gudmestad2011

@Book{ gudmestad2011,
    author = {Robert H. Gudmestad},
    title = {Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom},
    address = {Baton Rouge},
    publisher = {Louisiana State University Press},
    year = 2011,
}

Opens with the successful running of the Ohio falls by the New Orleans in 1811. Argues in the introduction that steamboats played a crucial role in the population boom that made western river cities like Louisville, St. Louis, and Mobile some of the nation’s most populous by 1860 (p. 5), while also reducing the region’s isolation from national and global markets, particularly through their ability to move upstream.

p. 5: “A decade after the first riverboat touched the New Orleans levee, over seventy steamers prowled the western waters.”

p. 12: “the 1,350 mile journey from New Orleans to Louisville” took “three to four months” by keelboat

p. 18-20: Interesting anecdote about the Natchez log books:

When the Panic of 1837 struck, a captain who had just come from Louisville scrawled, ‘Reports all Cincinnati & Louisville banks stopped!,’ to which another visitor added, ‘God Dam.’¹

p. 23, 28: Louisville also an important site of steamboat construction.

p. 27: steamboats as both “lucrative” and “risky” investments; but “residents of the Southwest poured money into riverboat construction, spending about $44 million between 1811 and 1860,” and they “possessed a number of advantages over railroads”

p. 31: “Whites worked the best jobs, like captain, pilot, engineer, or mate, and even the lowly position of clerk could be the path to upward mobility and a place in the middle class.”

p. 32: Most of the crew drew monthly wages instead of a yearly salary (though clerks often were salaried at around $750 to $800 a year)

p. 35:

Clerks completed the crew on the hurricane deck and were third in authority behind the captain and pilot. They were responsible for a steamer’s bookkeeping and served as the boat’s business manager. In their offices on the boiler deck, clerks recorded names, freight, passengers, and wages in a series of books. They bargained with shippers, set freight rates, solicited cargo, and did whatever other tasks were necessary to turn a profit. A clerkship was a highly coveted position because it had none of the physical difficulties associated with other jobs and clerks could parlay their experience and connections into a spot in the mercantile houses of river towns. … Young men who aspired to be clerks typically had some type of apprenticeship as second, or ‘mud,’ clerk. They learned their craft but paid the price of having to deliver small packages or bags to wharves or plantations in all types of weather. Even these jobs were much sought after. When J. W. Gosen bought the Autocrat, he joked at receiving “seventy five thousand applications for the No 2 clerk’s berth.”

p. 36: stewards oversaw the boiler deck and passengers, purchasing food and supervising meals, sometimes delegating jobs like waking passengers to “a cabin boy”

p. 38: “Cabin boys could be found on most steamboats and were employed doing all sorts of disagreeable tasks. Most were youths who hoped to become clerks, mates, or even pilots, and some had run away from home, perhaps lured by the romance of the river.” Example given of one who started at the age of 10.

p. 46: “‘It is a young man’s job, full of violence and change, of coming and going,’ an observer recorded.” Lack of privacy compensated by the “masculine” leisure pursuits in which coarse language, gambling, alcohol, jokes, and wordplay and stories were common. The culture spilled over into dockside taverns in places like Natchez’s “Under-the-Hill” (p. 47)

p. 47: masculine identity did not create unifying workers’ consciousness on board, however, because men were divided along skill and racial lines: example is the order in which men ate from the “grub pile”; “sharp words” and violence between white and black men common

p. 48-52: enslaved laborers on steamboats, provided opportunity for mobility and some wages, but also could be used as an instrument of containment by slaveholders. Indeead, the steamer was especially useful for slave traders trying to coordinate long-distance trade in human beings. Uncle Sam is mentioned as a boat that had long chains on the deck for shackling slaves (p. 56-57). See also buchanan2004.

p. 140: cotton from plantations in Alabama sometimes loaded via long chutes down the bluffs lining the river; bales then hooked and put on board by enslaved roustabouts

p. 144: the steamboat reoriented internal trade so that planters in Louisiana who wanted to sell, say, sugar or molasses, did not necessarily have to send via Atlantic vessels, but could find interior markets in Louisville

p. 152-153 talks about the importance of the Falls in making Louisville a center of steamboat and merchant traffic, since the city essentially joined two fleets of boats on either side of the falls with draymen who carried cargo between them through the city.