The antebellum period looms as an especially important epoch in Mobile’s long history, a time in which the town literally and figuratively took shape after generations as an outpost of three colonial powers. One of the busiest and most important maritime trading centers in the nation in the first half of the nineteenth century, antebellum Mobile held a position of relative regional preeminence that it has yet again to equal. While this dynamic period in Mobile’s rich history is chronicled primarily in sterile statistics, business records, shipping manifests, and a very limited set of surviving imagery, our understanding of the city from circa 1820 to 1860 and the level of economic activity that fueled its growth are revealed in more vivid detail by the dozens of visitors who published accounts of their stays in Alabama’s nineteenth-century trading emporium.
Nineteenth-century travel narratives are among the most evocative verbal descriptions of places as they existed at the time. Travel writing was then a popular genre in the publishing industry, perhaps never more so in book form than during the mid-nineteenth century. The author of travel narratives became a tour guide for readers, most of whom would never have an opportunity to see a given location themselves. Hence, even small things that made one place markedly different from another were not just mentioned casually but sought after by travelers to help them better characterize a particular location and to keep their story from becoming dull and repetitive. They were often actively looking for things that struck them as noteworthy and unique about a place, and they made a conscious effort to capture in words the essence of a locale’s physical and cultural reality. Their accounts collectively represent, in a sense, some notion of how given places were perceived by the outside world.
These travel narratives were written by literate, well-traveled guests. Even if they do not paint the whole picture of Mobile at the time, they do help frame the canvas and color in some defining features of the community as it once existed in a unique and informed way. They are certainly not without some limitations, though, which are important to understand. Most were written by men, most of whom hailed from northern European countries, and all of whom were white, as far as I am able to discern. Virtually all who worked held what we would today call white-collar positions, pursuing professions in fields such as politics, education, ministry, and the arts. Plus, these visitors were almost always in town only a few days, and their stays tended to allow them access to only a few of the most prominent public spaces and perhaps the interiors of select homes of well-heeled hosts. But the same set of limitations must be considered when dealing with any set of published accounts of nearly any community of the era under discussion. As long as we understand this fact and consider what the accounts can and cannot tell us, they remain worth our attention.
Mobile’s antebellum guests used their narratives to comment on the city’s setting, climate, people, customs, and more. The area’s lush vegetation intrigued them, especially the wildly diverse proliferation of plant and tree species thriving in the city’s subtropical climate. The stately white-columned mansions of the city’s well-to-do, the relative abundance of classically styled religious and public architecture, and the well-ordered public squares all caught the attention of visitors. No less so did Mobile’s people. Some 60 percent of Alabama’s entire urban population resided in its largest city by 1860. At a time when only five communities in Alabama had populations of more than 2,500 residents, Mobile and its nearly 30,000 inhabitants made it a veritable metropolis. The diversity contained within those numbers drew comment as well, as the city hosted free Black, foreign-born, and Creole communities, the likes of which could be found in no other place in Alabama or the larger region outside of New Orleans at the time. The city was also home to thousands of enslaved people, and the fact that the institution of slavery pervaded every aspect of life in antebellum Alabama and lay at the core of the economic activity that fueled Mobile’s growth did not escape observers.
[Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion]
But it was the city’s role in trading cotton that perhaps drew the most attention of visitors to antebellum Mobile. A “flourishing seaport” by the mid-nineteenth century, Mobile, in the words of the city’s acclaimed historian, John Sledge, in the decades before the Civil War, became the epicenter of a regional trading network centered on exporting cotton to world markets. By any measure, the phenomenal growth in Mobile’s cotton exportation during the antebellum decades is noteworthy and defined the city’s economic trajectory until the Civil War. In 1818, the city sent a relatively paltry seven thousand bales to world markets, but by the winter of 1858–1859, its harbor sent over half a million bales to domestic and international ports. Considering that the entire United States crop in the late 1850s averaged between 2 to 2.5 million bales, Mobile’s cotton trade proved extremely significant to the region. By the 1830s, Mobile’s port, fueled by the massive scale of cotton production taking place in the rich agricultural hinterlands through which the rivers emptying into Mobile Bay flowed, had surpassed Savannah and Charleston as a center for cotton exportation. Only New Orleans exported more of the fiber in the two decades prior to the Civil War’s outbreak. By 1860, Mobile’s cotton trade was valued at some forty million dollars, making it one of the top ports in the nation in terms of export value. Mobile embraced the trade full tilt; the original city seal featured a ship with a cotton bale above it and the motto “agriculture and commerce” below.
New England journalist Hiram Fuller provided a summary assessment of antebellum Mobile at the height of its commercial activity in the 1850s, which any visitor at the time would have recognized and which has been often repeated in histories of the community. Revealing the obsession with the fleecy staple that turned Mobile’s economic wheels, he described the place in sarcastic fashion:
[A] pleasant cotton city of some thirty thousand inhabitants—where the people live in cotton houses and ride in cotton carriages. They buy cotton, sell cotton, think cotton, eat cotton, drink cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children. In enumerating the charms of a fair widow, they begin by saying she makes so many bales of cotton. It is the great staple—the sum and substance of Alabama. It has made Mobile, and all its citizens.
Fuller’s comments read as critical hyperbole today, but they were grounded in a measure of truth.
The staggering scale of the trade and associated infrastructure stunned and intrigued the city’s guests during the period. Regardless of their length of stay in town or the purpose of their visit, travelers who wrote any description of Mobile in the era almost invariably described it first and foremost as a booming trading port with a remarkable focus on a single article of commerce. The “good display of shipping at the wharves,” featuring “a fine view of steamers, taking in and discharging cotton, the great staple—the mighty pivot upon which the business of this city of 30,000 inhabitants revolves,” in the words of one, became both a tourism attraction and a defining image of the place.
Even early in the nineteenth century, before Mobile’s commercial maturity as one of the Gulf region’s most vibrant ports, visitors recognized the unmistakable advantages it held for trade and predicted its inevitable rise. “This must become a considerable place for export and import, when once better known to the mercantile world,” one visitor forecasted in 1816, just a few years after Mobile’s acquisition by the United States. Several guests of the city in those early American years raved about its possibilities in remarkably similar language, proclaiming the city to be “advantageously situated for commerce,” having a “most advantageous situation,” or a location “advantageous for commerce.” In the words of one visitor to Mobile in 1817, the city could not help but soon “become a place of much trade” given its unique position at the head of a spacious bay located at the mouth of one of the largest river systems in southeastern North America.
The realization of such rich promise came in relatively short order, as by the late 1820s, the city had already become well-established as a hub for regional trade and seemed to have found its commercial calling. “The maritime position of Mobile, with one foot upon the Gulf, and one hand grasping a quiver of rivers…determines its commercial character,” wrote one arrival during its nineteenth-century economic heyday. Others seconded his assessment of the town’s robust business activity that, despite periodic fluctuations, made Mobile’s trading scene Alabama’s largest by far throughout the pre-Civil War period. The city became a regional “commercial emporium” and the “great mart for all the country on the Gulf east of the Mississippi” early in the era, and it not only held on to but embellished its position as the decades progressed through the mid-century. Visitors unhesitatingly referred to Mobile as the “principal outlet of the commerce of the State of Alabama” and “as a depot for all the good things of this bountiful land” by the 1850s. Superlatives regarding the trading activity witnessed by visitors during the era abound in published accounts, ranging from understated estimations of the city as simply a cotton port to one enthusiastic assessment as “one of the most important of American cities…rapidly increasing its population and its trade.” All agreed on Mobile as a place on the rise.
Numerous offices could be found nearby, allowing individuals employed in the inner workings of the cotton economy to do their business. These included cotton factors who sold the crop on behalf of planters, commission merchants who purchased supplies for the planters to produce a new crop of cotton, insurance agents who processed the paperwork and collected fees on policies protecting the investment on its transoceanic journey, and bankers who played a critical role in supplying the credit necessary for the whole enterprise. It could take months or more from the time Alabama cotton arrived at Mobile’s port until buyers in northeastern or European ports received it. It would also go through the hands of multiple middlemen and figure into numerous transactions, a great many of which took place in Mobile and upon whose performance many based their careers.
“Near the port there is a continual bustle,” remembered one visitor, “all buildings in this part consisting exclusively of stores, warehouses, and offices, in front of which stand pyramids of cotton-bales.” Even Mobile’s hotels, theaters, and restaurants, operating seasonally in tandem with the cotton trading season, were inextricably tied to the cotton trade. Without the businessmen (and their families) the trade brought to town, many businesses would simply have ceased to exist. One visitor, James A. Davidson, summed up all he had seen of Mobile’s commercial activity with a simple assessment his fellow travelers would have undoubtedly agreed with: “There is a great deal of business down here.”
Visitors could be excused if they came away with the impression that trading cotton was not only Mobile’s primary economic activity but also perhaps its sole reason for existence. Many, such as Alexander Mackay, believed it no exaggeration to say that the city’s whole population “either directly or indirectly, live and thrive by the cotton trade.” Picking their way through narrow riverside streets lined with and sometimes almost completely blocked by the cotton or observing the activity along the wharves where dozens of workers were constantly in motion manhandling the precious cargo from and into ship holds, visitors to Mobile would have found themselves immersed in a cotton world. So omnipresent was cotton in the city’s business district during the fall and winter when most travelers visited that it sometimes seemed to literally fall from the sky. “The gutters, when it rains (and the rains of Mobile are floods),” remembered Mackay, “bear down waifs and strays of cotton to the river, and the river is studded and flecked with cotton-drift floating about on its surface like so many nautili.” Another observed, “The wharves for a mile are piled with cotton bales. The very trees are draped and made ugly by its flying about.” Other tangible physical reminders of the city’s preoccupation with cotton lay everywhere to be seen, none more striking than the dozens of workers at the docks, many of them enslaved, whom one described as “straining every nerve upon the quay…loading and unloading ships beneath the full blaze of the sun, on the glassy waters of the bay.” The description expresses in somewhat romantic language the brutal reality of the hot, hard, physically taxing work involved in squeezing cotton bales, each weighing several hundred pounds, into the cramped and stuffy holds of ships.
It all added up to a characterization of the city by some visitors as almost purely a place for business, with all else incidental to its transaction. “Mobile is a place of trade, and of nothing else,” remembered one observer. “It is the great port of the cotton-growing State of Alabama.” “The cotton trade loomed as the overriding commercial pursuit,” remembered one typical visitor, struck as were so many by the centrality of the fiber to every aspect of life in the town. “Cotton culture and the population grow at the same rate” in Mobile, in the words of another, pointedly summarizing the interconnectedness of the cotton trade and the city’s development. ““The thoughts of the merchants of Mobile are of cotton. They talk of cotton by day, and dream of it by night.” In the estimation of Joseph Holt Ingraham, cotton ranked as nothing less than ““the circulating blood that gives life to the city. All its citizens are interested in this staple… A failure in a crop of cotton, would cast a cloud over every brow in this city.”
Just a few short decades after most of these writers visited the port city, economic and transportation patterns had radically altered Mobile’s relationship with regional cotton trade. The heyday of the paddle-wheel river steamers and the motley assemblage of piers, presses, and warehouses that lined Mobile’s waterfront had quickly passed, replaced in large measure by a growing network of railroads and a more orderly system of cargo handling and storage under the operation of a new state port authority. Cotton continued to be a major part of Mobile’s maritime commerce until well into the twentieth century, but as the region slowly diversified, the fiber became less and less central to the city’s economic life. Mobile’s period as one of the nation’s primary cotton ports may have been a relatively brief one in the city’s long history, but it remains among the most enduring in our understanding of its storied past. That it does is due to a mountain of empirical evidence that quantifies the economic value of the millions of bales shipped out of its harbor in the mid-nineteenth century. But it is so vividly recalled, as well, in no small part by the compelling descriptions of the dozens of travelers who found the infrastructure of a true cotton city so novel that they chose to include it in published accounts of their journeys.
Top-most photo credit: Cotton on the steamboat “Wave” in Mobile. [Alabama Department of Archives and History]
This article first appeared in Alabama Heritage magazine, Issue 153, Summer 2024.
Mike Bunn currently serves as director of Historic Blakeley State Park in Spanish Fort, Alabama. He is author or co-author of several books on Gulf Coast area history, including Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America’s Revolutionary Era and The Assault on Fort Blakeley: “The Thunder and Lightning of Battle.” Mike is chair of the Baldwin County Historic Development Commission, a member of the Board of Advisors for the University of South Alabama’s Hospitality and Tourism Management program, and editor of Muscogiana, the journal of the Muscogee County (GA) Genealogical Society.
