A view of a Richmond street, c. 1860, muddy water, and Jefferson denounces slavery.

Two views of the street in from of the White House of the Confederacy from the 1860s. When viewing these, remember this is *the* major building in the South. Even it had a muddy street in front when it rained and dusty street when it was dry. There was no centralized sewage system, and the Richmond Pump house was completed in 1883. Prior to it's completion, there was no city wide water system in Richmond. People got water from wells or from the creeks, rivers, and canals into which the streets flowed..


Today I mentioned two quotations--one from Mark Twain on the virtues of drinking river water and one from Jefferson on his reaction to slavery. For good measure, I dug up a couple of pictures of Richmond prior to sewers, water treatment, etc.

The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three- quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river, and then it warn't no better than Ohio water - what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up - and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be.

The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says:

"You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow worth shucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. It's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any."

And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across.
-Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi


Jefferson, a denouncement of slavery (1785):

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. If a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him . Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.