Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans

The Freedom of Rivers and Roads

When the enslaved fugitive John Brown slipped ashore at New Orleans in early 1850, he knew he needed advice. He was lost. Brown had decided to make a bid for freedom after the death of a dear friend, John Glasgow, a British sailor who had been sold into captivity and who had taught him “to love and to seek liberty.” He began his journey away from Milledgeville, Georgia, buoyed by his familiarity with the state’s geography. From his hiding place in the forest adjacent to his owner’s plantation, a man he described as savage, Brown resolved to go west. “I had come to know the road to Cass-ville, because we slaves used to have to take bacon to the Altoonah gold mines to sell to the miners. Cass-ville must be quite two hundred miles from Milledgeville, and I knew every step of the road.” That knowledge carried Brown a part but not all of the way to freedom, and by the time he set float down the Tennessee River on a hand-built raft, he had exhausted his knowledge of Southern terrain. The raft nearly collided with a steamboat on reaching the Ohio River, and he decided to abandon it on the riverbank. Talking his way onto the steamboat Neptune by convincing the captain that he was traveling to meet his owner, Brown used his time aboard to replenish his dwindling store of information, “endeavor[ing],” he said, “to ascertain” from other passengers how he might get from New Orleans to England. Brown soon realized that his fellow passengers had taken advantage of his “ignorance and simplicity” to deliberately mislead him. In a cruel jest, the men had told Brown that England was no more than a step or two away from the Crescent City. When the Neptune stopped along the New Orleans shore, the sight of legions of enslaved laborers sweating over piles of cargo needing to be moved made Brown’s heart sink, and he began to “suspect that all was not right.” Hurrying away from the Neptune, Brown “made for a place where [he] saw a number of cotton-waggons, tended by the drivers, who were all, or nearly all, of my own colour,” determined to ask them “a few questions.” The answers were awful to a man who wanted nothing more than to get away. “I was in the very heart of slavery, and further off from England than when I was in Georgia.”

Still, piecing together what he got from the black teamsters as well as the black watermen who also congregated in large numbers at New Orleans, Brown gathered “a good deal [more] information” about the “opportunities thus afforded me” and how he might obtain his ultimate goal. That time was not long in coming. Less than a year after leaving his master’s plantation, this man, who had been born into slavery, subjected as a child to the domestic slave trade, beaten, abused, locked up, and lied to, followed the Mississippi River to its origins and crossed into Canada, bound, as he said, for “the North Star.” From there, Brown inched his way east. Picking up whatever jobs he could to pay his passage, he eventually slipped back to the US side of the border, departing Boston for Liverpool in the summer of 1850. “After a surprising run of fifteen days,” Brown at last reached his long-dreamed-of destination, safely landing where his dear departed friend, John Glasgow, had “left his wife and children so many years before.”

Black teamsters and their counterparts, the black watermen, spent their days coursing over the region’s rivers and roads in their wagons and boats, hauling everything from crates of apples and casks of wine to sides of beef, boots, shoes, and astonishing quantities of the South’s great staples. They moved back and forth across the Southern interior, stitching hinterland to ocean shore, cities to plantations, mountains to plains, and south to north. And as they floated, paddled, or drove their wagons, enslaved teamsters and boatmen kept their eyes and minds wide open. Although what they came to see, know, and believe was a function of their individual routes as well as the mode of propulsion (steamboats and wagons proceeded by different routes and paces), no boatman or teamster was left unaffected by their experiences moving slavery’s goods. Getting the crops to market and getting the goods home changed American history by changing America’s enslaved.

Watermen were not the first to whom Brown turned when he needed advice, but they would have been a good choice. The rivers, bays, and bayous of the American Southeast teemed with river traffic. In the decades before the introduction of Robert Fulton’s steam engine, the traffic was composed of rafts, keelboats, canoes, and other vessels powered by water, wind, or human hand. That changed in the second decade of the nineteenth century when Fulton, Henry Shreve, and others launched the nation’s first steamboats. Eagerly sought after by planters who yearned for more efficient and cheaper ways of moving their crops to market and bringing finished goods home, steamboats, with their ability to run against as well as with river currents, fast became a regional favorite. By the 1820s, hundreds of varying tonnages could be found huffing their way along inland waterways, and as many as 2,169 had been built for use in the Southern interior by 1860. To stay afloat, these boats needed not just steam but crews too, and from the beginning, enslaved people figured among them. While exact numbers remain evasive, circumstantial evidence suggests that by the mid-nineteenth century enslaved people represented somewhere between 12 and 50 or more percent of the South’s inland crews. Mostly leased out by their owners to the shipping companies and captains who needed their labor, black watermen and -women were regular fixtures on the region’s vessels. They crewed the tenders that guided oceangoing vessels in and out of the South’s harbors, commanded the canoe-like pirogues favored by low-country planters in Georgia and South Carolina, poled rafts and other shallow-drafted vessels across the limestone ledges that otherwise made many inland waterways unnavigable, and manned the keelboats that continued well into the nineteenth century to carry produce from Kentucky and Missouri to the merchants of New Orleans. Even Solomon Northup, a free black Northerner whose story of having been kidnapped into slavery continues to captivate American audiences, spent time aboard the Deep South’s boats, earning himself the sobriquet “the Fulton of Indian Creek” for his work ferrying sawed lumber from his owner’s mill to its market. Such was enslaved people’s ubiquity on the South’s inland waterways that when the Colonel Crossman exploded near New Madrid, Missouri, in the mid-1850s, the Scottish poet and geologist Charles Mackay was not at all surprised that the bulk of the crew had been “all negro slaves.” Though no fan of the practice (he blamed the black crew for the accident), Mackay also knew that in the late-antebellum South, there were no easy alternatives for what he judged a “deplorable” practice.

Although the vast majority of these enslaved crews were concentrated on the lowest rungs of shipboard society, enough of them rose so high in rank as to stand out in a society otherwise known for its obstinate color line and widespread racial oppression. Chief among these were the enslaved men who became pilots. Holding down a job second in importance only to that of the captain, men like Robert Smalls-who in May 1862 leveraged his years of experience piloting the Planter in and around Charleston harbor into freedom for himself, his family, and friends-were wholly responsible for guiding their vessels safely through an always changing waterscape made hazardous by half-hidden logs, sandbars, shoals, and navigable channels that never seemed to stay in one place. Decreed “by far the most difficult post aboard a western steamboat” by the author of an 1832 immigrants’ guide, pilots served as “navigator and steersman combined,” delivering craft and cargo safely to their next destination. Theirs was a practical knowledge, amassed over years of working on the water in all seasons, in all weathers, and at all times of the day. The position also elevated its holder to a special place of authority in the shipboard order. Rising far above what an English visitor, Charles Lanman, described as the majority of the “subordinates on board,” pilots had to answer only to their captains. In contravention of slavery’s more typical racial order, enslaved pilots gave orders to those below, handled money, kept records, paid expenses, collected debts, dealt out discipline, and made snap decisions on which cargoes and lives depended. Pilots were, says a recent historian of antebellum steamboat life, “the aristocrats of the river trade.”

Right below them stood the enslaved stewards who surfaced regularly in travelers’ accounts, perhaps as a consequence of their public-facing positions. The maritime equivalent of a shop supervisor, stewards exercised wide latitude in logistical matters. Mediating between officers and crew on the one hand and passengers on the other, stewards decided who could stay aboard and who had to go, where people would sleep, what and when they would eat, and how to keep general order. Stewards also purchased the ship’s provisions, a job that put them in regular contact with grocers and vendors along their routes; supervised the waiters, cooks, and cabin crew; and hired replacements as the need arose. On the steamboat that carried the English novelist Harriet Martineau south from St. Louis to New Orleans, the steward had charge of the mattresses on which deck passengers slept, distributing them until the supply ran out. He also played the part of shipboard guard, warning those who occupied the staterooms to keep their doors locked to reduce the instances of theft, a risk on boats that were routinely overrun at stops by vendors and visitors. When boarding passengers threatened to overwhelm the crew, stewards could also be seen pitching in to help their pursers collect passengers’ tickets and direct the disposition of luggage. On the Eldorado and others, it was the steward who examined the tickets and free papers of any black person attempting to board, a job that could force enslaved stewards to choose between assisting black fugitives or, as happened aboard the El Paso during a routine stop at St. Louis, informing their captains about suspected stowaways as well as about any of the rest of the crew who may have aided them in their escapes.

No matter where an enslaved person stood in a shipboard hierarchy, all were subject to a job that was neither easy nor safe. In an era when the maritime mortality of enslaved crew may have been as high as one in four, going aboard in any capacity posed risks unknown to most of those who worked on the land. Accidents, death, dismemberment, and disaster were part of maritime life. Prone to explosion, the steamboats that plied the South’s rivers were uniquely perilous, killing and wounding hundreds of people each year. Sensitive high-pressure engines that could blow for any number of reasons were not the only problem. Snags brought boats down, likewise high water, low water, collision, fire, and, in the winter, chunks of floating ice. Boats occasionally ran into each other too, splitting hulls and spilling their contents into the water, a sequence of horrors that cost a black crewman aboard the Rainbow his life. While the dangers presented by natural or mechanical hazards did not discriminate by ancestry, condition, or class, enslaved crew also faced their own brand of threats. Time being money in the hurried world of steamboat travel, eighteen-hour days were not out of the ordinary. Add to that poor food and near constant exposure to all the environmental elements, illness as well as accident was rife among the enslaved people who worked on the water. The latter could be especially lethal. Something as simple as a misstep, a wet deck, or, in Ned’s case, the slippery edge of a paddle wheel he had been sent to repair, could send exhausted and overworked crew plunging to their deaths. A “very awkward looking hogshead” of tobacco doomed Ben when it broke loose and rolled over his body. “She [the boat] was running, and he was passing,” Henry Taylor said of a spinning flywheel and the slave who met his death beneath it.

The dangers were most acute for those who occupied the lowest rungs of shipboard order. Subordinate to anyone else on the craft except, perhaps, enslaved servants who came aboard with their owners, and trapped in what amounted to a floating cage, enslaved deckhands, cabin crew, and firemen were vulnerable to all manner of personal and professional abuse. That most of them had been leased from their owners offered some protection (the wanton destruction of another man’s property could easily become a costly lawsuit). But not all ship’s officers agreed that “the niggers are worth too much to be risked,” and enslaved crew were frequently subjected to ill-advised orders, assigned impossible or dangerous jobs, and made the butt of cruel and insulting jokes. In an era when courts typically supported a shipmaster’s authority and, as one former waterman complained, “it was impossible to obtain anything like justice, where capital was the defendant,” even judges were sometimes appalled at the treatment enslaved workers received at the hands of senior and free crew. “Gross negligence,” a Florida judge called an order issued by a mate to a deckhand to “jump on board . . . from a flat-boat,” a gymnastic feat that required leaping upward from one moving object to another. The Louisiana Supreme Court was just as scornful of an incident that involved a mate ordering a slave to carry sacks of corn across a rain-slicked plank that was suspended between two boats swaying alongside the New Orleans wharf. “Defective, insecure and dangerous, and indicated a want of ordinary care, attention and foresight” was how a panel of judges described the flimsy and poorly secured “staging” that flipped Tom to his death.

In the high-stakes game of antebellum inland steam transportation, tyranny was endemic. “Steamboat officers did what seemed good in their own sight, with none to molest or make them afraid,” wrote John O’Connor of those he encountered. Described by another traveler as “a fresh water variety of the old Sea Kings,” steamboat captains “neither dreaded courts of justice nor were they one whit restrained by fear of public opinion, from committing the most brutal outrages on inoffensive persons placed in their charge.” The more ferociously a ship’s officer laid into the crew, the more his superiors appreciated him. Regular “screamer[s]” such men were called, and they often received the highest wages in exchange for the terror they inflicted. On vessels where violence was not only condoned but liberally rewarded, many found themselves frequently on the receiving end of the kind of “whipping beating wounding maiming and ill-treating” that drove an enslaved Georgian named Howard to fling himself to his death in the Savannah River. “Shameful atrocities,” recalled another crewman of such grisly and desperate scenes.