Empire of Commerce
The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade
Susan Gaunt Stearns
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Center of Presidential History Book Prize, (2025, Winner)
A groundbreaking study situating the Mississippi River valley at the heart of the early American republic’s political economy
Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism.
In Empire of Commerce, Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States’ untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Stearns’s perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments—the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase—and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real.
- Journal of Southern HistoryAn outstanding book that reframes early American history in crucial new ways. It is polished, well organized, erudite, and accessible, and it moves elegantly between geopolitics and intimate lived experiences. It should stand as a significant contribution to southern, western, early American, African American, and Native American history: stories all linked together by America's voracious empire of commerce.
In these pages, Susan Stearns has brilliantly defied some conventional myths of American history, especially about how our Constitution took form. Rather than oversimplified notions of liberty and freedom, readers will be surprised at how often narrow geographic and economic interests motivated the Founders’ decision-making. The author’s colorful reinterpretation of the United States' westward expansion (and her picture of its advocates) adds some long-needed context to our most basic document.- Carl Bernstein, journalist and co-author of All the President’s Men
Takes a striking approach to one of the key issues in the first decades after the Revolutionary War—full use of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico—by weaving together the various inhabitants of the trans-Appalachian southwest, including the Chickasaws, the policymakers and diplomats in the national capital and abroad, and the changing trading patterns of the Atlantic world.- James E. Lewis Jr., Kalamazoo College, author of The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis
Stearns gives a clear view into the complex history of the 'Mississippi Question.' In 1784, Spain closed the Mississippi River to European Americans triggering a national crisis for the United States. Stearns masterfully unpacks the ramifications of this decision for Indigenous peoples, the Chickasaw Nation in particular, as well as European American farmers, traders, merchants, and politicians. With astute observation and captivating historical examples, Stearns showcases the economic importance of the Mississippi River to these diverse groups and the fluidity of their affairs on the waterway. . . Stearns’s work, grounded in existing scholarship and punctuated with poignant illustrations, will once again force historians to reevaluate the importance of the trans-Appalachian West in American history.- American Historical Review
Susan Gaunt Stearns is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi.
