Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom by Robert Gudmestad (review)

The Mississippi River network, stretching from Alabama to Montana, plays an enormous role in American history. Robert Gudmestad sets out in this well-researched and concise volume to tell that story as it relates to the steamboat in the antebellum South. He covers the basics well, including the common use of flatboats and keelboats before the southern steam revolution started ca.1817-19. The rise of trade and transportation in the region became self-feeding during the steam era, as moving between places on the rivers frequently went from months to only days. From 1820 to 1860, steam vessels carried more freight on the brown and green waters of the rivers and coasts than did the total of all of the South's railroads, despite the exceptional growth of the latter in the 1850s. Five of the South's seven largest cities would grow up on the western waters. By the 1880s, however, the railroads had all but ended the use of steamboats.

Historians have too often overlooked the technical element in plantation agriculture, which was every bit as crucial as labor and agronomics, as the vital role of the steamboat in the Old South reveals. Gudmestad illustrates that steamboats were built in 141 different landings, villages, towns, and cities to whatever size fit the cargo and the waters, and almost always with local capital, including from planters whom tradition claims had a disdain for technology. Some vessels even were designed to carry vast amounts of cargo, something akin to the modern oceangoing freighters.

The ships also carried circuses and other forms of entertainment. Showboats became part of the river mystique, as did the steamboat races that added the thrill of going aground or the ship blowing up. The latter made popular fodder for the press. Steamboats could land almost anywhere, giving people and products access unlike anything known before. News, in different forms, often moved faster on water in these boats than by the regular mail and to places never reached by the telegraph. Travel in the best boats could be as elegant, and as expensive, as anything of the time but for most passengers the boats were overcrowded and seedy, with passengers frequently including gamblers, thieves, and conmen. The boats became popularly, although wrongly, associated with spreading cholera and yellow fever. Accommodations were largely separated by gender but even more by race.

Steamboats made cotton more profitable and fueled its expansion in the West while creating support economies, such as wood cutting. On a steamboat all jobs but manual labor went to whites, although these vessels offered some African Americans a means of obtaining freedom legally or by escaping from slavery. Black chambermaids especially feared sexual assault as, because of their race, they were not legally allowed to testify against whites. Barbers and bartenders were private contractors who rented space. The deckhands and roustabouts had dangerous jobs made worse by racial tensions, low pay, and physically demanding work.

The history of steamboats has illustrative moments as well as a broad importance. Henry Miller Shreve, for whom Shreveport takes its name, made important improvements on some of the first steamboats. In 1817, he played a major role in breaking up the monopoly of Robert Fulton's and Robert Livingston's Ohio Steam Boat Navigation Company. Steamboats became prisons and tools for ethnic cleansing during the Indian removals of the 1830s. Their speed and efficiency in those times saved lives despite horrific overcrowded conditions and the hundreds of people, most of them Creeks, killed with the wreck of the Monmouth in 1837. Specific steamboat incidents fueled debates over regulations, environmental concerns, and national infrastructure needs.

Gudmestad wrote that this book came out of his frustration with being unable to find a work on steamboats in the South's rivers other than the Mississippi. In his own research, however, he found little about travel on the lesser rivers. This book does have an extensive bibliography and useful tables...