dance hall/night
club and had a full house, with all but one door locked to keep out gate
crashers. A fire started and the crowd
panicked and all headed for the one exit in a stampede. By the time the fire
was out over 200 people had lost their lives. A memorial marks the spot which
now is only a concrete slab where the building used to stand.
Back on board the boat we had time
for dinner and then a show blues band from Memphis was our entertainment.
Brandon Santini is the front man’s name. He sings and blows a mean harmonica
along with a smokin’ guitar man, a drummer and a bass player. His style was a bit Chicago, but
authentic. We all enjoyed that very
much. After the show I talked to both the guitar player (Timo), an African
American, and Brandon, a white guy, and purchased two of their CD’s. The house band was set to play later in the
bar, but we were done in by the day’s activities and turned in.
On Friday, March 24, after breakfast
we had a lecture by our historian on the siege and battle for Vicksburg as we
would be stopping there later in the morning. We learned about President
Lincoln’s threefold strategy for winning the Civil War. First was to suffocate
Southern commerce via a naval blockade of southern ocean ports. Second was to
capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. The third was to split
the confederacy in two at the Mississippi River and control any shipping on the
river itself. Lincoln was almost
immediately successful on the first objective. By 1863 he had almost completely
achieved the third objective, with only Vicksburg standing in the way of total
domination of the Mississippi. As an aside, we know that the second objective
happened only months ahead of the end of hostilities. Vicksburg was known as the Gibraltar of the
West, standing on high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. General U.S. Grant
was in charge of Union forces tasked to take Vicksburg and General Pemberton of
the CSA was in charge of the Confederate defenses. Up until July of 1863, Union
forces were winning the minor battles, but the Confederates were winning the
major battles. That all changed with the Union victory at Gettysburg and the
almost simultaneous fall of Vicksburg after a 6 week siege. The Vicksburg campaign impressed Lincoln
enough that he gave Grant control of the entire Union Army and the rest is
history. Grant initially tried to take
Vicksburg by ground assault, but after several bloody encounters, he decided to
bombard the city with naval artillery and starve the inhabitants out by
blocking all entry into the city by river or by land. After 6 weeks, on July 4th, the
city surrendered after the horses, mules and even the rats in the city had been
eaten. There were unsubstantiated rumors
of cannibalism. Civilians had dug caves into the bluffs facing away from the
river and despite huge bombardments, less than 20 civilians lost their lives. One poignant story was about a family who
were on a hillside watching the bombardments when shells started coming close
to them and they ran off the hill. One
little girl called out to her father saying “Daddy, I can’t run, they have
killed me!” and in fact she had suffered a large shrapnel wound in her hip and
bled to death. It was said that Vicksburg refused to celebrate Independence Day
after that until 1945 with VE day having occurred just weeks before. After the
surrender, 30,000 confederate troops were paroled out (let go to home with a
promise to not rejoin the Confederate forces). Officers were allowed to keep
their side arms. 172 Cannon and 60,000
muskets and rifles were surrendered.
Our stop in Vicksburg included only
a tour of the battlefield and the memorials there, which are quite
extensive. Our local guide was very good
and we toured the battlefield in our bus with our guide narrating and making
several stops along the way at the very impressive memorials. The battlefield topography favored the Confederate
defenders despite extensive trench works dug by the Union forces. There was just too much open ground to cover
to have a decisive engagement by Union ground forces as Confederate artillery
could decimate the assaulting force with canister and grape shot. In some places the trench works were so close
to each other that the opposing forces would chatter back and forth and in some
cases, orders had to be given to Union forces to stop going over in the
evenings to Confederate trenches to play cards and checkers. My military schooling has taken me to both
Antietam and Gettysburg and I live near Manassas and Fredericksburg so have
seen all those battlefields, walked the ground and am familiar with the
actions, but having said that, Vicksburg was a much more extensive and complex campaign
than I imagined and the amount of ground taken in by the National Park is
surprisingly large. One of the last
exhibits we saw in the battlefield is the restoration of a Union gunboat, the
Cairo, which was sunk in the Mississippi in 1862 by a Confederate mine. It had
13 cannon, iron armor plating over wood, and five coal fired boilers that drove
two internal paddlewheels under armored cover.
It was quite an intimidating vessel, but sank in 15 minutes with no loss
of life among its 152 man crew. It was
rediscovered in the 1960’s, recovered and restored on display, along with
hundreds of personal artifacts and gear from the boat. Similar gunboats
controlled the Mississippi river and played a large role in the siege of
Vicksburg.
Here are some interesting notes I
took on General Grant from our lecture.
His name was actually Hiram Ulysses Grant, but an error on his West
Point entrance papers had him as Ulysses Simpson Grant (also some documents had
his middle name as “Sam”). He was a big
picture strategist who looked to see how best to achieve the war aims with the
minimum loss of his forces. He did not
like or tolerate profanity and disapproved of off color stories being told in
his presence. He was slight in stature,
standing about 5’ 3” and weighing about 150 pounds. He was an accomplished
equestrian and won the top horsemanship award at West Point. He continued to
ride for pleasure the rest of his life.
He graduated 21st out of 39 in his West Point class. He was
married to Julia Dent, a woman from St. Louis whose family owned slaves. He smoked 10-15 cigars a day. In the heat of battle, he was a calming
influence on his staff officers who were full of anxiety. In 7 years he went
from being a store clerk in a not so successful retail store to being General
of the entire Union Army. He was the 1st
of 2 West Point graduates to become President of the United States. His memoirs
were edited and published by Mark Twain and sold well enough to get him out of
debt before he died. His wife Julia had
been stalked by John Wilkes Booth and the Grants had been invited to accompany
Lincoln and his wife to Ford’s theater the night Lincoln was assassinated, but
begged off attending, some say because Lincoln’s wife was so erratic in her
behavior. Grant’s presidency from
1868-1872 was marked by scandals in his administration, not involving him
personally. He managed to eradicate the KKK in the South during the Reconstruction
period. He was said to be a drunk, and
he probably did have a problem with alcohol, but he had a low tolerance for
booze. After two drinks he would be hammered.
One of Grant’s rivals, General McClernand, was a personal friend of
Lincoln from Illinois with no military experience. He was made a political
appointee General and assigned to Grant’s forces at Vicksburg. He tried to
undercut Grant with Lincoln by accusing Grant of being drunk on duty (which he
never was at any point during the Civil War) and also gave unauthorized interviews
to the press puffing up his role and downplaying Grant’s. Grant relieved him and replaced him with
General Sherman and Lincoln, to his credit, backed Grant up. As an aside, the Confederate General
Pemberton was also a West Point graduate originally from Pennsylvania. He was
an artist by inclination and had combat experience in the Mexican War. His wife
was a southerner, but her brothers fought for the Union Army. When he died he
was eventually buried in Philadelphia.
He and the former Confederate General Longstreet were pallbearers at
Grant’s funeral.
After
the battlefield tour, we were bussed right back to the boat and had a few
minutes to admire the murals on the levee walls in the Riverside Park. We
re-boarded and departed Vicksburg as we were having lunch. Our journey upriver continued for the rest of
the day, overnight and for the full day on Saturday, March 25. Remarkably,
there was little activity on shore as we went upriver after about Baton Rouge as
development tended to be off the river and its flood plain, with the exception
of the bigger river towns with levees for flood control.
After lunch we had a lecture on the road to the Civil War.
The Revolutionary War could be considered to be sort of Civil War itself as the
colonies were about evenly divided into 1/3 British Loyalists, 1/3 American
Patriots and 1/3 not engaged. As early
as 1830, South Carolina wanted to secede from the Union over taxation, but did
not. By the 1850’s the political climate in the U.S. was very hateful with
fistfights in Congress and physical assaults in the Senate. The Missouri
Compromise, Dredd Scott decision, Kansas-Nebraska Act and the push into the
American West threatened the balance of free and slave states that had held an
uneasy balance until the late 1850’s.
Interestingly enough when secession did take place 11 states eventually
joined the Confederacy, the first 7 before Lincoln’s inauguration. Four states
- Delaware, Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky - voted to secede, but never did.
The Mexican War settlement gave more territories to the West which had no
desire for or need for slavery.
Washington DC outlawed slavery and the publication of Uncle Tom’s cabin
in 1852 also had a big effect on the desire to end slavery in the U.S. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1852 saw the end
of the Whig party in the U.S. and formation of the Republican Party as its
successor. Lincoln, a former Whig party member, ran for president as a
Republican. Democrats were split between Southern and Northern factions, each
running their own candidate against Lincoln. In the presidential election of
1860, Lincoln won in a race involving 4 candidates with 42% of the popular
vote, but taking the Electoral College in a majority. Lincoln’s campaign in 1860 was primarily
based on preservation of the Union and had little or nothing to say on slavery,
but as we know once in office and with the Civil War underway, he eventually
took action to accomplish the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863.
We had another nice dinner that evening, but I was not
interested in the show following the meal so I went to our stateroom and read
before turning in. Suzy went for part of
the show, but left before it was over as it was not what she was interested in
either.
March 25 dawned gray and rainy after
a night of heavy thunderstorms.
Fortunately, this had no effect on our travel as we had no stops for
that day. It was also Suzy’s birthday so
we had lots to do to celebrate her special day, to include a cake for our two
tables at dinner and a hearty rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung by our
companions and wait staff. Since we were
underway all day, we had two lectures by our historian, both very
interesting. The first had to do with the
great Mississippi Flood of 1927. This
was a once in a century event that was a perfect storm of weather overwhelming
rivers feeding the Mississippi and the Mississippi itself. The flooding covered some 27,000 square miles
some 30 feet deep. The Mississippi in
spots was 70 miles wide, displacing some 630,000 people in Arkansas,
Mississippi and Louisiana and killing between 250 and 1000 people. The political climate in the country had
changed for the worse after WWI with the Red Scare of the 1920’s. Anti-German
hysteria lingered after the Great War and anti-black sentiment in the South
resulted in a revitalized KKK which targeted African-Americans, Catholics,
unions, immigrants and alcohol. Discrimination, the enactment of “Jim Crow”
laws in the South, and grinding rural sharecropper poverty were driving
southern black people up to the big northern cities of Detroit, Chicago, St.
Louis and Pittsburg where factory jobs were paying living wages. This was the climate in 1927 when the great
flood came and once again, the southern black population suffered more than
their white counterparts. They were herded into relief camps under the auspices
of state National Guard troops who mistreated their charges to the point
several NG companies were relieved of their duties. Stories circulated of white planters forcing
black people to stay in areas that later flooded when evacuation earlier would
have spared lives and property. The Red
Cross came to the rescue and relief of many in the flooded areas and did a
credible job. Herbert Hoover was
President Coolidge’s’ point man on flood relief. Hoover had a history of
excellent relief work in Europe after WWI and in fact did a lot for the relief
effort in this disaster. Hoover reached out to southern black people appointing
a “Colored Advisory Committee” and taking their advice into consideration for
his decision making. President Coolidge
had espoused a "hands off" policy of letting the states handle their
own disaster relief and with Hoover’s visibility and popularity at the moment;
he was the natural candidate for the Republican Party in the following
presidential election of 1928. His election was assured when he leveraged his
relations with the black voters who were overwhelmingly Republican Party
members at that time, despite black voter suppression in Jim Crow states. Once in office, Hoover failed to deliver on
many of his promises to his black constituency and that resulted in their overwhelming
desertion of the Republican Party for the Democrats. That fact, coupled with the onset of the
Great Depression, ensured Franklin Roosevelt’s victory for the Democratic Party
in 1932. All in all, this was quite a
tumultuous period in American history. The economic loss of the Great Flood of
1927 was estimated at $1 Billion, 1/3 of the Federal Budget that year, and
$1Trillion in today’s dollars.
We had lunch
in the dining room, which was also a nice buffet meal. I did manage to slip
back to the “Front Porch” for self-serve soft ice cream! Our afternoon lecture
was on Hurricane Katrina and it also was interesting, especially as our
historian lived through it, evacuated and returned well before he was supposed
to in order to rescue his mother’s cats. He told the story of driving through
the cone barriers and being the only car on the highway at that time and the
only person in his mother’s neighborhood when he rescued the two cats. Most
people who could evacuate on their own and had the means rented or bought homes
elsewhere in the neighboring south and have since returned to New Orleans, but
many poor people have not come back as there is nothing for them to come back
to. Failures of planning, maintenance
and poor decision making in the midst of the crises contributed to a disaster
well beyond the hurricane’s making. The
hurricane which had been a category 5, wobbled off New Orleans and was down to
a category 3 when it hit, but loss of pumping station power and some contractor
shortcuts in levee construction years before all combined to see flooding
caused by breaches in levees along canals draining runoff to Lake Ponchatrain. The Garden District where the wealthy live
and the French Quarter did not flood.
The city lost about half of its population and has since regained about
half of that back and continues to grow in parts, but is certainly less of a
city than it was. The whole boot of
Louisiana is on borrowed time given the realities of rising sea levels and
climate change factors. It is uncertain if another Katrina-like event will
result in as much damage and loss of life, but even if no storms come along
like that, by 2100 the lower part of Louisiana could be under water.
We had another nice dinner and Suzy
had her birthday cake. The entertainment that evening was Country and western
music along with another opportunity to do some dancing. This time we did not join the late evening
party in the bar, proving that we are definitely no longer party animals!
Sunday March 26 brought us into
Helena, Arkansas for our stop in the midst of the Mississippi Delta Blues scene.
We came off the Mississippi and entered Helena via a small shipping canal that
challenged our pilot in getting through a tight spot and to the tie up point,
which was pretty much a large launch ramp for sport boats and fishermen. We got
off in really nice weather and were welcomed by some Chamber of Commerce representatives
handing out tote bags and local information.
I talked to one of them and asked him about the name “Helena” as I am
from Montana where Helena is the state capital. He was aware of that and told
me there are some 18 towns in the US named Helena, several are ghost towns and
several others have a population of less than 50. This was our final stop along
the way to our end point of Memphis, Tennessee. We no longer had our Road Scholar dedicated
bus and driver so we used the same ship dedicated shuttle buses as the regular
passengers. We stopped at their museum which is set up in
the former public library and houses a number of interesting displays,
including a section on Thomas Edison whose family was from the area. After looking through the museum, Suzy and I
walked to the downtown and were surprised at how it was pretty much all boarded
up and shut down. It was a rather depressing sight to see, but we did get to
the Delta Blues Cultural Center and got to see some good displays depicting the
roots of the blues. It contains a small studio for the local radio station KFFA
that gave the blues its first commercial radio airplay in the 1940’s on a show
called “King Biscuit Time” which was a brand of flour made in the area. The
programs featured many local blues legends playing live in the studio as well
as playing their popular records. In the 1930’s and 40’s, Helena was a wide
open river town with lots of clubs and juke joints featuring established and
new Delta blues artists from the region along the National Highway 61 corridor
that runs along the Mississippi on the Mississippi state side. KFFA also played rockabilly music and
featured people like Conway Twitty. Conway’s Dad ran the ferry between Helena
and the Mississippi side of the river until a bridge was built across the river
nearby. The radio station still does a “King Biscuit Time” show from the Delta
Cultural Center, but only runs for an hour or so and it is all recorded music
with live commentary. We shopped at the
gift shop and listened some to a local fellow playing and singing the blues,
then picked up the shuttle and rode around the rest of the stops listening to
the local guide’s narration. They have
two music festivals a year, one is all kinds of music and the other is strictly
blues music. The town comes alive then
with a lot of older large homes fitted out as B&B’s. The people who don’t
rent B&B space camp out near the levee where the seating is open air on the
side of the levee for the music itself. Each festival lasts just under a week. The town has a grain terminal for barge
loading as they grow rice in the area on a large scale and export most of it to
Japan. The other main industry in town
is a large scale charter school education center for the region that handles all
the public education for K-12. They use a lot of new trailers and some
converted downtown buildings. The
students go to class 6 days a week and one Saturday a month they do community
service projects. The main business district and newer homes are located in
West Helena, where there is a Wal-Mart and more of a population base. The local
area has about 10,000 residents, which I understood to be about 1/3 of what
they had in the early to mid-20th century. I am told that on the
downstream trip our boat makes from Memphis to New Orleans that the Helena stop
is replaced with a stop in Greenville, Mississippi which is across the river
and still in the heart of the Delta Blues region. I was personally happy to
have stopped in Helena for the history of the music, but I know a lot of folks
on the boat were not happy with the touring and the limited things to do on a
quiet Sunday morning in a dying town.
Once again we returned to our boat,
had lunch a short rest and then our final lecture from our historian on the
subject of “free people of color”, particularly those in New Orleans from its
founding through the Civil War era. It
was a unique society that offered support for both mixed race free born people
and slaves who had been set free by their owners, had through their extra
efforts earned money to purchase their own freedom or even had petitioned the
local courts for their freedom. There
were special courts and attorneys who specialized in these cases and the
overwhelming majority were successful in gaining freedom for petitioners. New
Orleans’ ethos seemed to be more accepting of different cultures all along more
so than anywhere in the South up through the Civil War. With our final lecture over, we received our
disembarkation instructions and tags from our Road Scholar guide Bee and got
ready for our final meal together in the dining room. After dinner we assembled on the stairs going
up to the 2d deck for a group photo. Suzy and I then went to our final night’s
entertainment which featured a Memphis blues legend by the name of Joyce Cobb
who rocked the house despite being a white haired old lady. Her back up band
were great musicians and she put on quite a show while narrating the history of
the blues, with roots in black Gospel and white Country and Western genres as
well as the field songs from the cotton plantations. She sang W.C. Handy tunes, rockabilly
classics from Jerry Lee Lewis and even early Elvis, B.B. King’s blues and a
version of the recent hit tune “Walkin’ in Memphis”. She could also blow a mean harmonica. She had
us eating out of the palm of her hand, received a standing ovation and did an
encore number that had us all joining in.
It was a great way to close out the shipboard entertainment and got Suzy
and I looking forward to getting into more of the Memphis music scene once we
got there. We went back to our stateroom, packed our bags and set our bog ones
out in the hall for pickup and transfer off the boat the next morning when we arrived
in Memphis.
This concludes the Mississippi River cruise
portion. The next installment will cover
our arrival and stay in Memphis until we flew back to Virginia. The Road Scholar portion of this adventure
was a great experience. We enjoyed our trip coordinator Bee from Natchez and
Brian our historian from New Orleans. We
all bonded and got along well, making new friends and many good memories while
learning a lot.
