Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World.

Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World. By Thomas C. Buchanan. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 256. $32.50, ISBN 0-8078-2909-9.)

Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World is a history of the culture and life created by blacks who worked on or traveled by steamboats on the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century. According to Thomas C. Buchanan, steamboating led to the development of a pan-Mississippi black community and culture. Largely relying on travel narratives, court records, and slave testimony from George P. Rawick's The American Slave (Westport, Conn., 1972-1979), Buchanan has woven a fascinating narrative of life, crime, culture, and work in the river industry. The Mississippi River and its major tributaries formed a highway of information and a highway to freedom. Information about freedom, loved ones, or jobs flowed through informal networks that stretched along these rivers from New Orleans to Cincinnati. The river and its steamboat workers were critical resources in assisting slaves to freedom. Buchanan has successfully integrated themes of black self-determination and resistance to the poor working conditions and race relations on board the steamers, throughout.

Black Life on the Mississippi could be used as a companion to W. Jeffrey Bolster's work on blacks in the maritime industry (Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail [Cambridge, Mass., 1997]). Buchanan heightens our appreciation of the contributions black river workers made to the Mississippi River society and culture. He succeeds in illuminating this group of black laborers who have not heretofore received adequate attention. In one of his strongest chapters, the author uses the "confessions" of a group of "rascals" to write a colorful depiction of those black fiver men who lived under the law and worked outside the formal economy and who used the Mississippi River to perpetuate crime and violence (chap. 5).

The author must be applauded for his painstaking quest for and recovery of the voices of black river workers--voices that appear to almost speak for themselves in this text. Even still, the work seems a bit unfinished. While Buchanan has done a great job discussing life inside the steamers, the reader is left desiring more information about the culture these workers carried onshore to boarding houses, brothels, taverns, and jails. An analysis of census data, city directories, or jail records might have provided greater insight about their lives at port. Much of the evidence for Black Life on the Mississippi is derived from the records of St. Louis and New Orleans, to the near exclusion of other western cities, like Cincinnati, that heavily relied on steamboat workers, creating a somewhat imbalanced view of this pan-Mississippi society. The countless racial riots that occurred on the docks of these port cities as a result of labor competition between river workers are noticeably absent. Finally, the epilogue leaves us with more questions than answers. For example, how did displaced steamboat workers transition to other fields as the river declined? Despite these problems, Buchanan has indeed illuminated how valuable the Mississippi steamboat industry was to the African American community. I expect his work to begin a conversation about black steamboating and river culture and to influence how historians write about black communities in riverside cities.

NIKKI TAYLOR

Vassar College