Episode Details

In 1784, Spain closed the lower Mississippi River — and with it, the only road to market for the tens of thousands of Americans pouring into Kentucky and the West. This is the story of what that closed river nearly did to the United States. When Spain dangled a rich trade treaty in front of the commercial North in exchange for America formally giving up its western river, Foreign Secretary John Jay was willing to take the deal, and Congress split down a line it had never split along before: not big states against small, not debtors against creditors, but North against South. It was the union’s first purely sectional vote, and both ends of the country began, out loud, to talk about leaving. Meanwhile, out on the frontier, a debt-ridden Revolutionary general named James Wilkinson floated a flatboat to New Orleans, swore secret allegiance to the King of Spain, and became Agent 13 — advising his new masters to keep the river closed, the better to pry Kentucky loose from a union that had nearly sold it. The Confederation could not open the river. Worse, it could not hold its own people.