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Memphis and its commercial importance.

The city of Memphis, from its high bluff on the Mississippi, overlooks the surrounding country for a long distance.  The muddy waters of the river, when at a low stage, lap the ever crumbling banks that yearly change, yielding to new deflections of the current.  For hundreds of miles below there is a highly interesting and rarely broken series of forests, cane brakes and sand bars, covered with masses of willows and poplars which, in the spring, when the floods come down, are overflowed for many miles back.  It was found necessary to run embankments practically parallel with the current, in order to confine the waters of the river in its channel.  Memphis was and is the most important city of Tennessee, indeed, the most important between St. Louis and New Orleans, particularly from the commercial point of view.  Cotton was the principal product of the territory tributary to it.  The street running along the bluff was called Front Row, and was filled with stores and business houses.  This street was the principal cotton market, and here the article which, in those days, was personified as the commercial “king,” was bought and sold, and whence it was shipped, or stored, awaiting an advancing price.  The completion of the Memphis and Charleston railroad was a great event in the history of the city.  It was termed the marriage of the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and was celebrated with a great popular demonstration, people coming from the surrounding country for many miles.  Water was brought from the Atlantic ocean and poured into the river; and water taken from the river and poured into the Atlantic at Charleston.  It was anticipated that this railroad connection between the two cities would make of Charleston the great shipping port, and of Memphis the principal cotton market of the southwest.  The expectation in neither of these cases has been fully realized.  Boss, in common with planters and business men throughout that whole region, was greatly excited.  I attended him and thus had the opportunity of witnessing this notable celebration.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER III.

Slavery and the war of the rebellion.

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Beginning of the war.

I remember well when Abraham Lincoln was elected.  Boss and the madam had been reading the papers, when he broke out with the exclamation:  “The very idea of electing an old rail splitter to the presidency of the United States!  Well he’ll never take his seat.”  When Lincoln was inaugurated, Boss, old Master Jack and a great company of men met at our house to discuss the matter, and they were wild with excitement.  Was not this excitement an admission that their confidence in their ability to whip the Yankees, five or six to one, was not so strong as they pretended?