Introduction

Dennis Gould 0:00

Welcome to Meanwhile Mobile, the podcast that climbs into the attic of history and opens a trunk filled with hidden, lost, or forgotten pieces of the puzzle that make Mobile Alabama unique. Here's your host, Kathy Richardson.

Kathy Richardson 0:21

Thank you, Dennis Gould. And along with author Joe Cuhaj, we open that trunk and find people and stories that will surprise and even amaze. Joe?

Joe Cuhaj 0:33

Let's open the trunk.

Kathy Richardson 0:37

Mobile, at the height of the Civil War, the wives and mothers of the men away on the battlefields are finding it tough, if not impossible, to survive amid food shortages and the rapid devaluation of the Confederate dollar. Nearing starvation, these women have had enough. Armed with axes, hatchets, and broom handles, they riot and break into stores on Duncan Street in what became known as the Mobile Bread Riot. But first, let's

Mike Bunn Introduction

Kathy Richardson 1:05

go back to the time before the war. A time of peace and prosperity in a city called the Paris of the South, that 30,000 people called home, Mobile, Alabama. And who better to take us back to that time than Mike Bunn, director of Blakely Historic State Park, and author of several books on Gulf Coast history, including this Southern Metropolis, Life in Antebellum Mobile. Hi, Mike. Thanks for joining us.

Mike Bunn 1:31

Thank you guys for having me.

Kathy Richardson 1:32

So, Mike,

An Overview of Antebellum Mobile

Kathy Richardson 1:33

give us an overview of what antebellum mobile was like.

Mike Bunn 1:37

Mobile was, of course, Alabama's largest city in the antebellum period, uh, right before the Civil War, and of course during the Civil War. It's one of the largest cities in the South, for that matter. And it was a pretty robust economic scene that was here. Uh it was by far the the one true metropolis, I would say, that we had in the state. So it was it was a busy place. It was a place that was sort of on the map. It was on the major travel routes. Of course, they were primarily by water still at that time. So Mobile was right front and center with all of that. And it was the center of the cotton trade in the state and really one of the epicenters of the trade in the region. And so for all those reasons, Mobile was a place of consequence, and it was a place that people knew about and is a place that a lot of visitors to the area would would have traveled through, even if they didn't really mean to or want to. Sort of your connecting flights, if you will, with your steamboat travel would come right through Mobile.

Mike Bunn's Sources for This Southern Metropolis

Kathy Richardson 2:40

You've obviously done a lot of research on the period you write about in This Southern Metropolis. What were your sources?

Mike Bunn 2:47

The people that I specifically write about in my book are people who are traveling through on some sort of tour of the South. Now, there were a variety of other travelers that were coming through for business reasons or family reasons, et cetera. But the ones that I focused on are the ones that were wanting to visit the place specifically because they are compiling some sort of travel narrative. And we've got to realize that travel narratives were a big form of literature at the time period. It allowed people to visit places in written form that they would never otherwise visit in physical form. And so a lot of those that are coming through that I drew on were people who were composing narratives of some description, either specifically for a travel narrative or for some other published work that was a form of commentary on the society, such as you know, the how slavery functioned, things like that. So there are people who are coming here and and wanting to find out something that's unique about the place. If you were traveling and you were visiting twenty southern cities and going to write a description, you probably are not going to be well received in your writing if it's just this place was nice, good food. Yeah. These these short things. They are purposefully seeking out things that are different, things that are unique, things that make the community stand out as different from others. And these visitors really helped flesh out a scene and a place and a time that I think is is presents a different way of looking at Annabelle and Mobile.

Mobile's Diversity

Kathy Richardson 4:35

It's fascinating how diverse Mobile's population was at that time. Your book paints a wonderful picture of this and the reaction visitors to the town had to it, not knowing if the black person they met was a slave or a free black.

Mike Bunn 4:50

Exactly. Mobile had the largest free black population of any of any place in the region outside, of course, New Orleans. And it had this really interesting mixture of folks from diverse backgrounds that we collectively call Creole. And it also had, let's not forget, the largest concentration of foreign-born citizens anywhere in the state. And that and that was a pretty seismic majority of people who were first generation Americans who were living in Mobile. So it was a very diverse place. If you traveled other places in Alabama at the time, and other places in the region, outside of again, New Orleans, you you were struck by the fact that this is a very cosmopolitan looking place that and you you just a lot of these travelers frankly didn't know what to do or how to make sense of free black and creole. It's not like someone of color had a big tag on their shirt that said, I'm enslaved, or I'm working independent of my master, or I'm hired out, or I'm free. And they noticed that that people sort of blended together in a way that made it difficult for them to tell someone's status very easily. And that was a big shock to a lot of them. Uh there's one guy that gives a really interesting account of being on a steamboat and probably puts the societal dynamics most succinctly coming into Mobile. He described how he learned very quickly the the the real order of society, even though you couldn't tell it at a glance, uh, because the meals were given with the first meal was the white passengers and working crew. And and then you had the the enslaved laborers and other hired workers on the boat. The last people to eat were the free blacks. He said that they almost had no place in this society. It's like they they really couldn't figure out where they were supposed to fit. They didn't fit with the slaves, and they certainly didn't fit with the white society. So the odd dynamic is that they they just they could only tell when these people are really free, people of color, by watching their interaction with other white people sometimes. Because they if you'd just casually looking at it, you wouldn't always know. And so that was just an interesting revelation to me, because if you think about people walking in town, you know, what would that look like? And there are a lot of enslaved laborers who were technically enslaved, but they were working totally free of their masters, earning money, paying rent. And so this sort of just turned everything upside down that they thought they knew about slavery, because when you get outside of a plantation field with everybody out there and you can tell who's enslaved, who's working, you tell a hierarchy, when you get into an urban environment, it's much more fluid. And and that that's something that struck

Mobile as a Transportation Hub

Mike Bunn 7:47

them.

Kathy Richardson 7:48

Earlier you mentioned Mobile acting almost as a hub of transportation for visitors and businessmen. How did these travelers actually get to the town?

Mike Bunn 7:58

The average route that that most of the settlers or most of the visitors I should say that were coming here were taking would be a water route. Now there were a few that I ran across that I described that took stagecoaches from different places and ended up taking a stagecoach over to the eastern shore to Blakely and taking a ferry over. But those were those were the exception. Uh stagecoach travel was very, very unglamorous and very slow and very bumpy and uh just not comfortable. So if you could avoid it, it was more timely and more comfortable to travel by boat, even though it had its own vexations. But the the most of the ones that I am describing are are people who were on sort of a um United States grand tour. They noticed the grand homes beginning to be developed like on Government Street and just called it a avenue of gardens and all that. And of course there's some exaggeration there, but again, they're trying to capture something that's unique about the place. And to have these large homes and these well-manicured lawns and gardens and all struck them as as something you know, uniquely distinctive uh about mobile. And they did describe a little bit about life of the more common people, but y you gotta stop and just think for a second. Their purpose is to describe what's different. That's what they're searching for. They did not necessarily dive into the day-to-day on every average mobility, but they did talk about things uh such as the fact that it's sort of a seasonal town. It sort of sprang to life, so to speak, when cotton trading season began in the fall. So you've got you've got a town that sort of lies dormant in the for a little while in the hot months, and it really picks up, and a few restaurants and hotels begin to open, and all these things are catering to the people of means because they are the traders and the the the insurance agents and the factors and everybody who's involved in that trade that descends on the town. So they could not help but notice that was what was different.

King Cotton

Kathy Richardson 10:11

From their writings, it appears the one thing that fascinated these writers the most was King Cotton.

Mike Bunn 10:17

Uh cotton was a very visceral, upfront reminder at every step that this was a cotton city. It was not just something that was traded somewhere off in the city in parts unknown. It was front and center. It lined the streets, it lined the wards of the port. When there was no rain and the wind blew, cotton lint was in the air, it was in the trees, uh, it was in the gutters. Uh everywhere you looked, you were reminded this was a vast cotton warehouse. Really, one of the things that visitors took as one of the primary attractions, if you will, I hate to use it in that term, but it's sort of what it was, was they wanted to go take a stroll on the port. They wanted to see this this activity. This was where the the hub, the lifeblood of the city was, and very few seemed to have missed that opportunity. They were so impressed with the activity that they wanted to back it up with some serious statistics to describe this. And that ends up being one of the dominant ways to describe Mobile. There's no other place they visited that was that dominated by one crop.

Population Explosion

Kathy Richardson 11:32

So it wasn't only visitors and businessmen coming to Mobile.

Mike Bunn 11:36

The real difference is between early American period, 1820s, and 1840s. You got this phenomenal explosion of growth in Mobile. It goes from this being this, what they joked was a one-horse town, and there was a guy who is actually quoted, he said, We're not a one-horse town. Just walk through our streets at any day, and you'll find lots of other horses and cows and pigs and dogs. So it transformed from that into this really established urban environment with explosion of the popularity of Greek revival architecture, and it just it took on an entire new physical appearance, and the growth was just incredible. At the early beginning of the American period, you're talking about a city that may have had 1,500 people in it, and 20 years later, you're talking about a city that had uh reached population 15 or 20,000, which the numbers don't sound extraordinary today, but put them in perspective with the percentages of gain here, and it was just a different place. And with that growth came this growing uh rift between North

Mobile's Take on Secession

Mike Bunn 12:44

and South.

Kathy Richardson 12:45

In 1860, the threat of war breaking out is palpable throughout the country. What was Mobile's attitude toward the coming war? Were they leaning for or against leaving the Union?

Mike Bunn 12:57

By the time you get to the 1850s, the sort of the state's rights trajectory that the region was on, and the whole concept of, you know, if we can't find a way, a place in this union with our institutions that we might need to find another way, that argument had been going on a while. It it was not a new phenomenon in Mobile. What was new was actual secession. There had been conferences like the Nashville Convention in 1850. There had been states' rights groups around since the 1840s, and the whole notion that if we can't get our way, we'll just find a new way with our own nation, that that was not this brand new concept. And so a lot of the people who are traveling here in the 1850s, you know, that that's just sort of in the air. That there is this regional tension, but there's no overt concept that, okay, something really big is about to happen. This was not a hotbed of secession. It was a hotbed of southern rights and economic privilege, and they really wanted to find a way to work within whatever the environment was. This was a place run by businessmen. This was not a place run by hotheads. And so what you find in the narratives is there's really not all that much discussion of this mounting tension. It's a slow and gradual accumulation of effects.

The Blockade of Mobile Bay Begins

Kathy Richardson 14:23

So now it's 1861. War has erupted between the North and the South. The Union blockades Mobile Bay in an attempt to cut off supplies and goods, and the economic strife would begin, and that would lead to the bread riot.

Mike Bunn 14:39

It's not one single day that all of a sudden you've got supplies coming in, then the next you don't, because as you well know, they declared that blockade. The blockade was relatively porous for quite a long time, and there were a lot of supplies still getting in and out of mobile, even during the entirety of the blockade. Once it really got down to business and they sent adequate forces and they're really patrolling what's coming out of in and out of Mobile Bay, something on the order of 80% of the attempted runs through the blockade were successful.

Kathy Richardson 15:13

Thank you, Mike Bunn.

Mike Bunn 15:15

Thank you guys for having me. Really enjoyed the conversation and opportunity to delve into some interesting aspects of local history.

Kathy Richardson 15:22

And we encourage everyone to read the book, This Southern Metropolis: Life in Antebellum Mobile.

Quote by Hiram Fuller on "The Cotton City"

Joe Cuhaj 15:33

You know, what I really found fascinating about the conversation we had with Mike Bunn was the fascination everybody had coming to Mobile with cotton. It was everywhere. And there's a great quote by New England journalist Hiram Fuller. In the 1850s, he wrote, Mobile is a pleasant cotton city of some 30,000 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's the great staple, the sum and substance of Alabama. It has made Mobile and all its citizens.

Kathy Richardson 16:24

This ends part one of the Bread Riots of Mobile, the Antebellum Years. Coming up in part two, the Women

Conclusion and Credits

Kathy Richardson 16:33

Rise Up.

Dennis Gould 16:37

Meanwhile... Mobile is produced at Soundworks in Mobile, Alabama by Kathy Richardson, Joe Cuhaj, and me, Dennis Gould. No generative AI has been used in the research, writing, or recording of this podcast. Visit us on Facebook for additional information about this and upcoming episodes and links to related material. For comments, questions, or ideas for future podcasts, contact us at meanwhile mobile at gmail.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you like Meanwhile... Mobile. Word of mouth more than any other form of promotion is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.