As soon as it began, the US almost fell apart

During the years between the Revolutionary War and the Louisiana Purchase, the issue that generated the most skepticism was the use of the Mississippi River, the commercial superhighway of its time. Early in that period, Spain, which still controlled New Orleans, shut down traders’ access to the river, and the nascent US Congress struggled to counter. In response, Americans turned on one another — not just Americans in the west, including Jackson, but also Americans in the east, including many in Boston. In fact, Stearns shows that arguments over river access nearly split the country apart.

It’s a fascinating and mostly forgotten episode. It’s also a perfect example of how US history could have gone a totally different way. History is “contingent,” as the professors like to say — even the history we’re living through right now.

Stearns, who teaches history at the University of Mississippi, begins her story in 1784, barely a year after the Treaty of Paris and the end of the Revolutionary War. That’s when Americans learned that Spain was shutting down their access to the Mississippi River. The news, writes Stearns, “created a crisis that threatened the unity of the United States.”

The crisis started with the 100,000-plus settlers already living in the west. To that point, geology and gravity had made things relatively simple: To reach global markets, you sent your produce — flour from Ohio, whiskey from Kentucky — down the river and with the current to the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean beyond.

Spain stopped all of that. When a Tennessee merchant took a boat down the Mississippi in 1786, to pick one example — a boat loaded with flour, Dutch ovens, and iron skillets — Spanish officials seized the goods and the boat and told the merchant to go home by land instead of looping around to the east coast.

The closure of the river came to be known as the Mississippi Question, and it instantly threatened western settlers’ way of life. Their land values dropped by a third — then as now, a guaranteed way to get the attention of politicians and voters. America was still operating under the Articles of Confederation, and Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee were not yet states. But politicians in Georgia and Virginia had done their own speculating on western land, and they began pushing for a new treaty with Spain to reopen the river.

Westerners mulled more dramatic measures, including forming a new country of their own or simply switching to being Spanish subjects. Andrew Jackson, an ambitious lawyer trying to protect his holdings in land and slaves, was one of more than a thousand “Americans” who chose the second path. On that hot summer day, he listened as a Spanish official recited a vow of loyalty, first in English, then in Spanish. Then Jackson placed his hand on a Bible and promised to serve the Spanish king.

Yet, as Stearns shows, it wasn’t just westerners who wondered whether a national union actually served their interests. Northern states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts wanted to reopen the Mississippi — but not as much as they wanted to secure access to Spain’s other ports around the world. In private letters and New England coffeehouses, northerners began talking about making their own treaty with Spain and cutting out the south and the west.

Rumors spread, with James Monroe hearing that secession was “talked of in Massachusetts familiarly and is supposed to have originated there.” The rebels included mainstream Massachusetts figures like Benjamin Lincoln, who had served during the Revolutionary War as a general and America’s first secretary of war. “The United States, as they are called, seem to be little more than a name,” Lincoln wrote. The only logical outcome was “division.” Americans who claimed otherwise were “deceiving themselves.”

The Confederation Congress tried to find a diplomatic solution, authorizing John Jay of New York to negotiate with Don Diego de Gardoqui of Spain. They agreed on a treaty that opened Spain’s other ports while keeping the Mississippi closed. This pro-New England deal caused Americans to attack one another. A Virginia congressman argued that ratifying it would devastate southern and western farmers, “their dearest interests sacrificed and given up to obtain a trivial commercial advantage for their eastern brethren.” A Massachusetts congressman countered that blocking the treaty would be “sacrificing the interest and happiness of a million to promote the views of speculating land jobbers.” Gardoqui met secretly with both factions. Reporting back to Madrid, he wrote that “never has congress had a more combative controversy.”

James Madison worried the treaty debate would be “fatal . . . to an augmentation of the federal authority.” In the end, though, it may have helped. In 1787, while the Confederation Congress was debating the Northwest Ordinance that would further expand the nation — and while the Constitutional Convention was trying to codify Madison’s dream of “federal authority” — the various interests reached a quiet compromise on making the Mississippi a shared national priority.

This lowered the interstate pressure, though it didn’t eliminate it. That would require a new treaty, negotiated by Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina and ratified by the Senate in 1796. The Mississippi again flowed with commerce, and when Spain repeated its river shutdown, in 1802, America’s response was markedly more unified. “There is,” wrote Madison, “but one sentiment throughout the Union.”

The next year, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe solved the problem permanently with the Louisiana Purchase. The Mississippi was now an American river, and even Andrew Jackson was ready to be a happy citizen. “All the western hemisphere rejoices,” he wrote to Jefferson, his newly beloved president. “Every face wears a smile, and every heart leaps with joy.”

When academic historians call the past “contingent,” they mean a few different things — each a version of the idea that the present situation was never inevitable or automatic.

One aspect of contingency is that people living in the past didn’t know the future. Andrew Jackson didn’t know that one day he would be president, just as he didn’t know that one day America would be a continent-spanning superpower. All he knew in the summer of 1789 was that his property was losing value — and that Spain seemed like a better bet to fix that than America.

Another aspect of contingency is that people living in the past could change the future. Whatever did happen next was contingent upon — dependent on — their choices and desires. Consider the case of Piominko, a powerful Chickasaw leader who, in the 1780s, urged his people to side with the Americans instead of the Spanish. In the Ohio River Valley, Native nations formed a loose alliance and dealt the American army two bloody defeats. In the Mississippi River Valley, by contrast, a similar alliance never emerged — ”in large part,” Stearns argues, “due to conflicts within the Chickasaw nation.”

A third aspect of contingency is that people living in the past were shaped by huge social and structural forces. Often, their choices and desires were themselves contingent — were influenced by unpredictable shifts or dumb luck. In 1797, just after Pinckney’s treaty was ratified, Spain went to war with England while devastating hurricanes hammered the Caribbean. Those factors created a huge demand for food, which American farmers were suddenly able to meet. Access to the Mississippi, along with unforeseen events, supercharged western growth.

Each of these aspects reinforces the idea at the core of historical contingency: The past did not have to unfold the way that it did. Certainly the Mississippi Question didn’t. It occurred at a time when America was new and fragile and divided. What if Piominko had sided with the Spanish? What if the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations had formed a powerful alliance? What if America, already struggling with the Ohio alliance, had found itself in a two-front war? What if those hurricanes had missed? What if the river had remained closed? Would cotton and slavery still have proliferated as rapidly in the South?

Historical contingency is also a useful way for thinking about the big questions of the present. After all, what was true in 1789 is still true in 2024: We don’t always know what’s important, and we certainly don’t know how it will all turn out. We don’t even know the “why.” That’s a reason for humility, but also for hope.

Craig Fehrman is a journalist and historian. He is at work on a revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition for Simon & Schuster.