Cairo, Illinois — History
by Drew E. VandeCreek, Ph.D.Cairo, Illinois was founded in 1818 when John G. Comegys, a St. Louis merchant, secured the territorial legislature's authorization to incorporate the city at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Comegys passed away two years later, but the young city of Cairo survived.
In 1837 Darius Holbrook, a Boston investor, incorporated the Cairo City and Canal Company another act with from the state legislature. Holbrook's venture represented a wider American mania for the “internal improvements,” such as turnpikes and canals, that made a market economy possible. Holbrook financed his enterprise with bonds sold to English investors, and retained several hundred workers who constructed shops, houses, and, most importantly, levees. 1
In 1825 the State of New York had completed the Erie Canal, which linked the Hudson River, and by extension New York City, with the Great Lakes. The new waterway made New York City the shipping and jobbing hub for the states formed from the old Northwest Territory, and turned western New York towns like Rochester and Syracuse into prosperous commercial centers as well. Water transportation clearly represented the future of American economic growth. In light of the Erie Canal's stupendous success, promoters in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and Illinois rushed to secure charters and funding for new internal improvements, each confident that their work would bring riches to themselves and their region while uniting Americans in a national marketplace. River cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville grew by leaps and bounds and made the fortunes of their merchants and bankers.
Holbrook clearly believed that Cairo, located at the confluence of the busy Ohio River and the mighty Mississippi, which stood to become the major thoroughfare of western trade, could outstrip all of these cities' growth and wealth. But Holbrook's city failed to become the next metropolis. Holbrook's bonds became worthless in 1840, shaking the entire English banking system. When Charles Dickens visited Cairo in 1842, he reported that the population had dropped rapidly in just two years, leaving only one hundred people to man the taverns and other businesses serving steamboat travelers.2
Even as steamboats plied the Mississippi with greater frequency in the antebellum era, Cairo lagged behind St. Louis, Memphis and the other great river ports. Frequent floods overwhelmed the city's levees and devastated businesses and homes. But the opening of the Illinois Central Railroad in 1855 again placed Cairo on the map. In 1857 the city received another charter and reported a population of 1,756.
The Illinois Central linked Chicago with the Gulf of Mexico and marked the rise of railroads as serious challengers to the primacy of steamboats in the American transportation system. Railroads pushing west from New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore had integrated the Ohio Valley, and especially Chicago, into the national marketplace. But the ICRR ran parallel to the great river, and directly challenged its trade.
Cairo's strategic position quickly made it vital to the Union cause in the Civil War. Many denizens of southern Illinois publicly proclaimed their allegiance to the Confederacy, and backwoods struggles between pro-secession and pro-Union organizations there often turned violent. In this context the State of Illinois and United States Army moved to secure Cairo for the Union by stationing 2000 Illinois volunteers at a hastily constructed Fort Prentiss. Governor Yates also assembled a considerable stand of arms, including 6,000 rifled muskets, 500 rifles and 14 batteries of artillery, in the fall of 1861. 3
Cairo quickly became a huge military camp that housed most of the Illinois regiments in the war's early years. General Ulysses S. Grant built Fort Prentiss into the new and massive Fort Defiance, which served as a staging area for forays into Missouri and, later, downriver. The New York Times referred to Cairo as “the Gibraltar of the West.” 4
Soldiers drilled on a massive parade ground and lived in clusters of barracks on all sides. The troops surrounded Cairo with a fifteen-foot high levee, which kept back the waters of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. But the levee could not keep the low-lying city from becoming a muddy mess during rainy weather. The English author Anthony Trollope, who visited Cairo in the winter of 1862 , recalled that “the sheds of soldiers” at Camp Defiance were “bad, comfortless, damp, and cold,” but that they did not “stink like those of Benton barracks at St. Louis.” 5
In addition to the garrison at Fort Defiance, Cairo became a major military depot as well, supporting the activities of troops far afield. The city served as the western armies' base of operations, ferrying rations, ammunition and other supplies downstream to troops. The Illinois Central Railroad entered the city from the north, and swung around its perimeter on tracks built upon the levee. 6
The Ohio River side of Cairo became the home of a US Navy base, which hosted both commercial wharf boats carrying supplies and gunboats. Ironclads soon became the most effective warships of the Civil War, and foundry workers in nearby Mound City busily converted steamboats into gunboats by covering them with iron plate. Once so outfitted, these craft proceeded down the Ohio to Cairo, where they took on crews, ordnance and provisions. 7
Cairo's location also made it a major Civil War medical center. The U.S. Army often brought troops wounded in the western theater of war to large hospitals built at Cairo. These facilities provided them with better care, security and safety than field hospitals. Mary Bickerdyke, a Galesburg nurse, led the efforts of Illinois women to provide the wounded with care at Cairo. She crusaded for more sanitary conditions in Cairo's hospitals and attracted the attention of Grant, who invited her to travel with his armies. There she became well-known to a national audience as “Mother Bickerdyke.” Other women volunteers built large Soldiers' Rests across the North, including one at Cairo. Unfortunately, many of the wounded soldiers did not recover. The dead were buried in the large Union cemetery nearby. 8
In January of 1862 Grant led a federal force made up of troops and gunboats from Cairo up the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in Kentucky, taking Forts Donelson and Henry from Confederates. At the same time General John Pope moved down the Mississippi, seizing strategic islands and clearing the way for navigation. Grant's continued push southward met a sharp challenge when Confederates attacked at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. On April 6 and 7, 1862 Grant narrowly avoided a crushing defeat at the Battle of Shiloh.
The success of Union armies in the west sent a steady stream of Confederate prisoners, some 14,000 in all, to Cairo to await assignment to northern prisons. Grant's western campaign ended with a bitter, long, and eventually successful siege of Vickburg, Mississippi in the summer of 1863. This victory sent another 30,000 confederate prisoners north to Cairo. With this record of success, the Illinois general moved East to take up command of Union forces there, and faced General Robert E. Lee in the bloody battles of 1864.
With the return of peace, Cairo seemed poised to become the river metropolis its original promoters had envisioned. In 1867 more than 3,700 steamboats docked at the city. Steamboat crews patronized the saloons and gambling casinos along Cairo's wharf, while prosperous merchants built palatial mansions just a few blocks away. Luxurious churches, opera houses, hotels and a huge government custom house, devoted to collecting tariffs on goods imported via the river, attested to Cairo's wealth and importance. In 1886, combined river and rail shipments---evaluated at $60,000,000---gave Cairo the highest per capita commercial valuation in the United States. 9
Cairo also became the staging area for blacks arriving from the South after the Civil War, but many did not find what they expected. Many northern whites actively discouraged blacks from coming north, fearing that they would work for low wages and disrupt labor markets. The vast majority of blacks lacked the money to buy farms or start their own businesses. In the face of northern hostility, many returned to the South and became sharecroppers.
By the late 1870s Mark Twain and other observers noted that steamboats had begun to cede their position at the center of the American transportation system to railroads. Although Twain commented favorably on Cairo's prospects in Life on the Mississippi (1883), the city's best days were past. The Illinois Central's trade continued to grow, but it did not nourish Cairo as did the steamboats and their crews. ICRR trains simply passed through Cairo on their way to larger cities north and south. The city adapted to its changing fortunes by developing new industries processing cottonseed oil and milling lumber, but they could not provide the profit margins available in the city's brief heyday of Mississippi River trade. 10
1. Illinois Guide and Gazetteer (Chicago: Rand McNally Corporation, 1969) 97.2. Ibid.
3. See http://www.angelfire.com/wi/wisconsin42nd/cairo.html.
4. See http://www.angelfire.com/wi/wisconsin42nd/cairo.html.
5. Trollope quoted in Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide (Chicago: Works Progress Administration Federal Writers' Project, 1939) 173.
6. Robert P. Howard, Illinois: A History of the Prairie State (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1972) 298-302.
7. Ibid; see http://www.angelfire.com/wi/wisconsin42nd/cairo.html.
8. Victor Hicken, Illinois in the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) 23.
9. See http://www.cairocitizen.com/history.htm.
10. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883) 214.