Hey everyone, thanks for downloading episode 82 of our Civil War podcast.

My name is Rich.

I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Welcome to the podcast. As y'all will recall last week we talked

about how the Confederates came to be at Columbus, Kentucky, which was a spot of important

high ground on the stretch of the Mississippi River between Cairo, Illinois and Memphis, Tennessee.

Confederate generals Gideon Pillow and Leonidas Polk thought that by moving north in September

1861 and seizing Columbus, despite Kentucky's neutrality, they were acting to save the Mississippi

River for the Confederacy. They were certain the fedeors were about to descend the Great River

and use it as an avenue of invasion to strike at the south. Pillow and Polk saw the seizure

of Columbus as a preemptive measure. They thought that if they seized that spot of important

high ground and then built fortifications and emplaced cannon there to dominate the Mississippi,

they would stop the Yankees from descending the river.

Tracy and I want to spend just a bit of time here in the first part of this show. Let's

call it part one of this episode, but spend it talking about the importance of the Mississippi

River and the Western Theater of the Civil War. It's probably hard for us today to appreciate

just how important the Mississippi was to Americans in the mid-19th century. Because back

then it loomed large in the American psyche as not only a vast artery of commerce and

communication, but also as a symbol. For those Americans living west of the Appalachians

in the extensive watershed of the Mississippi, the river was important as a trading artery.

This became even truer after regular steamboat travel began on the Mississippi. The steamboat

era reached its peak in the 1850s, between 1859 and 1860. More than two million tons of

goods were shipped down the river to the port of New Orleans, amounting to nearly $300

...