| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.4 | The History Cooperative

*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. xv + 256 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $32.50.)
Studies of slavery in the United States have for decades shown that the peculiar institution was more complex and diverse in its practice than historians of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries indicated. Likewise, recent scholarship has examined how much control over their lives both slaves and free African Americans had in the antebellum slave kingdom. In Black Life on the Mississippi, Thomas C. Buchanan examines a small but interesting aspect of African American existence during the slavery era.	1
For much of the early-nineteenth century thousands of steamboats plied the waters of the country's major waterways, hauling freight and people. The Mississippi River played, of course, a huge role in intersectional commerce between the North and the South. Every year hundreds of steamboats sailed from southern ports heading to free states loaded with cotton and other local products, and they brought northern manufactured goods south on their return journeys. Many of the workers on board these Mississippi River steamboats were slaves and free blacks.	. . .

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