St. Louis Blues: Business, Slavery, and Urban History

Abstract

As American settlers streamed ever further westward during the first half of the nineteenth century, St. Louis, Missouri, became a commercial boomtown and the leading city of the Mississippi valley. Its population nearly quintupled during the 1840s, and by 1850 its prosperous merchants were servicing a rural hinterland that extended northward into the upper Midwest and westward from the lower Ohio River to the frontier. Business has never been more flourishing, reported Hunt's Merchants' Magazine. Stocks were never better, hotels never more crowded (p. 88). City fathers reveled at midcentury in their seemingly incontestable commercial supremacy. But during the decade that followed something went wrong. Investors and traders began to turn away from St. Louis toward a new rival, Chicago. By 1860, that northern Illinois city had become the premier urban center of the burgeoning new West, demoting St. Louis to the status of a purely regional entrep6t, possessing strong ties to a small hinterland and only weak ties outside of the region (p. 156). This story is hardly unknown. It is, indeed, something of an urban history chestnut. But Jeffrey S. Adler of the University of Florida believes it is a tale more often repeated than understood, that scholars have not [satisfactorily] explained why St. Louis outdistanced its rivals and became the dominant city in the West. Nor have historians explained why the city failed to maintain its position as the commercial capital of the (p. 1). A contribution to Cambridge's Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Modern History series, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West holds that St. Louis's rise, like its decline, can be explained only by examining the particular setting and peculiar manner in which the antebellum St. Louis economy developed. More specifically, the author directs our attention to the pivotal role played in the development of St. Louis (and other western cities) by eastern