Existing comment:
A Separate South 1861:
On the eve of the Civil War, the young town at the foot of Lookout Mountain was ready to grow. In the 1850s, four railroads converged at Chattanooga, linking the Deep South with the Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi Rivers. Plentiful resources -- coal, iron ore, copper, potassium nitrate, and lead -- awaited exploitation. Wealthy white Southerners and Northern entrepreneurs, sensing the region's industrial potential, began to capitalize on it.
Yet by 1861, the population of Chattanooga was only 2,500. The whites who lived here were mostly Southerners, with some Northerners, Westerners, and Irish immigrants mixed in. Slaves and a few free blacks made up not more than 15 percent of the region's population. During the coming conflict, the local residents would follow divergent paths. The view from Lookout Mountain took in a corner of north Georgia and mountainous Tennessee -- a "separate" South, not typical of the longer-settled plantation-based society that embarked on rebellion.
The hotel was swarming with people arriving and departing with the trains, east, west, north, and south ... Rolls of banknotes were exhibited ... In the confusion of tongues, the ear could catch the words: 'plots,' 'stocks,' 'quarter sections,' 'depot,' 'dividends,' 'township,' 'railroads,' ... 'ten thousands,' 'hundred thousands,' 'millions' ...
-- A reporter describing the scene at the Crutchfield House, Chattanooga, Harper's Magazine, 1858 |