| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks and the Western Steamboat World. By Thomas C. Buchanan. (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xv plus 256 pp. $32.50).
Black Life on the Mississippi is an extremely well-executed project in social history. It extends recent work that has enriched our understanding of the diversity of slavery in the United States in space and over time. In this case, Thomas C. Buchanan reveals a previously neglected aspect of that experience: Black labor in the shipping industry on the Mississippi River.	1
Slaves and free Blacks were employed "often side by side" (20) on steamboats. Some differentiation did exist. The 2,000 to 3,000 slaves who worked on the southern river system tended to be concentrated in the deep south, worked on deck positions and found their on-land mobility severely restricted. The 1,000 to 1,500 free Blacks who also were employed on the boats tended to work further North, often in favorable crew positions, and though their off-boat freedom of movement was constrained, possessed a considerable degree of autonomy. Work on the western rivers, as Buchanan puts it, "provided slaves and free blacks with opportunities to forge local, regional and even international communities." According to him, "slave and free black steamboat workers worked to construct their own world beyond the sight of masters, captains and plantation owners" (17–8).	2
Steamboat work was of course arduous. Officers were, Buchanan reports, "obsessed with labor discipline" (54), a discipline imposed not infrequently with violence. Working conditions were "horrible" (58) and disease ever-present. In particular, black women working as chambermaids were at risk. As Buchanan puts it, "the dominance of African American women in these positions and the larger social context of rampant sexual abuse combined to make steamboats a harrowing work environment for African American women" (55). Black workers resisted these depredations as best they could. Nevertheless "what filled their day-to-day experience was backbreaking work" (79).	. . .

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