Southern Water, Southern Power

How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region

Christopher J. Manganiello

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781469636023
  9781469620053
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469620060
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Why has the American South — a place with abundant rainfall — become embroiled in intrastate wars over water? Why did unpredictable flooding come to characterize southern waterways, and how did a region that seemed so rich in this all-important resource become derailed by drought and the regional squabbling that has tormented the arid American West? To answer these questions, policy expert and historian Christopher Manganiello moves beyond the well-known accounts of flooding in the Mississippi Valley and irrigation in the West to reveal the contested history of southern water. From the New South to the Sun Belt eras, private corporations, public utilities, and political actors made a region-defining trade-off: The South would have cheap energy, but it would be accompanied by persistent water insecurity. Manganiello's compelling environmental history recounts stories of the people and institutions that shaped this exchange and reveals how the use of water and power in the South has been challenged by competition, customers, constituents, and above all, nature itself.

Chapter 1: Lowell of the South

There are no lakes in any part of the region under consideration except a few near the coast, a position which renders them of no value as regards water-power.

—George F. Swain (1885)

After months of planning and recovery from an industrial accident, John Muir began his southern walking tour in late 1867 at an unusual and critical turning point in the region’s history. Well in advance of his better-known and published experiences of his first summer in California’s Sierra Mountains, Muir passed through Georgia in the wake of the American Civil War on his “thousand mile walk” from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. After arriving in Gainesville, Georgia, Muir spent September 24 “sailing on the Chattahoochee” with an old friend from Indiana. While cruising the “first truly southern stream” he had ever encountered, the two men set about “feasting” on ripe wild grapes that dropped into the unencumbered upper Chattahoochee River. Muir and his host followed the apparently free-flowing river’s cue and currents and discovered masses of grapes floating effortlessly in slow churning “eddies along the bank.” Other enterprising men working with the river from boats and the shore easily collected the grapes from these pools where the river’s current slacked. Muir enjoyed some of the delicious grapes right out of the river, as well as the muscadine wine they produced. “Intoxicated with the beauty” of the river’s banks and intrigued by what the banks farther down the river might look like, Muir briefly contemplated traveling the Chattahoochee by boat to the gulf. However, he opted to forgo the water route in favor of overland travel to really see the southern landscape, and eventually, he reached Augusta by foot.¹

In deciding to walk and record his observations, Muir contributed to a set of social and economic assumptions about the American South. John Muir wanted to disengage from an “entangling society,” according to environmental historian and biographer Donald Worster, but he did not avoid journaling and judging the region as a rural and uncivilized backwater.² Furthermore, Muir encountered a postbellum South that remained—like the majority of the nation at the time—primarily an agricultural region with wild margins that lacked the pristine wilderness usually associated with the Sierra Club’s first president.³ In his travels across the Chattahoochee, Oconee, and Savannah River valleys, Muir “zigzagged … amid old plantations” and encountered former slaves working and harvesting low-hanging bolls in cotton fields for wages. Muir also encountered the “northern limit” of the longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) ecosystem. The trees fascinated Muir: “sixty to seventy feet in height, from twenty to thirty inches in diameter, with leaves ten to fifteen inches long, in dense radiant masses at the ends of the naked branches.” The cotton fields, African American laborers, plantations, and timber all pointed to a real, antebellum past powered by human and animal muscles sustained by soil. Muir described these social and economic realities and perpetuated a historical narrative of life and labor in the American South that overlooked critical components of the region’s environmental, industrial, and organic energy history.⁴

Before the Civil War, Piedmont southerners had already begun to move beyond agricultural production and muscle power, and they relied on southern rivers and renewable energy to do so. When Muir reached Augusta and the fall line—the point where the Coastal Plain and Piedmont merge and easy upstream navigation ends—he did not say anything about the Old South’s antebellum textile mills or industrial artifacts. Nor did he describe the 1,000-foot-long rock dam that diverted the Savannah River’s current from a series of rocky shoals into a maze of linear waterpower canals. Augusta’s industrialists had re-created a version of the New England Waltham-Lowell system that Henry D. Thoreau described in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Augusta’s system never reached the scale Thoreau found during his New England paddling trip, and the New England factory system and mill towns were, of course, rare. Scattered grist- and sawmills in the Savannah River’s creeks and tributaries—such as William Gregg’s Horse Creek valley mills—were more common throughout early America, including the Southeast. Regardless of scale and technological diffusion, Augusta’s system captured an organic and renewable energy source, reorganized modes of production, required external collaboration, and altered the river’s environment. And from this perspective, Augusta looked a lot like a New England mill village in an agricultural nation.⁵

The upper Chattahoochee and Savannah Rivers did flow freely through Blue Ridge and Piedmont agricultural landscapes with “intoxicating banks” in the nineteenth century. Downstream at the fall line, however, Old South entrepreneurs in towns and cities such as Columbus and Augusta had already erected diversion dams, created small artificial ponds, and laid the foundations for an industrial New South upon the banks of southern rivers during the 1840s. By focusing on the natural history and agricultural dimensions of the southern landscape, Muir obscured the early industrial legacy of the energy-water nexus in the American South.⁶

Throughout the nineteenth century—and in the centuries before—Savannah River valley inhabitants depended on the river to survive. As John Muir traveled leisurely through multiple southern river valleys, he passed through a peopled and working landscape that had been shaped as much by Indian, African, and European hands as it had been shaped by droughts and floods. All of these human and natural influences crafted a Savannah River valley that was an agricultural and industrious place before the American Civil War.

Antebellum Georgians, South Carolinians, and their industrial allies began a process that fundamentally transformed the region’s free-flowing rivers into a collection of pools and reservoirs encumbered by dams or channeled in new directions to generate industrial energy and remap social power. The Southeast was rich in organic energy—soil, timber, and wildlife—but lacked abundant and easily transferable mineral fuels—coal and oil—required to generate energy. Participants in America’s famed market revolution, however, brought organized capital and mainstream dams south in the 1840s. Entrepreneurs amassed private investors’ capital or entered into public-private partnerships to build diversion dams along the region’s fall-line urban centers, including Columbia (S.C.) on the Congaree River and Augusta on the Savannah River, to fill canals and supply muscle-powered factory laborers with water and renewable industrial energy.

Water and power have been linked for a long time in the American South.⁷ Muir may have observed Augusta’s emerging hydraulic waterscape, and had he decided to float the Chattahoochee River from the Georgia mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, he would have discovered similar infrastructure in Columbus. Aside from this speculation, Muir did describe an agricultural landscape, and in so doing, he missed key physical industrial artifacts that were the building blocks of the American South’s modern waterscape and political economy. As he descended the Savannah River valley, Muir would eventually encounter the spirit responsible for transforming antebellum waterpower into “New South” hydroelectric power, a process that built a water and power nexus with alacrity.

The Savannah River Basin

The Savannah River watershed encompasses approximately 10,500 square miles in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Like a funnel, the watershed consolidates water seeping from underground springs and rain that falls on the ground and drains from northwest to southeast. Water flows quickly to the Atlantic Ocean, since this watershed travels the shortest distance from mountains to sea of any mountain-to-sea river basin in the southeastern United States. Blue Ridge Province streams and creeks descend from Western North Carolina’s ancient mountains (5,500 feet above sea level) to the Piedmont Province (elev. 1,000 ft.). Gathering speed, the rugged Southern Appalachian headwater streams give rise to Georgia’s Tugaloo River and South Carolina’s Seneca River before these two form the 300-mile-long Savannah River. Serving as the dividing line between Georgia and South Carolina, the Savannah River then pushes through the Piedmont and over rocky shoals before cascading over the fall line at Augusta, Georgia (elev. 200 ft.). Below this city, the rocky Blue Ridge and Piedmont clays give way to the Coastal Plain’s softer alluvial soils. The gradient change causes the rushing Savannah River to decelerate and slowly twist back upon itself to form serpentine “oxbows” throughout the remainder of the river’s journey to Savannah, Georgia (elev. 42 ft.), and the Atlantic Ocean.

Intense geological energy and force created the southern landscape and the Savannah River watershed more than 200 million years ago, when what are now the North American and African continental plates repeatedly collided with each other before separating for the last time. These faulting and thrusting collisions—whereby the plates slid under or over each other—created uplift in the earth’s crust and resulted in the formation of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which some geologists think may have been as tall as the Rocky Mountains. Over the following millions of years, erosion—rain, snow, ice, and wind—slowly whittled the Blue Ridge, contributing to creation of valleys that drained through the rolling hills of the southern Piedmont and the more moderate Coastal Plain gradients to the Atlantic Ocean, or drained through the ridge and valley to the Gulf of Mexico.⁸ The tectonic forces were important for creating deep valleys and narrow gorges—important landforms that can constrict stream flow—but these actions alone could not form lakes as found elsewhere in North America.

Glacial movement in conjunction with tectonic forces carved the landscapes necessary for natural lakes in other parts of North America, but these combined forces did not sculpt a southern landscape to create natural lakes. During the great Ice Age of the Pleistocene epoch (20,000 to 9,000 years ago), a giant ice sheet stretched from coast to coast but never advanced from the polar north beyond present-day Ohio. Nearly three miles thick, it sliced valleys and pushed soil to build low ridges. As the giant ice sheet began to recede and melt 16,000 years ago, it left behind midwestern and New England waterscapes pocked with natural lakes from Minnesota to Maine and flooded the Mississippi River valley with meltwater. Like tectonic forces, the glacial retreat did not scrape the southern landscape and leave behind a waterscape of natural lakes.⁹ Geological and climatic events were not the only conditions that influenced the form and composition of the southern landscape. People also shaped the Savannah River valley for thousands of years before any lakes or artificial reservoirs appeared on the landscape.

William Bartram, the American South’s best-known southern naturalist, provided the most complete picture of the Savannah River valley, having traveled from the Atlantic port of Savannah throughout the valley’s Piedmont and Blue Ridge headwaters between 1773 and 1775. Endowed with a gifted botanical eye and an artful pen, Bartram observed how planters organized the valley’s land, water, and human energy resources.¹⁰ African slavery—initially outlawed in colonial Georgia before legalization in 1751—made it easier for Euro-Americans to capitalize on the valley’s natural resources and enabled Georgians to directly compete with South Carolina in production of agricultural and export commodities such as rice.¹¹

Bartram called on one diversified South Carolina plantation, located near the present-day town of Bordeaux but now partially under Clarks Hill’s reservoir, which was “situated on the top of a very high hill near the banks of the river Savanna.” From Frenchman Mons. St. Pierre’s house, Bartram looked down and across fields of corn, rice, wheat, oats, indigo, and sweet potatoes on “rich low lands, lying very level betwixt these natural heights and the river.” Other reports suggest Bordeaux—located about 3.5 miles from the Savannah River in McCormick County, South Carolina—was primarily inhabited by up to 700 Huguenot transplants who attempted silk cultivation and wine production. But after the American Revolution, the region turned to cotton as a staple crop. Bartram provided no sense of the size of this or other plantations, but these settlements required more than the river valley’s soil and free-flowing water to survive.¹² On another stop, Bartram called on one slave owner downstream from Augusta who deployed African labor into the “ancient sublime” longleaf pine and cypress forests. There they cut and prepared timber for export downriver to Savannah and beyond to the “West-Indian market.” Euro-Americans and African slaves consistently cultivated the valley’s rich soil and water resources for international markets, and those basic resources became significantly more valuable after the American Revolution.¹³

Once European colonists arrived in the Savannah River valley, developments designed to reap southern rivers’ currents began to follow patterns familiar in other regions, such as New England. In the colonial and early national periods, private investors improved water resources at specific sites, constructing single mills or small factories alongside natural waterfalls or shoals. Millwrights undertook similar projects in watersheds adjacent to the Savannah. Like Native American anglers who congregated around rocky shoals to capture fish and like farmers who planted the valley’s mineral-rich bottoms and floodplains, Euro-American mill builders utilized specific sites and the river’s energy to serve limited geographical markets.¹⁴

Well into the antebellum era, private individuals and investors continued to harness the Savannah River’s water energy to power gristmills, lumber mills, and cotton gins. Planters such as James Edward Calhoun, who owned and operated the Millwood Plantation, erected low dams to drive mills and machinery. James, the cousin of South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, who is remembered for steering the nullification and state’s rights crisis of 1833 prior to the American Civil War, owned property that stretched for seven miles and covered more than 10,000 acres on both sides of the Savannah River in Abbeville (S.C.) and Elbert (Ga.) Counties. This property included small dams and diversion structures that channeled water to small mills that sat on riverbanks. Unlike some of the plantations Bartram visited high on bluffs above the river, Millwood sat in the Savannah River’s floodplain below the mouth of the Rocky River and about sixty miles upstream from Augusta. Calhoun’s many small diversion dams, which did not run from bank to bank, simply redirected a portion of river to run multiple mills and assorted machinery starting in 1832, and by 1850, mill manager Delancy Chisenhall produced cornmeal, wheat flour, lumber, and leather for Calhoun.¹⁵

Millwood Plantation, n.d. (photographer unknown). In Sharyn Kane and Richard Keeton, Beneath These Waters: Archeological and Historical Studies of 11,500 Years along the Savannah River (Savannah, Ga.: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Interagency Archeological Services Division, National Park Service, 1993). Image from Richard B. Russell Study Files, University of Alabama Museum, Moundville.

Before the Civil War, Calhoun diversified his crops and succeeded because he ordered the energy of slaves, tenants, and soil to produce the plantation’s primary product—cotton—in addition to peas, corn, turnips, and oats. Calhoun’s diversification may have been an aberration in comparison with other plantation owners in the region, but his and his neig...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Southern Water, Southern Power
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Southern Water, Southern Power
• Chapter 1: Lowell of the South
• Chapter 2: Dam Crazy for White Coal in the New South
• Chapter 3: New Deal Big Dam Consensus
• Chapter 4: A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean
• Chapter 5: Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt
• Chapter 6: Countryside Conservatism and Conservation
• Chapter 7: Taken and Delivered: The Chattooga River
• Epilogue: Water and Power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index