SOCIAL STUDIES – Students will learn the ways in which steamboats facilitated the enslavement of people and the ways in which they allowed for freedom of movement and, for some, escape to the Northern states.
Learning Objectives
- In Steamboats: Enslavement and Freedom, students will learn the role that steamboats played in the continued enslavement of black people in the United States after the importation of slaves was banned in 1808.
- Students will identify the ways in which work on steamboats provided for freedom of movement that sometimes led to escape.
Have students read the narrative below and assess with short answer questions provided at the end of this lesson. Extension activities can be found at the end of the lesson as well.
Student Reading
Estimates suggested that 500,000 to one million enslaved people were shipped via steamship or forced to walk from the Upper South — Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky — to labor on plantations in the Deep South between 1810 and 1865. This migration, that reshaped the country, created immense fortunes for slave traders, and ripped apart countless families, has come to be known as the Slave Trail of Tears or the Second Middle Passage.
More than ten million Africans were forcefully imported as part of the transatlantic slave trade between the 1600s and early 1800s. The majority went to the Caribbean and South America. At least 388,000 were brought to the United States before U.S. law banned importation in 1808. Slavery and the debates about its morality continued in the United States. The end of legal importation and the economic viability of cotton in the Deep South contributed to the development of a thriving internal slave trade.
The Mississippi River played a major role in the intersection of commerce between the North and the South. Hundreds of steamboats sailed from southern ports loaded with cotton and other local goods, and brought northern goods south upon return. Mississippi steamboats helped unite the nation by forming networks of people and goods, and supported the business of slavery by bringing cotton and slaves to market.
Slave children faced a thirty percent chance of being “sold downriver” during their lifetimes. The eighty-three enslaved people on board the Lafayette were shipped from an Alexandria, Virginia, slave market for sale in New Orleans, Louisiana. They were sold by the largest slave trading firm in the United States, Franklin & Armfield. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield started the firm in 1828.
Franklin and Armfield operated on such a large scale that they owned their own “slavers” or ships to transport the enslaved by sea. Although other sorts of “goods” were transported on these ships such as sugar, molasses, whiskey, and cotton, the primary use was for the transport of the enslaved. The firm annually exported between 1,000 and 1,200 enslaved persons to the Deep South. The firm at one point owned three slavers. One of the slavers was aptly named the Isaac Franklin and as the firm grew, they acquired two other slavers, the Uncas and the Tribune. The firm also made use of other slavers, according to newspaper advertisements. Owning a fleet of ships for business purposes was certainly not commonplace among many slave traders of the time.
This was instrumental to the success of the business. By cutting out the middleman, they saved on shipping costs. It also offered them “an advantage in the buying market.” The money that was saved on transportation allowed Franklin & Armfield to offer more for its purchases than did its competitors and still make a profit. They also compensated for losses by having a reliable shipping schedule that allowed them to attract more business, although their ships might not always sail at full capacity. This was a business innovation for the time. Whereas the ships initially sailed once a month, Franklin and Armfield increased embarkation from the Port of Alexandria to twice a month, a clear indication of the success of the firm.
The Mississippi River steamboats had a dual impact on black families. Steamships and what came to be known as the Second Middle Passage, separated families and caused immense suffering. These steamboats aided in the continued enslavement and trade of black people in America, but they also allowed for some freedom. William Wells Brown worked as a waiter and steward during his enslavement. He recalled “A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat is an occurrence so common, that no one, not even the passengers, appears to notice it, even though their chains clank at every step.” Traders often treated slaves like livestock: they were exposed to the elements, given few provisions, and subject to sale at any time. They were often chained together and forced to stand in their own excrement. The threat of disease constantly threatened slaves’s lives as well. The boat officers who lacked this type of cruelty faced the possibilities of slaves escaping or committing suicide.
Within the system, however, many free and enslaved blacks worked on Mississippi steamboats. These vessels enabled enslaved and free black river-workers to carry news of family and friends up and down the river. Black steamboat workers were part of a hidden slave communication network that was able to operate outside the view of slave masters and steamboat officers. While river capitalists and slave masters separated families, some slave and free black river workers were able to use their mobility to stay in touch with family members in home ports. Some made a little money through meager wages and tips, although many riverside masters prevented their slaves from keeping their wages. The luckiest found and took the opportunity and escaped to freedom.
In an article in Steamboat Bill, our precursor to PowerShips magazine, C. Bradford Mitchell details the history of black men working on steamboats in “Paddle Wheel Inboard.” On the Ocklawaha River in Florida in the late 19th century, river steamers often employed black pilots and captains to navigate the waterways. Since the deckhands and wheelmen were under the director of “the pilot on watch,” that meant that there must have been many times when the full responsibility of the steamer’s guidance rested upon one black pilot or wheelman. This practice was uncommon on Western Rivers and remarkable given the time and place. In other waters, black men were confined to the status of roustabout, waiter, or fuel passer.
William Wells Brown was born a slave around 1814 near Lexington, Kentucky. He moved around with his master before settling in St. Louis in 1827, where he was frequently hired out to local merchants and steamboat captains, including slave traders. Brown attempted escape three times, failing twice. A riverboat captain named Enoch Price bought Brown. In 1834, while docked in Cincinnati, Ohio, he finally escaped with the help of a Quaker man named Wells Brown. He took his name as a free man. He spent some years working on Lake Erie steamboats helping others escape into Canada. William Wells Brown became an avid abolitionist working with Frederick Douglass. He toured England lecturing. While there, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850. British abolitionists purchased his freedom in 1854 to ensure his safety when he returned to America. Upon his return, he published the first novel written by an African American, Clotel.
Robert Smalls escaped slavery on May 13, 1862 with a crew of fellow slaves posing as the captain of the C.S.S. Planter, a Confederate ship. Smalls navigated the cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family, and left the harbor, got past two Confederate checkpoints, including Fort Sumter. Once out of Confederate waters, the crew raised the white flag and surrendered to the Union fleet.
Smalls had sailed the South Carolina waters since his youth, serving as the ship’s “virtual pilot,” but since whites could only hold that rank, he was often the “wheelman.” Before the Civil War, Smalls wanted to purchase his family’s freedom. The price was $700 and he could not afford it. After his escape, however, Congress passed a private bill on May 30, 1862, authorizing the Navy to appraise the Planter and award Smalls and his crew half the proceeds for “rescuing her from the enemies of the Government.” Smalls received $1,500, although later the Naval Affairs Committee reported that his pay should have been substantially higher.
Smalls lobbied the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin enlisting black soldiers. After President Lincoln acted a few months later, it is said that Smalls recruited 5,000 soldiers himself. In October 1862, he returned to the Planter as pilot as part of Admiral Du Pont’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. According to the 1883 Naval Affairs Committee report, Smalls engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, S.C. Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war. Poetically, when the war ended in April 1865, Smalls was on board the Planter in a ceremony in Charleston Harbor. After the war, Robert Smalls served in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before watching his state roll back Reconstruction in a revised 1895 constitution that stripped blacks of their voting rights.
The flood of runaways to the Navy soon created concern about competition for jobs and the reality that the work these men did became associated with the work of black men. Navy commanders tried to reduce the potential for conflict by enforcing rigid segregation: eating, sleeping, and working in “checkerboard” shifts.
After Emancipation, black workers on the river sought to rid steamboats of the abuse they endured and defend their new rights to wages. Strikes and lawsuits took place in an industry that remained firmly dependent on black labor. Black workers continued laboring on steamboats during Reconstruction, but because of racial discrimination, often they held non-management positions like cabin crew as a steward or barber.
Steamboats: Enslavement and Freedom Short Answer Questions:
- What were some of the reasons behind the internal slave trade?
- How did this movement of people change the United States at the time?
- Describe the ways in which steamboat and river work provided for freedom and flexibility of free and enslaved workers.
- Explain the ways in which this freedom of movement allowed for escape for some enslaved people.
- Did the Civil War and Emancipation change the type of work black river laborers performed? Why or why not? Give examples.
Extension Activities:
Try the Forks of the Road Slave Market at Natchez lesson plan written by Karla Smith for Mississippi History Now. Use this lesson for grades 4 – 12.
Use “A Loathsome Prison:” Slave Trading in Antebellum Alexandria from the Black History Museum.
Additional Primary Sources
Research Slave Ship Manifests filed at New Orleans, 1807 – 1860 from the National Archives.
Track the Brig Uncas in Historic Newspapers from Alexandria.gov.
Examine the Ship Manifest for Schooner, Lafayette from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Read excerpts from William Wells Brown’s Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself, 1847 from the National Humanities Center for Resource Toolbox, The Making of African American Identity.
Additional Resources for Steamboats: Enslavement and Freedom
Check out PortSide New York’s African American Maritime Heritage program.
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).
“The Forks of the Road Slave Market at Natchez” by Jim Barnett and H. Clark Burkett, Mississippi History Now.
“Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears” by Edward Ball, Smithsonian Magazine.
Learn more about the Franklin and Armfield Office from the National Park Service.
“Alexandria to New Orleans: The Human Tragedy of the Interstate Slave Trade,” by Donald Sweig, Alexandria Gazette Packet, October, 2014.
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