Forum; Dr. Morton Rothstein: The Natchez Trace series

Thank you. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is Forum. After the first bloody battle that's going to run, he abandoned hope for peace and returns to New Orleans, fearful that otherwise he's property there and in the Natchez area, likely confiscated by the Confederates. Historian Dr. Morton Rothstein, describing a member of the Duncan family, one of the elite planters he has researched in the Natchez Trace collection, the center for the study of American history at the University of Texas at Austin.

If we propanate the myths about matches, including some embedded in a considerable body of serious scholarship on the subject, we find a social order in the 1860, sharply divided over secession, over-sconflicted royalties, and when it's leading white citizens to the lost cause, and later over the adjustments of both planters and former slaves to emancipation. This is Olive Graham. Our program today on Forum features the third in a series of lectures that inaugurates the Center for the Study of American History at the University of Texas at Austin. A lecture series focuses on the history of the South and the Natchez Trace collection housed at the center. The speaker today, Dr. Morton Rothstein, is a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, and a specialist in 19th century agricultural and economic history. His Natchez Trace lecture is entitled, Flight, Resistance and Adjustments.

His elite planters during and after the Civil War. According to Dr. Rothstein, the Natchez area in Mississippi had the greatest concentration of wealth in the country in the 1850s. The wealthiest of these planters had many holdings outside of the South, and this fact colored their response to the issues of war and secession. In a war rapidly becoming a revolution, a confrontation between Mercer and Butler was virtually inevitable. When it came, it drove the old man into exile. Mercer weathered the questioning of his own conduct and of his banks, cooperated with federal authorities in many ways, and then bought when told that he must take a newly required oath of allegiance or face forfeiture of all of his property. He refused to take the oath on the grounds that he had sworn such an oath on entering the Navy in the war of 1812, had never remounced it, and had remained neutral in the current conflict by also refusing any oath to the Confederacy. He also felt that his vigorous up position to the suicidal course of secession should

be enough testimony. Mercer sent a long version of this explanation to his friend and fellow banker August Belmont, the Rothschilds agent in the North, who was so impressed that he found a way to show this letter to Abraham Lincoln as an example of the kind of support for a peaceful solution that was being lost by the requirement of an oath. Mercer then meticulously conformed to Butler's order number 76, and drew up a list of his property in New Orleans, including the home on Canal Street, and more than $60,000 in personal notes that he helped. It totaled more than $500,000 in value, and he informed Butler that he was ready to be stripped of all of his property and rendered penniless, except for about $3,000 in gold he needed for traveling expenses. He did not mention, of course, that the property he had outside New Orleans was considerably more valued than what he had in New Orleans, including 7,000 pounds in British consoles held by his Liverpool agent and old friend Washington Jackson from Philadelphia originally, and several

thousand acres of Illinois prairie land, amounting to almost half of Macapin County, right in the center of the Corn Belt, that was even then being sold off to settlers by his agent in Springfield, Illinois, with whom he carried on correspondence all through the Civil War. The confrontation was never directly resolved, Butler left New Orleans soon after sequestering Mercer's property in the city. Mercer left the country spending some time in Cuba that winter, then went to New York City, and a house on 14th Street that belonged to his old friend Dr. James Mettaff of New Jersey, and another Natchez area planter. When the war was reaching a military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Mercer was again in Newport, riding a wheel and appointing executors, switching investments and a search for greater liquidity and security, and getting lawyers in both New Orleans and Washington to work for the full restoration of his Louisiana property. The value of that estate that he held at the end of the war, he spent the rest of it

shuntering between Newport and New York City, was only partly reflected in his 1865 payment of an income tax of $8,000, and at the tax rate then, it was a fairly small amount considering his wealth. He also stayed in touch with friends and officials at the Bank of Louisiana and with his late wife's family in the Natchez area through mutual friends traveling between New York and the Southwest. In August, 1863, Mercer's lawyers reported, I'm sorry, 1865, Mercer's lawyers reported that the General Tandy had ordered full respetration of his property. It took more time to have the order confirmed precisely, to close up his place in Newport, and to send ahead a stock of fine wines for his Canal Street House. He was back home for Christmas, principles intact. Mercer hardly suffered in his war experience, but like most of the others in his circle, he had difficulty accepting the freedom of his former slaves in all of its ramifications.

Before Christmas in 1865, he went up river to Laurel Hill, the centerpiece of his plantation holding south of Natchez, where he found the, quote, conditions of many of the Negroes very unsatisfactory. They are lazy and thievish, but subordinate and respectful, unquote. With customary, imperious paternalism, he told them that he would expel all who misbehaved and that any of them who left without permission would not be allowed back. He conferred briefly with shields, his overseer, who had run the plantations through the war, arranged to provide cash advances on wages and the necessary food and clothing, and returned to New Orleans after a single night on that plantation. There is no evidence that he ever went near Natchez again. He was well past 70 by then, rolling feeble, as the most esteemed citizen in the Crescent City. He got along reasonably well with reconstruction officials. He was friendly and helpful to Henry Clay Wormeth, for example, perhaps because he was the

namesake of Mercer's political hero. Death came in 1873 when he was past 80 and dubbed the Judah Turo of the Protestants for his philanthropy in the city, and he has had given to several of the leading charity hospitals and other such charities. But the estate he held together was left in a tangle-welter of cotasils that took years for lawyers to straighten out. Mercer was hardly the only member of the elite circle who tried to protect his property by occupying it. William J. Minor, the heir of Don Stephen Minor, who had served as an aide to the last Spanish governor of Natchez in the 1780s, scattered his family and following the same strategy. He left his wife, one of Stephen Duncan's nieces, at Tonker, the original family home with a joining plantation on the edge of town. He had recently given his oldest son, the family holding across the river near Videlia, as a wedding gift. But John had gone to Harvard and was, many people claimed, thus ruined for business.

So his wife, the former Catherine Surje, or Susette, depending on which of Natchez's favorite pronunciations you care for, she managed the place for most of the 1840s, 50s, and civil war period. She would later submit one of the largest bills ever presented to the Southern Claims Commission and collected most of it for being on the union side throughout the structure of Europe. William himself stayed for most of the war at his two sugar plantations in Terrible and Perish, where more than 150 miles southwest of Natchez, and South Down is still preserved in terms of its house and much of its grounds, and is very much open to the public there. Well-known as an outspoken opponent of succession, both in Natchez and in his Louisiana holdings near Huma, minor cooperated with union officials as soon as they appeared. His wife Rebecca, an equally outspoken unionist, entertained union officials after they occupied the town in July of 1863, but received many snubs from Natchez residents who had been

old friends, and she had a lonely time with it for the rest of the war, as did the small group of other women with such sympathies. The miners worried about their two younger sons, who enlisted against the parents' wishes in the Confederate army and with cause. One died in camp, the other endured a long imprisonment, though slightly aborted through their special pleading. Meanwhile, minor had to take heavy losses in equipment and livestock and found a new labor system that was evolving under union occupation as trying as any of his secessionist neighbors. Aside from his land and slaves, minor had little other property or investments outside the district. He came closer to the usual stereotype of the platter in being deeply in debt, and had not gone north for the summer with his wife's relatives for some years as he worked to reduce the amount he owed. By contrast, one of his closest neighbors and friends, Levin R. Marshall, who was just a few years older, had carved out an extensive estate from earnings as a merchant and biker

as well as a slaveholder. He operated more than six large plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, and several others that he was bringing into production in Arkansas. Like Duncan and Mercer, he also built a portfolio of investments in northern securities and was spending more and more time each year at his house on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and later the mansion he built for himself at Pelham in the Bronx, a widower in the 1830s. Marshall was later married a wealthy widow and between them they had several sets of children for whom he was building legacies. In early 1861, he sent his wife and two youngest children to New York, largely out of fear of federal confiscation of his houses there, though he was concerned about how a southern lady, quote unquote, would be treated there. He brought them back to matches as soon as the danger of confiscation seemed to subside. Marshall's losses from the flooding of recently reclaimed land due to breaks in the levees mounted during the first two years of the war as did the threats from rebel sympathizers

and matches. When the Yankees reached matches, two weeks after the fall of Vicksburg, Marshall was ready to abandon the town and his southern holdings, though by then he, too, had sons in the Confederate Army. It's Stephen Dawkins, however, the most ambivalent and the wealthiest of the match's neighbors who was the center of this network of interrelationships. He was a man who grew up on the front here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the early 19th century, back to the born 1787, had gone to Dickinson College and then on to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School where he, too, studied with Benjamin Rush. And at the age of 21 or 22, arrived in matches, Mississippi, and within seven or eight years had married Margaret Ellis. He built his position largely through shrewd, energetic exploitation of opportunities

opened by family connections from the time of his arrival in 187 with his medical degree. His marriage to Margaret Ellis put him squarely in the same family network that Mercer would enter more than a decade later. His longstanding ambivalence about the South was evident when his wife died in 1818, and he considered moving back to Pennsylvania because he believed that matches with its prevalence of disease and dissipation was a bad place to raise children. A second marriage and new family gave him deeper roots in deer Mississippi as did the accumulation of a fortune, and he would later write to Mercer in the 1830s. How wonderful life was in deer Mississippi. We can live on as little here, he said, as any place, and we can make more money here than anywhere else. By the 1850s, he had sold off most of the original holdings within the Netsha district itself, which were virtually worn out, and was using his capital to build up at least six adjoining plantations at the area called the Reach, which is in the area of Isakuna and Bolivar

counties in Mississippi, and it was only the Azu Delta, really, and so still some of the richest farmland of America, largely because they had the money to invest in building levies and could reclaim it from the periodic floods that were coming and had come for several centuries. This stretch of choice of Luvial land at Skipwith's Landing was really just what he was looking for. It was an area just being opened by those levies, and his nearest neighbor with Umi became very friendly, and it was also constructing new plantations there. He became friendly enough to lend this new person $400,000 or more, was weighed half in the second of South Carolina. Duncan in 1859 was anxious to withdraw from sugar production, so he entered into a partnership agreement with McWilliams, his steward on the Bayou Tesh, which gave the latter the chance to become the sole owner. Duncan wanted to consolidate, secure, and make profitable these holdings as legacies for his grandchildren, and also wanted to simplify his own portfolio.

And it's about this time, in the late 1850s, that he began to tell everyone that he really didn't have any money. He was very busy building up the legacies for his children, for his grandchildren, and when the succession crisis loomed, he was in his mid-70s, still making arduous journeys up the river from matches to supervise plantation affairs and to give his sons, now in their 40s in some cases, further training his planters, even as he planned the transfer of title to them. He was also parceling out to his other holdings so that each of his six children, including his state for his deceased oldest daughter, would receive the equivalent of $600,000, when the war came, Duncan sought to settle his affairs in ways that took into account what he viewed as inevitable separation. He placed most of his northern investments, which included more than $500,000 in railroad securities alone, and to trust for his children that would be safe from confiscation and would be held by the leverage brothers.

His mansion, at number 12 Washington Square, was also reputed to be worth about a half million dollars, but he was holding that for his life. Flinging between bouts of optimism and pessimism after Lincoln's election, he was especially concerned that if Mississippi seceded, its government would also prevent the collection of debts from the state's citizenry by outsiders. He had been horrified by the breach of property rights and the state's repudiation of its bonds during the backwash of the 1837 panic, and had learned never to be very trustful of the legislature in that state again. In 1861, he also held almost $300,000 in personal loans to friends and relatives, which he feared would be as much in jeopardy as his land and investment in local enterprises. He therefore decided to forego his usual summer tour, which for years had taken him first to Philadelphia and his surviving sisters, then to New York and his mansion, and finally to Saratoga and Newport for the rest of the summer.

And to minimize the losses that he foresaw, what would be, quote, the longest and most bloody war in history, unquote, he identified himself completely with natures, still hoping in May 1861 that the North would, quote, let us depart in peace, unquote. Joining him that summer were his three sons and two sons-in-law, one of them J.J. Pringle of the famous Charleston South Carolina family, and the other Samuel M. Davis sign of an old natures family, not connected to Jefferson Davis. Most of them had left their wives and children in the North or in Paris, and were prepared to save as much of their plantations as they could. Their ages ranged from the mid-30s to the mid-50s, but critical neighbors noticed that none had shown any interest in fighting for the rebel cause. On the other hand, Duncan did buy substantial amounts of cotton from several friends, including many who were ardent supporters of secession, paying them with easily negotiated rafts on Liverpool and assuming for them the risks of damage or loss on the shipments of those cotton

bales. Among the people he helped this way were John T. McMurron, the distinguished lawyer and partner of the late John Quitman, Frederick Stanton, builder of one of the most glorious houses in natures, natures is leading commission merchant, and Gustavus Calhoun and Alexander Ferrar. The last of these had helped Duncan acquire the land in the reach, but he was a cooperationist in the state secession convention, and then he cast his lot with the Confederacy and served as provost marshal of natures during the next two years. Natures and its hinterland was giving a high proportion of its white males to the lost cause, including two generals and an admiral, and at one point calculated that at least one third of all the white males in the town were involved directly in the fighting during the Civil War. On the side of the Confederacy, the resentment of Duncan, marshal and others continued to run higher and higher, although he still had hopes for some kind of sectional reconciliation

as late as March 1863. Duncan's feeling three months later showed a business bitterness that would die hard. My mind is made up to quit this country and quit it forever, he wrote Mercer, adding that he would rather live in the confines of hell itself than around secessionists in this Confederacy, for I hate them one and all, unquote. He would later lace his correspondence with Ferrar with a string of Jeremiah's denouncing him and the secessionists he had served for ruining the country. He was with great relief that Duncan, marshal and others greeted the Union forces when they first occupied matches in late July 63 and opened the escape routes by the river. They had no qualms about taking loyalty oaths and some were already known to grant and several of his officers through contact at plantations north of Vicksburg. The Duncan's and the marshals were also lucky to have Lorenzo Thomas, the Federal Adjutant General, whom they had known socially since the 1840s, passing through the area on a special

permission for Lincoln. Thomas helped arrange for them a naval gunboat to take these two families to Memphis where they could get steamboat passage for voyages home to the north. The Duncan stopped on route at Carlisle to visit surviving relatives, then went straight to Washington Square where the disconsolate Stephen Duncan convinced that the southern property he tried so hard to save was not worth, quote, one-twentieth of its former value, unquote, died at age of 80 in 1867. The marshals spent the rest of his days until 1870, not much later, at Pelleth. By then, the next generation was trying to restore some of its form of value to the holdings. And this would become, in some ways, the most difficult problem for both Duncan at first and then for his sons to deal with. Because many of the papers in the Nationalist Race Collection, and particularly the Winchester papers, show a network of loans that had been made not just to close friends and relatives

through this network that I've been talking about. But more and more of those loans were made on the basis of newly opened lands. There is a whole additional network that I had no idea about until I opened the letters here, and I've been looking at some of these people for 20 years of how widespread the loans were to individual settlers in that region based upon the value of their land and on the value of their slaves. With emancipation by 63, half of the value or more of those plantations was being reduced or was simply vanishing. And the value of the land was obviously going down fairly rapidly as well. So it was very much akin to the kind of thing that several Michigan scholars in agricultural economics discovered in the 1950s, a century later, when they found that at about 90 percent of all of the loans being made to farmers in that state, or at least the sample counties

in that state that they were studying, were made by other farmers who had saved their money and was simply making shooter investments at above market rates. This is a sort of iceberg of which we have only recently begun to take the dimensions when you talk about credit in farming operations, but one of the leading operators in such activities was clearly Mr. Duncan himself. And the problems that they saw was that they would have to either foreclose on the land or better yet because they were reluctant to acquire land, knowing that it would be a long time until they could get any liquidity out of it. To require the people who owed them debts to re, to drop new mortgages, to foreclose on the basis of additional new mortgages that would be made, which would be on the value of the land alone, rather than including any of the slaves, and therefore have a better chance to recruit more money out of the debt that was owed to them. But the correspondence mostly on the collection of debts or the renegotiation of debts takes

up an extraordinary amount of time and effort on both parts. This was a generation then with apparently less tenacity in drive than the older one after Duncan than the older one, but it was confronted in the south with a world of shrinking market opportunities. Perhaps it was simply that the new frontier that the Yankees made to use cash is phrase about the new south, called for a new entrepreneurial style and that the sons of Duncan and his sons and law and others were not up to the mark, but the responses to the peace were as diverse and as changeable as the responses they had made to war. Some of the naches elite found that it took all their talent and nerve merely to hang on to their old plantations, others such as Samuel Davis and Stephen Duncan Jr. groped for ways to restore earlier levels of production in their cotton fields with only modest results. Stephen Duncan Jr. at one time was flirting very much with the idea of bringing Chinese

coolies in to replace the blacks that have been on the plantation for several generations in fact of the family. It succeeded to some extent in just conducting that kind of experiment. In the first couple of seasons after Appomattox there were disastrous floods followed by frustrations and dealing with the freed men and then gradually failing interest in the whole enterprise. A perennial bachelor, Duncan struck it out the longest, due to supporting efforts to revive the naches economy while also managing his share of investments in personal notes, including an agnonymous renegotiation of the Hampton loan. Increasingly he spent more time traveling in Europe and you get all sorts of letters in the correspondence from Beirut's, Paris, London and various other gay spots in Europe. Davis withdrew earlier from this area to live in his Philadelphia coast and enrichment, although his late 1880s Samuel Davis is still on his plantations in northern Mississippi trying to get another good year in.

The remaining Duncan heirs who had fled to their lands and to save them when the war broke out, then fled from the area when southern defeat and rakek became clear, retreated again. The two oldest sons to homes in Philadelphia, the Pringles to Paris. Those who left this time, like the Duncan's were not however, just the ones whose ties to naches had almost always been marginal. At least one of the sujets returned in the late 60s to his ancestral home near Bordeaux France. Those members of the second generation among the elite who left the naches area and the business careers as planners that the parents were so determined to save for them were demonstrating more than the generational and spatial mobility, so common in a developing America. They were also responding rationally to an evolving world market in which labor-intensive production of staples was more hazardous as an enterprise than when their parents skimmed the resources of the region so effectively.

The first generation had been unique in their success. They were capitalist entrepreneurs with a sophisticated grasp of what it took to maximize profits and to avoid risks. It was with their support that their middlemen and agents flourished rather than the other way around. I have found letters in London for example explaining in the 1830s that this man Washington Jackson had good credit largely because he had good friends in William Mercer and Stephen Duncan rather than our usual picture of cotton factors and merchants as people who were exploiting the poor benign platter who didn't know very much about the market and if you can look in the done, RG done records of credit of value of individuals that are on file of Harvard University's business school and find that his rating was in one of the descriptions that said Stephen Duncan is more trustworthy than all the two or three men on Wall Street and easily could sell or buy any of the merchants with whom he would be doing business.

It seems ironic that their success made them the objects of emulation by those younger primers on the make so anxious to keep opportunities for the same kind of success open through the support of succession while also to some extent embracing the affected cultural habits and values of a semi-futal or pre-capitalist world that was already lost. It seems doubly ironic that Auburn the classic plantation house and grounds Stephen Duncan had bought in 1820 and which is descendants donated to matches as a public park after the turn of the century has only been refurbished recently for inclusion in the annual pilgrimage that celebration of antebellum family homes and their romantic past. One day a forum is featured remarks by Dr. Morton Rothstein of the University of California

at Davis as part of the Natchez Trace Lecture Series at the Center for the Study of American History at the University of Texas at Austin. The views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. Technical producer for forum David Alvarez, Production Assistant Mike Lee and Catherine Vasquez, I'm your producer and host, Olive Graham. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing forum cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is The Longhorn Radio Network. This week on forum Dr. Morton Rothstein, antibellum and civil war planter society of

the Natchez Trace this week on forum.