| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World. By Thomas C. Buchanan. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xvi, 256 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8078-2909-9.)
Slavery, freedom, and water are hot topics. W. Jeffrey Bolster and David S. Cecelski, for example, have profiled the importance of black sailors and watermen to the Atlantic world and southern slaveholding society. Thomas C. Buchanan's compelling study of the lives of slaves and free blacks on the Mississippi River is in a similar vein.	1
Buchanan reminds us that antebellum slaves' experience of space varied considerably. Compared to their plantation counterparts, slaves on Mississippi steamboats experienced a vastly expanded geography. Black steamboat workers—slave and free—linked the plantation South with the North, connecting towns up and down the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Life and labor on the steamboats was grueling, of course, but Buchanan emphasizes that slaves understood the peculiar advantages of river work. They pressed hard for wages and used the anonymity of ports to cross the color line or evade anxious masters. Slaves and free blacks also exploited the river and its commercial links to protect what bondage often split asunder—families. Here, Buchanan shows a fine eye for numbing irony. His examination of how slaves used the Mississippi River—watery site of countless separations—to maintain, bolster, and protect family integrity and ties is effective and original.	. . .

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