Waters of Potowmack

by Paul Metcalf

Waters of Potowmack is a documentary history of the Potomac River and its wide, fertile basin--the setting for much of early United States history. A collage of primary accounts, it extends from the first explorers and colonists, the building of the Capitol, and the incidents of the Civil War through our recent past.

Waters of Potowmack records the firsthand impressions of the settlers and surveyors of this river basin, an area that includes parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. In addition to offering an introduction to the geography, geology, and climate of the region, Metcalf's fascinating pastiche includes early descriptions of flora and fauna, and accounts of some of the earliest encounters between European settlers and indigenous peoples.

Here, too, are the voices of Washington and Jefferson, of Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the lesser-known stories of revolutionaries, mercenaries, and canal and road builders. And from diary and journal entries we follow the correspondence between Washington, Jefferson, and L'Enfant as they lay out the new Federal City.

Selections from Civil War diaries focus on key battle sites, and primary accounts offer a new understanding of the motives of John Brown and John Wilkes Booth.

The last section of Metcalf's engrossing book looks at the ruinous pollution of the river basin after the Second World War, at the rioting and looting of the 1960s, and at the despoliation of a land that at the book's beginning was described as an Eden, a paradise on earth.

An evocative and moving book, this is a history of exploring, settling, rebelling, governing, rioting, building, and cultivating, all on the "waters of Potowmack."

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Paul Metcalf (1917–1999) was an American writer. He wrote in verse and prose, but his work generally defies classification. Its small but devoted following includes Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds. His many books include Will West (1956), Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), Apalache (1976), The Middle Passage (1976), Zip Odes (1979), and U.S. Dept. of the Interior (1980).

He was the great-grandson of one of his major literary influences, Herman Melville.

Paul Metcalf was born in 1917 in East Milton, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard but left before graduating. In 1942, he married Nancy Blackford of South Carolina and over the next two decades spent long periods in the South. Metcalf traveled widely through North and South America and these travels figure largely in his work. Among his friends and associates were the poet Charles Olson (whom he met when he was thirteen), the artist Josef Albers, poet and publisher Jonathan Williams and the writer Guy Davenport. Later in his career, Metcalf was a visiting professor at the University of California San Diego, SUNY Albany, and the University of Kansas. He died in 1999, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The waters of the Potomac River flow for 405 miles, from the river's source at Fairfax Stone in the mountains of West Virginia to its outlet at Chesapeake Bay. And the flow of the Potomac encompasses a great deal of American history and culture over the course of those 405 miles, as Paul Metcalf makes clear in his 1982 book Waters of Potowmack.

Metcalf (1917-99), a great-grandson of Herman Melville, composed in an intriguing and unique manner that involved combining passages of prose and verse. He seems to have been particularly interested in the literary effects to be achieved by juxtaposition – bringing together two or more texts or images that might not seem at first glance to belong together. Waters of Potowmack, a poetically-inflected documentary history of the Potomac River region, certainly fits in with Metcalf's literary and thematic interests.

Beginning with accounts of the river’s geological features and natural bounty, Metcalf writes of how the Potomac River proceeds from its mountain origins “to Smith Point, Point Lookout…to the open Bay: Waters of Potowmack” (p. xix); his deliberate use of the archaic spelling “Potowmack” signals his intention of taking the reader back to the region’s very beginnings. In the process, he introduces the reader to the Potomac Valley’s original Native American societies, and then explores the process of how European settlement and colonization of the Potomac River region started at the river’s mouth and later proceeded upriver.

The “Tidewater Colonial” chapter provides a particularly telling example of Metcalf’s use of juxtaposition. Metcalf begins an examination of slavery in colonial Virginia with William Byrd’s appallingly casual remark that hundreds of English ships from all over the world bring to Virginia, “among other very useful things, many Negroes or black slaves to sell” (p. 53). Philip Vickers Fithian, who tutored the children of planter Robert Carter at the Nomini Hall plantation in Westmoreland County, recounts with horror the punishments invented for enslaved people by an overseer on a neighboring plantation; I will not share the details here, but will simply mention that this 18th-century man found the overseer an “inhuman Infidel” and said of the overseer that “savage Cruelty does not exceed His next diabolical invention” (p. 53).

And Metcalf follows these looks at the “peculiar institution” with Thomas Jefferson’s well-known remarks from his 1782 book Notes on the State of Virginia:

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. 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….The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. (p. 55)

From the colonial chapters, Waters of Potowmack moves forward to the beginning of the national life of the United States of America, and to the founding of Washington, D.C., as a planned capital for the new nation. The “Federal City” section of the book includes dramatic moments like British General Robert Ross’s August 1814 report on the burning of the public buildings of Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812:

Judging it of consequence to complete the destruction of the public buildings with the least possible delay, so that the army might retire without loss of time, the following buildings were set fire to and consumed: the Capitol, including the Senate-house and the House of Representatives, the arsenal, the dockyard, (navy-yard), treasury, war office, President’s palace, rope-walk, and the great bridge across the Potomac…. (p. 100)

With the onset of civil war, the Potomac River became a boundary between the Union and the Confederacy. The “Civil War” section of Waters of Potowmack includes accounts of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, on the Virginia side of the Potomac upriver from Washington. The battle, fought on 21 October 1861, was a poorly planned engagement that took place chiefly because some members of the U.S. Congress in Washington were impatient for a demonstration of the Union Army’s readiness to do something. The Union forces attacked up steep, almost vertical bluffs on the Virginia shore of the Potomac River, against well-prepared and well-defended rebel positions. Unsurprisingly, the battle ended in disaster for the Union forces involved.

Metcalf starts his juxtapositional look at Ball’s Bluff with Confederate general N.G. Evans recalling how the battle’s climactic bayonet attack occurred: “At about 6 o’clock p.m. I saw that my command had driven the enemy near the banks of the Potomac. I ordered my entire force to charge and drive him into the river. The charge was immediately made by the whole command, and the forces of the enemy completely routed, and cried out for quarter along his whole line” (p. 149).

Metcalf then juxtaposes that relatively cool account with a Union Army survivor’s harrowing account of what it was actually like to be driven off the bluff and into the river at bayonet-point:

A kind of shiver ran through the huddled mass upon the brow of the cliff; it gave way; rushed a few steps; then, in one wild, panic-stricken herd, rolled, leaped, tumbled over the precipice! The descent is nearly perpendicular, with ragged, jutting crags….Screams of pain and terror filled the air. Men seemed suddenly bereft of reason; they leaped over the bluff with muskets still in their clutch, threw themselves into the river without divesting themselves of their heavy accoutrements – hence went to the bottom like lead. Others sprung down upon the heads and bayonets of those below. (p. 150)

The Civil War section, one of the longest in the book, also looks to other events and campaigns that took place within the Potomac basin: John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry; the battles of Bull Run/Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg; the prisoner-of-war camp at Point Lookout at the river’s mouth. And this section of the book concludes by looking at the Potomac as the avenue of attempted escape for John Wilkes Booth after his assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Confederate agent Thomas A. Jones, who assisted with Booth’s attempts to cross the Potomac from Southern Maryland to Virginia’s Northern Neck, recounts how, “As the days rolled away, Booth’s impatience to cross the river became almost insufferable” (p. 198). Jones further recalls how he and Herold helped the injured Booth across an open field, with every step a torture for the injured Booth; “But the Potomac, that longed-for goal, at last was near” (p. 202).

Yet, as Metcalf dryly remarks, in one of the times when he lets his own voice enter into this collection of impressionistic sketches, “Jones forgot or failed to warn [Booth and Herold] of the spring flood tides. The boat was carried upstream, along the Maryland shore” (pp. 202-03). It is as if the river itself is trying to hold Booth back so that he can face punishment for his foul crime.

The closing chapter, “The 1960’s,” brings the reader up to modern times, chronicling the impact of pollution throughout the Potomac watershed, and the proliferation of the Cold War military establishment throughout the Washington, D.C., area, as well as signs in the city both of hope (the construction of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) and of ongoing difficulties in American life (the 1968 rioting in Washington that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.).

And Waters of Potowmack ends by emphasizing the natural beauty of the Potomac River region: “Sugar maples survive at the mouth of Difficult Run, with a stronger stand at Riverbend. At Ball’s Bluff, the cliffs have never been cut and farmed, and the display is exceptional: dogtooth violent and shooting star…At the Falls, spangle grass and leather-flower, redbud and shadblow…” (p. 228)

In a helpful foreword, creative writing professor John Casey of the University of Virginia suggests that Waters of Potowmack is truly sui generis, a fundamentally original work that is “so out of the ordinary that it was impossible to point to an antecedent model” (p. xi). Its originality helps explain why the University of Virginia Press reprinted Waters of Potowmack in 2002, as part of its Virginia Bookshelf series of regional works; I found the book around that time at a now-closed Borders bookstore in downtown Washington, D.C.

Having grown up in the Bethesda and Glen Echo area of Montgomery County, Maryland, I was excited to read the book: I have so many memories of the river – hiking the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal between Great Falls and Georgetown, or childhood trips with my parents to the park area on Roosevelt Island in Washington. And I found that Waters of Potowmack captures the qualities, the textures, and the nuances of Potomac River life exceedingly well. Indeed, the book’s anomalous, impressionistic quality contributes greatly to its success.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Waters of Potowmack, poet Paul Metcalf uses seemingly dry primary-source materials from history to construct a graceful, impressionistic account of the Potomac River and the people who have lived along its banks. Metcalf's own brief poetic passages link first-hand accounts that cover the period from 1588, when a Spanish ship sailed up Chesapeake Bay and explored the river, through 1968, when rioting erupted in Washington, D.C., following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In between those beginning and ending points, the reader will find accounts of the river's time as a waterway for the original Native American inhabitants of the Potomac River Valley, and later for the British colonies of Maryland and Virginia; the establishment of Washington, D.C., as a planned city designed to accommodate the United States' capital; and the river's time as a hotly contested boundary between North and South during the Civil War, among other subjects. Metcalf also looks into the river's future, considering the problems of pollution and the likelihood of future population growth in the Potomac region. Those seeking a straightforward history of the Potomac River should look elsewhere; here, the dry facts of waking life do not necessarily parade before the reader in strict chronological order, and they give way from time to time to dreamlike impressions and descriptive passages that emphasize the sheer beauty of the river. Well-illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs, Metcalf's Waters of Potowmack is suitable for any reader with an interest in the Potomac River as a natural, historical, and cultural site.

[Lloyd Potter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Metcalf is master of the juxtaposition. In this he takes excerpts from the 1400’s all the way up to the present all centering around the mighty Potomac river. He touches geology, history, and a myriad of different class perspectives. This is is beautifully and elegantly done, highly recommend for anyone interested In American History and poetic ordering.

[John Trefry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the bravura of Genoa, far more matter of fact, but still enjoyable. Hmmm... lacks an underlying sense of a project.