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Each boat contained a corporal and four men as a crew, and twenty-five armed soldiers. They were fifty in number, besides two flatboats to be used as a ferry to cross the artillery. The whole force consisted of 5000 men and three batteries of artillery.
They'll get the coal at Cumberland and turn back toward Washington in about ten days. It is estimated that a thousand tons a day will go down the canal some of it for private use in Washington, but the greater part for the warships and the factories. The flatboats carry a large amount of forage. The Yankees are using them, too, to transport troops.
That evening he thought of undertaking a last chance. He would cross the York River in flatboats, land at Gloucester, and march up the country through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. Any one who knew the actual state of that region understood that Cornwallis's plan was crazy; but it is to be judged as the last gallantry of a brave man.
The sovereignty of the lower Mississippi country could never be a matter of indifference to those settlers of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio who in the year 1799 sent down the Mississippi in barges, keel-boats, and flatboats one hundred and twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, ten thousand barrels of flour, twenty-two thousand pounds of hemp, five hundred barrels of cider, and as many more of whiskey, for transshipment and export.
Failing in this, his men collected flatboats, and set to work calking them, meantime sending a party to Buffington Bar, where they found a small earthwork and captured its guard; and these things delayed them until morning.
Such produce as corn-meal, flour, pork, and lumber had to go on rafts or flatboats down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Here the cargo and the boat were sold, or the cargo sold and loaded on ocean vessels, which in time reached the eastern market by a cheaper though longer route than that by land.
Besides, we shall want to move bodies of men rapidly so as to attack and harass the enemy when they are not expecting us. "I should say that we ought to have at least twenty great flatboats able to carry fifty men each.
A second, chiefly from Pennsylvania and Virginia, was spreading itself over the rich valleys of what are now West Virginia and Kentucky. Further south a third stream of emigrants, mostly from Virginia and North Carolina, had gone over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and was creeping down the valley of the Tennessee River. For months each year the Ohio was dotted with flatboats.
Traders from Virginia, even, found it necessary to go round by Carolina and Georgia, and to procure licenses. Augusta was the great centre of this commerce, which in those days was more extensive than would be now believed. Flatboats, barges, and pirogues floated the bales of pelts to tide-water.
Here steamers, coal-barges, and river craft of every description lined the Ohio as well as the Kentucky shore. Iron cages filled with burning coals were suspended from cranes erected upon flatboats for the purpose of lighting the river, which was most effectually done, the unwonted brilliancy giving to the busy scene a strange weirdness, and making a picture never to be forgotten.
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