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

The entrenched notion that the antebellum South was neither modern nor capitalist has finally begun to give way before the insistent and compelling critique of a new wave of scholarship. Robert Gudmestad’s Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom is a welcome addition to this much-needed revisionist argument. Gudmestad has written an engaging, concise, and comprehensively researched book, well supported with tables, appendices, and detailed descriptions of life and labor onboard the steamboats that “became one of the South’s most important businesses and put the interior South on the leading edge of technological sophistication in early nineteenth-century America” (p. 10).

Gudmestad began this project after reading Louis C. Hunter’s “treasure of a book” (p. xi), Steamboats on the Western Rivers (1949). Although finding it an excellent economic and technological history, Gudmestad was frustrated that it had little to say about slavery, plantations, and Southern culture. Gudmestad admirably seeks to redress these omissions with new (although the reader is rarely left with a sense of how new) analyses of slavery, class, culture, race, gender, and Indian removal. He explores how steamboats, economics, and perceptions of nature transformed the environment of the Mississippi Valley and made the Cotton Kingdom possible. In the end, he argues, the fast-money, high-risk, explosive (often literally) steamboat boom that helped create the Cotton Kingdom also contributed to its undoing. The success of steamboats had discouraged the construction of railroads, and as rail increasingly drew the Midwest closer to the North and the Southwest with the South, sectional tensions rose. This new attempt to explain the Civil War ultimately remains unconvincing, and was probably unnecessary. The book’s greatest problems, however, stem from a kind of technological essentialism. Riverboats are the objects of this book’s study, but they also often seem to be the primary subjects, agents directly responsible for historical change.

The first chapter, on Southern steamboat entrepreneurs, tells the story of how Southern middle-class whites—merchants, lawyers, planters, and “men on the make”—took local control of steamboat lines and maintained a high degree of local ownership throughout the antebellum period. Gudmestad recounts the rise and fall of the monopolistic, politically connected Ohio Steam-Boat Navigation Company, whose monopoly was broken by the heroic steamboat entrepreneur Henry Shreve. A recurring and central figure in this book, Henry Shreve’s success at destroying a monopoly to open Southwestern waters to increased traffic may appear to readers as an act anticipating his later fame as the inventor of the snag-clearing Heliopolis and the man most responsible for expanding and smoothing the geography of Southern steamboats.

Low costs, quick profits, and speculation in an “unproven technology” (p. 9) made the steamboat boom easily fit into the Southern political economy. Gudmestad clearly understands that industry and slavery were perfectly compatible—he lists the cotton gin, steam-powered sugar mills, ironworks, and other examples of industrial slavery—and insists that steamboats “made slaves more efficient and more valuable” (p. 29). In one of the final chapters, “The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom,” Gudmestad shows how steamboat operators and cotton planters mutually constituted the Cotton Kingdom through a newly possible division of labor, increased and intensified production, expanded markets, and global integration. Steamboats, he argues, increased the value of slave labor by creating markets for cotton and for renting slaves during the off-season.

In the next section of the book, Gudmestad weaves an impressive array of primary and secondary sources into reconstructing the social and cultural worlds of workers and passengers aboard Southern steamboats. These were hierarchical worlds realized architecturally in the stacked decks of the boats. The social worlds of steamboats at once reproduced and threatened the social orders of race, class, and gender of the terrestrial world. Working on a steamboat might allow enslaved or free people of color much greater mobility, the chance to escape, and the means of...