$18.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5813-4

Published: Fall 2004

 Add Cloth to cart
 Add Paper to cart
 View cart
 Checkout

Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction
Race and the Antebellum Western Steamboat Economy

Mark Twain romanticized Mississippi steamboating. He marveled at the Mississippi's eminent basin, its fifty-four major tributaries, and its 4,000 miles of length, from its mouth in Louisiana to its headwaters up the Missouri. This magical landscape provided the setting for what he considered the most wonderful job in antebellum America. Piloting was "play—delightful play, vigorous play, adventurous play."[1] In a famous passage in Life on the Mississippi he proclaimed that pilots were the only "unfettered and entirely independent beings on the earth." He believed that "every man and woman" had a "master" but "pilots had none."[2] Mark Twain moved through the American West with authority and respect, high atop one of the revolutionary technologies of the era.

William Wells Brown lived and worked in a very different Mississippi world. He told of his experiences on the river in the Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave, a story that launched his career as an antislavery activist and novelist. Instead of turning the pilothouse wheel with ease, Brown toiled as a waiter serving passengers and officers, including pilots, in the demanding confines of the steamboat cabin. Twain enjoyed respect when working; Brown's job was to be invisible. A good steamboat servant was supposed to loom, stationary and silent, on the outskirts of the cabin, waiting to descend to his labors whenever passengers had the slightest need. An empty glass? Filled. Mud on the cabin floor? Swept and mopped. While Twain glowingly wrote of his lack of accountability, Brown had masters seemingly everywhere. He had masters in St. Louis who could order him to labor of their choosing, sell him at a moments notice, or rent him away to steamboat owners who crowded around the city levee. The legal owners of his labor, however, were often the least of his worries. River stewards, captains, and passengers policed his daily life and were often rough and capricious. He could steam away from his owners, but whites were everywhere.

Mobility for Twain was unproblematic. He looked forward to new sights, people, and adventures with little worry about what was left behind. He knew he was free to return. For Brown, mobility was filled with remorse and sadness even as it created possibilities for freedom and independence. River voyages forced him away from his dearly loved mother, a St. Louis slave. Working on a steamboat made him all too aware that temporary separations could easily become permanent. While Twain "played" at the pilothouse wheel, Brown wept for the coffles of slaves he watched bound for New Orleans on the decks of river steamers, chained among the other cargo. His emotions were made more poignant by the fact that he knew their destinations. Mobility had educated him in the horrors of the sugar and cotton plantations of the deep South and the slave markets of New Orleans.

But the river was the focus of his dreams, too. The steamboats that moved up and down the Mississippi River carried the tentacles of slavery and racism, but they also carried liberating ideas and pathways to freedom. The river linked Brown to an African American Mississippi world that slaves, and their free black allies, created amid the attempts of masters to control their labor and family lives. By having so many different types of masters, Brown was freed from the personal domination that many riverside slaves suffered on the farms and plantations of the West. In between his masters' various demands, he was able to create moments of autonomy that allowed him to learn the West's social geography. This knowledge eventually made possible Brown's escape from slavery. Though he never steered a river steamer, Brown remembered that he "found great difference between the work in a steamboat cabin and in a cornfield."[3]

Mark Twain knew that this African American river world existed. The enduring image of Huck and Jim on that raft floating down the Mississippi shows the radical possibilities of river mobility in ways no historical source can. In Huckleberry Finn, the river allowed both a runaway slave and a young white boy to escape riverside conventions and to forge a forbidden friendship. By juxtaposing the freedoms of river mobility with the oppressions of riverside society, Twain's story memorializes the nation's historic fascination with liberty and independence while showing how dependent these ideas were on slavery to derive their meaning. But this linkage of the themes of freedom and bondage is curiously absent in Life on the Mississippi, Twain's account of steamboat life. His reminiscences reveal the freedoms of piloting but cast a blind eye to the experience of people of color like William Wells Brown who made his job possible. This book uncovers the Mississippi River experience personified in Jim but neglected in Twain's personal reflections.

The connections between piloting and slavery were not hard to see. The Pennsylvania and the other boats Twain piloted along the lower Mississippi were strewn with slave-produced products. The intimate relationship of steamboats and slavery was evident each time roustabouts walked down the gangway to carry hemp, sugar, tobacco, and especially cotton from southern levees. The volume of this commerce was incredible. Fifty-five percent of the South's cotton crop, 1,915,852 bales in all, came down the Mississippi in 1860, bound for the textile mills of Liverpool and New York. The some one million riverside slaves of the western river valleys produced this cotton, but steamboat workers did the crucial work of helping get it to market. Deck workers rolled, lifted, and carried the 400-pound bales from river landings to steamboat decks and then unloaded them at New Orleans.[4] A letter published in Debow's Review from Missouri politician Edward Bates reflected the mood of accumulation that defined the era. "We say the Mississippi is our river," Bates pronounced, "and New Orleans is our storehouse. And we will bestow upon both whatever amount of labor and expense may be necessary to produce the greatest sum of good[s] to the proprietors."[5] The "labor bestowed," of course, was not Bates's but the labor of slaves like William Wells Brown.

The story told in these pages uncovers the hidden world of the slaves and free blacks of the Mississippi River world. This world included mobile workers, as well as people who never left the riverbank. African American steamboat workers helped make this world a community by connecting African American urbanites in both the North and the South with plantation-belt slave societies. Steamboats traveled the very veins and arteries of the slave system, and the importance of this commercial world to the economics of the slave regime meant that the pan-Mississippi black community was always being threatened. Disapproving masters seemingly lurked beside every levee consignment, boat officers watched clandestine river transactions, and the levee police patrolled the waterways. Commercial work was also simply dangerous. Maritime labor was one of the most treacherous jobs in nineteenth-century America. No matter if they worked on a high-seas brig or a Mississippi steamer, workers drowned, sustained crushed limbs, fell prey to disease, and suffered frostbite. In the antebellum period, still the age of sail on the oceans, such dangers were compounded on the rivers by the threat of boiler explosions and instant death.

These hardships did not prevent African American steamboat workers from seeking freedom on the Mississippi. Some used the Mississippi River to leave the world of slavery behind. The river and its black steamboat hands were an important, and underappreciated, component of the black networks that enabled slaves to reach freedom. Most slave steamboat hands, however, took advantage of the special opportunities of steamboat life to survive within the slave system. Slaves bargained for various wage payments, took part in trading, and developed a spending power that exceeded that of other bondsmen and -women. In addition, the ability to maintain contact with a broad slave community was a powerful incentive for many to keep working. Steamboat travel allowed slaves to stay in touch with far-flung family and friends and served as a grapevine of information for riverside slaves. Masters could control the flow of commodities on steamboats, but they could not manage the flow of information that accompanied steamboat cargo up- and downstream. Black networks sometimes nurtured the creation of outlaw bands of river rascals. The Madison Henderson Gang, a group of one slave and three free black rivermen, moved through the Mississippi world appropriating goods from unsuspecting riverside merchants. Their lives further illustrate the possibilities that river life offered African Americans. Networks of illicit trade, family communication, escape, and theft, all made possible by African American steamboat workers, gave slaves additional resources in their quotidian struggles with masters and overseers.

African American river workers were heroic figures in the slave community. Slaves gazed with wonder and envy at the cosmopolitan lives of men like William Wells Brown. They admired the way river hands could seemingly come and go from river landings and levees as they pleased. Alexander Kenner, a former Louisiana plantation slave, thought that this contact with various landed communities bred a certain sophistication among steamboat hands. "The negroes on the river," he said, "… are intelligent… . Those in the interior, away from the river, are stupid; they see nothing, know nothing, and are very like cattle."[6] Josiah Henson remembered that working on the Mississippi between St. Louis and Galena was "a sunny spot" in his life and was "one of his most treasured recollections." He felt that the job "was the most pleasant time he had ever experienced." Later, when forced to work in a St. Louis hotel, Henson found the job "as painful as his preceding employment was pleasant."[7] Washington Thomas commented to an interviewer, "I came from Kentucky. I was a slave there. I didn't have very hard times. I was on the river all my life, from the time I was old enough."[8] The slave Madison Henderson, who lived much of his life in New Orleans, recalled that he "preferred to be sold to a boatman, so that I might be kept on the [Mississippi] river."[9]

While steamboat workers clearly had liberties other slaves did not, their high status within western slave communities also stemmed in part from slaves' cosmology and their long-standing beliefs equating waterways with freedom. In slave spirituals like the "Old Ship of Zion," "Deep River," "Down by the River Side," and "Roll, Jordan, Roll," rivers and boats represented pathways to heaven. These songs may have had African origins, but they had particular meaning in the antebellum western steamboat economy. One former plantation slave woman told her family that when her mother first saw a steamboat, she thought it was the "Old Ship of Zion" come to take her away to heaven.[10] Although some slaves may not have made so conscious a connection between steamboats and the liberating aspects of their Christian belief system, and others were just plain scared of these huge, modern, monsters of technology, the association of steamboats with freedom was pervasive throughout the slave community.

These hopeful visions grew along with the development of the western steamboat industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. The diverse array of builders, machine-shop workers, engineers, and gentlemen inventors that developed riverboats played an important though unwitting role in African American history. Beginning with Robert Fulton's 1811 launch at Pittsburgh's landing of the first commercially successful western steamboat, businessmen were interested in capturing the vast western river market that had been dominated by flatboats and keelboats since the eighteenth century. Steam power, recently adopted from England, offered the opportunity for improved speed—a key concern for shippers.[11] By the 1840s, wood-fueled, high-pressure engines revolutionized transport, particularly for upriver travel. The English traveler Basil Hall commented in 1829 that "the passage from New Orleans to Louisville, in Kentucky, before the introduction of steamboats, frequently occupied nine weary months of hard rowing and warping; whereas, it is now performed in little more than nine days."[12] Keelboats were nearly immediately put out of business on the larger rivers and were relegated to upcountry streams too shallow for the larger, steam-powered boats. Flatboatmen continued to compete with steamboats in the shipment of nonperishable goods throughout the nineteenth century, but they carried a smaller percentage of goods produced with each passing year. By the 1840s and 1850s, the major western river cities received several thousand steamboat arrivals a year. In cities like Louisville, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans it was not uncommon for a hundred or more steamboats to be docked on city levees at one time. In a few short decades, steamboats revolutionized western transportation, becoming a key component of the industrial revolution that was quickly spreading through the region.[13]

The quick ascension of western steamboats stemmed not only from their speed, which came with steam power, but also their structure, which made them suitable both for the shipment of cargo and for passenger travel. While there was great diversity in the size and load capacity of steamboats, many hulls were over 200 feet long and 35 feet wide, capable of carrying over 400 tons of produce. Flatboats and keelboats did not cater to passengers, so steamboat owners made it a point to profit from the movement of people as well as commodities. In addition to the large hulls, owners commissioned builders to construct several decks for housing passengers and officers. The resulting tiered, three-deck structure—a wedding cake without the complications, Twain called it—gradually developed in the 1830s and 1840s and was the defining characteristic of the western steamboat. Cargo was stored in the shallow hold and on the main deck. Deck passengers, the poorest of travelers, slept on deck amid the cargo. Elite passengers traveled on the second deck, the boiler deck, which rose ten to fifteen feet over the main deck. As the structure of steamboats evolved, a smaller third deck, the hurricane, was added on top of the boiler deck to house officers. On top of all this was the pilothouse. Removed from social bustle that went on below, the pilothouse towered some forty-five feet above the river. By midcentury, the larger boats had living quarters behind the pilothouse in what was called the "Texas."[14]

African American workers like William Wells Brown provided a link between the revolutionary steamboat technology and the vast slave communities that were quickly forming on shore. The looming structure of the western steamboat housed a diverse labor force that numbered about 20,000 workers by midcentury.[15] If the 93 steamboat crews docked at St. Louis in September of 1850 are representative of the 700 to 1,000 steamboat crews on the western rivers by midcentury, about 2,000 to 3,000 slaves and 1,000 to 1,500 free blacks worked in the industry at any one time.[16] The crew lists of these 93 boats indicate that 230 free blacks (6 percent) and 441 slave workers (12 percent) out of a total workforce of 3,627 toiled on these vessels.[17] In addition, 43 percent percent of the workforce were native-born white, 24 percent were Irish-born, 11 percent were German-born, and 3 percent were born in other miscellaneous countries outside the United States. Twenty-two percent of the workforce were officers, 57 percent were members of the deck crew, 20 percent were members of the cabin crew, and 1 percent were independent proprietors, such as barkeepers and barbers. Men dominated the labor force, but about 2 percent of the workers were chambermaids. This diversity provided a complex social setting for African American resistance and oppression. (See Tables A1-A3).

Although only a small percentage of the region's overall slave population worked on steamboats, river slaves were nearly as numerous as many other notable groups of nonagricultural slave workers. While figures for the western region are not available, Robert Starobin argued that the southern iron industry employed approximately 10,000 slaves, the hemp and tobacco industries each employed 15,000 slaves, and the cotton and woolen mills employed 5,000 slave workers.[18] Though estimating the number of maritime workers is difficult, it seems likely that the number of slaves working on the inland rivers, particularly the Mississippi River system, equaled the number working in Atlantic coastal and deep-sea sailing trades.[19]

The relatively small number of slave and free black Mississippi River workers that labored on steamboats at any one time does not adequately reflect the overall importance of this work to the African American community, however. Most steamboat workers labored on the river for a few years in their young adulthood before moving on to other jobs. According to the 1850 St. Louis census, the average age of slave and free black steamboat workers was twenty-six.[20] While older slaves were sometimes used by employers in other southern industries to provide continuity and technical skills in mixed slave and free labor forces, the difficulty of steamboat work led to regular turnover and more African Americans introduced to the workforce. Over a period of ten years in the late antebellum period, as many as 20,000 African Americans labored on the western rivers.

One of the most important characteristics of slave and free black rivermen, and the larger river labor force, was urban residence. By living in St. Louis, William Wells Brown was typical of other rivermen and -women. The dramatic population growth of western cities, and the rise to prominence of urban-based western manufacturers and merchants, made western cities natural home ports from which steamboat owners could simultaneously ship crews and contract with shippers.[21] Just as eastern cities supplied the sailors for the country's ocean ships, western cities supplied the region's inland mariners. Officers most easily mustered crews, which sometimes totaled over 100 diversely skilled persons, in large cities such as New Orleans, St. Louis, Nashville, Louisville, Mobile, and Cincinnati. To a lesser extent, smaller cities such as Memphis, Evansville, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and St. Paul emerged as key labor markets. "I have lived here [in New Orleans] all my life," swore free mulatto Isole' D' arcole' in a typical statement from steamboat workers.[22]

Slaves and free black steamboat workers who lived in rural areas or smaller towns often traveled to cities to enter the new urban labor markets. Free black steamboatman Nelson Collins, for example, lived in Paducah but reported getting work in Louisville and New Orleans. Most enslaved steamboatmen migrated to city levees in New Orleans, Louisville, and St. Louis from small towns with their masters, who hired them out on steamboats.[23] A smaller number got work in rural areas. Former Tennessee plantation slave Will Long remembered, "W'en times wuz slack on the plantation, ole Marse 'ud hire me out ter de boats dat wukked up an' down de big ribber."[24]

The several thousand slaves that worked at any one time on western steamboats at midcentury comprised an important part of the urban workforce. In 1850, for example, 5,442 slaves lived in Louisville, just over 17,000 slaves lived in New Orleans, and only 2,656 slaves lived in St. Louis.[25] That 441 slave river workers were reported to be at St. Louis's dock at one time suggests that steamboat owners were probably some of the most important slave employers in that city. Similarly, the over 1,000 free black river workers in 1850 made up a sizable percentage of the employed male population in western cities. Most large cities housed a hundred or more free black river workers.[26] When the total number of free black river workers is compared to the small populations of free blacks in these cities it is clear that the river industry was an important employer for free blacks as well, especially for men. For instance, Louis C. Hunter argues that in Cincinnati, river work occupied 20 percent of the employed male free black workforce. Another survey of 1850 St. Louis found that nearly one-third of that city's employed free black males worked on the river.[27]

The history of the slave Mississippi is an urban history, but it is also a story of work in a racialized industry. William Wells Brown's exclusion from Twain's pilothouse was typical of other African American steamboat workers. African Americans were nearly entirely excluded from officer positions (captains, clerks, mates, engineers, and pilots).[28] Engineers' and pilots' professional organizations did not begin formally excluding African Americans until the postbellum period, but they had been barring them from the beginning of the steamboat era. Native-born whites dominated the higher-ranking positions through nepotism. Officers often recruited cub pilots, strikers (apprentice engineers), and second clerks from the sons of relatives and friends in riverside communities. "The minister's son became an engineer," Twain wrote. "The doctor's and the postmaster's sons became 'mud clerks'; the wholesale liquor dealer's son became the barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots."[29]

Below the pilothouse, African Americans worked in the cabin and deck crews, but more slaves than free blacks labored in deck positions.[30] Former slave Henry Clay recalled that "us negro boys worked as roustabouts to load and unload and [to] keep the fire going."[31] Just south of St. Louis, the traveler Charles Mackay noticed that "the crew and stokers were all negro slaves."[32] On the upper Mississippi, the Englishmen Arthur Cunynghame commented, "On board the Lucy Bertram, many of the waiters and a large portion of the crew, including all the firemen, were slaves."[33] The cabin crew was much smaller than the deck crew, but African Americans were particularly concentrated there. African Americans, mostly free blacks, filled about half of these jobs on the western rivers. Gender and class diversified the African American cabin population in ways that were not evident on deck. Free black stewards and barbers made two or three times as much money as common laborers, wages that earned them respect in riverside communities. While barbering was common on only the larger boats, few steamers could go without the labors of a chambermaid or two. Laboring above the river of deckhand masculinity, these women helped construct the homelike atmosphere that captains promised to their cabin passengers. African American rather than white women were favored for these jobs because they were particularly associated with domestic service. Edward and Herbert Quick wrote that African American chambermaids "gradually supplanted" white chambermaids during the antebellum period.[34] In 1850, of the 85 chambermaids working on the 93 St. Louis steamboats mentioned above, 22 (26 percent) were slaves, 41 (48 percent) were free blacks, and only 22 (26 percent) were native whites or European immigrants.[35]

Several factors contributed to the concentration of African Americans in service positions. The belief among native whites, both in the South and in the lower North, that African Americans were particularly suited to fill these jobs was probably the most important factor. These prejudices most likely influenced the hiring practices of boat officers. As one early free black riverman put it, "They [officers] wanted the people traveling on their boat to be served by one whose origin was unmistakable."[36] The lack of suitable alternatives to African American labor also encouraged the hiring of black workers. European immigrants often did not have the skills to work effectively in these positions. Nearly all African Americans spoke English, and many had experience working in hotels and restaurants. The preferences of African Americans may also have contributed to their sizable representation in service positions. A St. Louis Globe-Democrat article claimed that among antebellum African Americans, "the waiters and barbers of the boat regarded themselves as immeasurably superior to the laborers on the first deck, and looked down on them with sovereign contempt."[37] Though working in such close proximity with whites had many drawbacks, good cabin tips and freedom from the most backbreaking labor and the most ritualized forms of labor discipline made these desirable positions compared to the alternatives.

While white workers often resorted to nepotism to secure the best jobs, slaves and free blacks navigated their own pathways to work. For free blacks, like for other laborers, getting work often meant being subjected to a levee shape-up, during which mates or stewards chose workers from the masses of laborers that congregated around steamboat landings. In the nineteenth century, the urban labor market had gradually supplanted the more family- and neighborhood-oriented labor pools that had long characterized the more agrarian-based flatboat economy. Free blacks who knew boat officers personally had an easier time securing berths, and recommendations from other common laborers could help as well, but in the industrial era, anonymity in labor relations increasingly became the rule. The market for slaves, in contrast, remained more individualized and personal. While, in some cases, steamboat officers owned the slaves who worked from them, in most cases, they leased slaves on behalf of boat owners from riverside masters, often people with whom they had other business dealings.[38] These leases could sometimes be a way for plantation owners to rid themselves of a troublesome slave. One Louisiana master leased out a slave because he "had a low opinion of him." The master complained that "he was addicted to drinking and was quarrelsome," and said he did not "wish him to work amongst his other negroes."[39]

Slave leases are good indications of how steamboat work depended on the rhythms of commerce. Fluctuations in labor demand generally corresponded to the agricultural cycle, with greater need for workers in the spring and the fall than at other times of the year.[40] Still, the labor requirements of steamboats did not fluctuate as much as those of the more seasonal flatboats that continued to ply the Mississippi during the antebellum years. The St. Louis merchant James Kennerly's leasing records, for example, suggest that steamboat officers demanded slaves in all seasons. He wrote in his diary on September 21, 1836, that he "called on Capt. Joe Small to hire negroes."[41] On October 18 of that year he recorded that the "Vandalia came up and my negroes [were] on board."[42] In 1837 he recorded receiving payments from steamboat owners in February, May, and July.[43] While other masters no doubt leased their slaves intermittently, for Kennerly, leasing steamboat slaves was a year-round proposition.

William Wells Brown worked intensively for several years on steamboats, which was typical of steamboat slaves. Steamboat leases suggest that slaves often accumulated extensive work experience during their youth. For example, the slave Joseph Jackson testified in federal court in 1863 that he spent two years on the Louisville alone.[44] Judy Taylor recalled that she had spent ten years as a slave chambermaid.[45] Another slave Henry Crawhion recalled that as soon as he was able to work his master hired him to a steamboat and that he "mainly followed steamboating" until his escape some years later.[46] The master of the Louisiana slave Wesley Holmes testified that between 1849 and 1854 "most of the time he [Wesley] was hired on steamers plying in the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers running from Louisville to New Orleans."[47] A New Orleans levee worker reported in another 1858 case that the slave Baptiste "was a steamboat hand" and that he "never knew him to be employed any where else but in a boat."[48] The account books of James Rudd, a prominent Louisville merchant who leased slaves to steamboats, further illustrates the extensive work experience some steamboat slaves accumulated. One slave, listed as "Big George," spent most of 1853, 1856 and 1859 on the river. Another slave, listed as "Little Charley," spent nearly the entire 1853-60 period working on river steamers.[49]

The African American workers discussed in this book are important in one sense because their occupational experiences were unique compared to those of plantation laborers, urban workers, and deep-sea maritime workers, all of whom they interacted with during their laborers. Their lives thus add richness to our existing knowledge of African American life during slavery. But while steamboats were a distinctive place to work, part of what defined workers' experience on them was their constant contact with society on the riverbank. They spent time in cities and journeyed to and from rural areas. The thousands of blacks who arrived in New Orleans landed at the intersection of domestic and international commerce and thus were at a crucial nexus of the Atlantic world. African American steamboat workers connected slave and free black communities through their jobs and thus were vital to building a pan-Mississippi African American culture.

Despite the close economic ties between the lower North (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), the upper South (Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri), and the deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas), there has been no attempt to write the history of slavery in this region from the perspective of this economic and social system. By focusing on the commercial world of the western rivers, this book illustrates the way in which slavery in the West was shaped by its link to the western river system and its workers. While slaves in this vast region differed in many ways, they all had contact with steamboats and thus were connected to a broader western African American world. The perils and possibilities that came with access to the river world were a common element in the experience of the region's slaves. Historians have studied urban slavery, plantation slavery, and industrial slavery, but they have not fully explored the lives of inland transportation workers. Flourishing work on Atlantic slave and free black sailors has made important inroads into this deficiency, but inland workers still have not received the attention they deserve.[50] Western slave and free black steamboat workers, who composed the largest portion of these inland mariners, have received scant mention in the vast literature on the slave experience.[51]

This book highlights the work experience of African American river workers, their pan-Mississippi world, and the actions they took to better their condition. Chapter 1 places slave and free black river workers in the context of the rapidly growing western economy. It illustrates their role as connectors between disparate slave and free black communities. Chapter 2 looks at the demanding work culture of the steamboat and emphasizes both the opportunities and the dangers of river work. Chapter 3 explores how contact between the inland maritime culture of the western steamboat shaped the world of slavery. It argues that the river industry produced a slave market that destroyed African American families. But it also suggests that African Americans used the Mississippi River system to construct covert information networks that maintained family contact. Chapter 4 shows that contact between African American river workers and the larger slave community also facilitated networks of river escape. The discussion of the ways African Americans used the river to expand the slave community is continued in Chapter 5, which moves from large-scale patterns of racial struggle to the story of how one group of African American lawbreakers used the river to fashion rascal identities. Chapter 6 analyzes how the African American steamboat work culture, and its relationship to the survival mechanisms of riverside African Americans, changed during the emancipation process. It argues that with the end of slavery, the river system became less of a highway to freedom, but it still remained crucial to the economic health of African American communities along the inland waterways. The radicalism of the slavery era continued with the efforts of African American steamboat workers to reform the horrible conditions that defined their experience on western steamboats. In the context of the widespread efforts by freedpeople to redefine labor processes throughout the South, these laborers worked to defend and define their freedoms on the decks of steamboats.

Western rivers provided slaves and free blacks with opportunities to forge local, regional, national, and even international communities. Beneath the pilothouse, slave and free black steamboat workers worked to construct their own world beyond the sight of masters, captains, and plantation owners. Working in conjunction with riverside communities, they made steamboats an important site of contestation in both the eras of slavery and freedom. Riverboats have long been considered an icon of American success in the early phases of the industrial revolution. The romanticism of Life of the Mississippi is just one manifestation of how most white nineteenth-century Americans embraced the steamboat without considering the struggles that took place on their decks. Slaves and free blacks, and then their postemancipation sons and daughters, countered this myth and sought to make steamboats their own.