Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (review)

Thomas C. Buchanan makes a welcome and significant contribution to the history of slavery and African Americans with this interesting and well-researched work. Just as historians have recognized significant variation in the slave experience on land, recent works have explored the presence and occupations of black Americans along the country's waterfronts. Until now, that meant examination of black watermen in Atlantic ports or along the Gulf of Mexico, but Buchanan reminds us of the extensive western steamboat economy sustained by slave and free black labor.

Buchanan is especially skillful in using statistical and anecdotal evidence. His years of archival research have turned up many relevant needles from the haystack of census, newspaper, and court records. He discusses the size of the black workforce, their specific occupations or areas of employment, and the significance of river work within the larger economy, and he includes some of the most relevant census data in appendices.

Buchanan begins his book by outlining the parameters of this world, including the rapidly growing western river economy and the places of black workers within it, the work culture of steamboats, and the influence of river culture on the institution of slavery in the region. The middle chapters examine how black river culture worked to maintain slave family communication, while contributing to escape networks and expanding the notion of community. At the same time, these chapters explore the varied methods of resistance used by blacks, from becoming river outlaws to work control. The final sections detail how the Civil War and emancipation brought change to the slave culture of the river, and Buchanan describes ways in which workers' lives were both transformed and remained the same during the war and Reconstruction.

There was overlap between river and ocean work, literally and figuratively. Steamboat workers might move from river work to ocean trade or back again in New Orleans, and like their deepwater counterparts, river workers experienced similar access to information, escape, and the wider world in general. Slaves who worked the western rivers were frequently hired out by owners in cities and towns along the waterways. Agents placed some slaves on boats, while others were "self-hires" who negotiated their own terms of work (22). Slave owners and ships' officers faced the usual problems of slaves in maritime employment—gaining necessary labor while restricting access to dangerous ideas and the potential for escape. Unlike that coastal world, however, women had access to employment on the rivers, and the chance to become a chambermaid on a steamboat gave some women a degree of mobility, freedom, and independence rare in the slave world. This did not come without hazard, however, because as Buchanan notes, "[c]hambermaids faced the harshest forms of violence" (55).

Steamboat work in general was dangerous and brutal, but the breadth of the black community employed was greater than in other maritime work. "Because porters, barbers, barkeepers, waiters, and chambermaids could find regular work in inland maritime employment, a broader cross-section of the African-American community was tied to the river and steamboats than was the case in deep-sea Atlantic trades" (59). White captains and officers controlled the vessels and when staffed by both black and white labor, segregation was the rule. Rivers, like the oceans and coastal waters, were frequent avenues of escape; vigilance by owners and captains—e.g., the use of their own riverside networks, restrictions on movements in port, heavy workloads, brutal punishments—were attempts to limit slave runaways. Western river culture also gave rise to its own marginal black community of "tricksters and Badmen, . . . river rascals" (147) who "sought to live outside the formal economy in a black river world where talents were rewarded and material gain was possible" (146). Their behavior was an important form of resistance.

The war and emancipation changed the black river world, but perhaps less...