Editing History of Missouri (section)

====Decline of Southern trade====
During the Civil War the Federal government closed the Mississippi to ordinary commerce so that military traffic could move faster. When the war was over, the prosperity of the South was ruined. Hundreds of steamboats had been destroyed, and levees had been damaged by warfare and flooding. Much of the commerce of the West that before the war headed to New Orleans, via the Mississippi, now went to the East Coast via the [[Great Lakes]] and by the rapidly multiplying new lines of railways connecting through Chicago. Some revival of commerce on the Mississippi took place following the war, but this was checked by a sandbar at the mouth of the Southwest Pass in its delta on the Gulf of Mexico. Ead's jetties created a new shipping passage at the mouth of the South Pass in 1879, but the facilities for the transfer of freight in New Orleans were far inferior to those employed by the railways, and the steamboat companies did not prosper.<ref>Louis C. Hunter, ''Steamboats on the Western rivers: An economic and technological history'' (1949). [https://www.jstor.org/stable/25148211  online review]</ref>