The entrenched notion that the antebellum South was neither modern nor capitalist has finally begun to give way before the insistent and compelling critique of a new wave of scholarship. Robert Gudmestad’s Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom is a welcome addition to this much-needed revisionist argument. Gudmestad has written an engaging, concise, and comprehensively researched book, well supported with tables, appendices, and detailed descriptions of life and labor onboard the steamboats that “became one of the South’s most important businesses and put the interior South on the leading edge of technological sophistication in early nineteenth-century America” (p. 10).

Gudmestad began this project after reading Louis C. Hunter’s “treasure of a book” (p. xi), Steamboats on the Western Rivers (1949). Although finding it an excellent economic and technological history, Gudmestad was frustrated that it had little to say about slavery, plantations, and Southern culture. Gudmestad admirably seeks to redress these omissions with new (although the reader is rarely left with a sense of how new) analyses of slavery, class, culture, race, gender, and Indian removal. He explores how steamboats, economics, and perceptions of nature transformed the environment of the Mississippi Valley and made the Cotton Kingdom possible. In the end, he argues, the fast-money, high-risk, explosive (often literally) steamboat boom that helped create the Cotton Kingdom also contributed to its undoing. The success of steamboats had discouraged the construction of railroads, and as rail increasingly drew the Midwest closer to the North and the Southwest with the South, sectional tensions rose. This new attempt to explain the Civil War ultimately remains unconvincing, and was probably unnecessary. The book’s greatest problems, however, stem from a kind of technological essentialism. Riverboats are the objects of this book’s study, but they also often seem to be the primary subjects, agents directly responsible for historical change.

The first chapter, on Southern steamboat entrepreneurs, tells the story of how Southern middle-class whites—merchants, lawyers, planters, and “men on the make”—took local control of steamboat lines and maintained a high degree of local ownership throughout the antebellum period. Gudmestad recounts the rise and fall of the monopolistic, politically connected Ohio Steam-Boat Navigation Company, whose monopoly was broken by the heroic steamboat entrepreneur Henry Shreve. A recurring and central figure in this book, Henry Shreve’s success at destroying a monopoly to open Southwestern waters to increased traffic may appear to readers as an act anticipating his later fame as the inventor of the snag-clearing Heliopolis and the man most responsible for expanding and smoothing the geography of Southern steamboats.

Low costs, quick profits, and speculation in an “unproven technology” (p. 9) made the steamboat boom easily fit into the Southern political economy. Gudmestad clearly understands that industry and slavery were perfectly compatible—he lists the cotton gin, steam-powered sugar mills, ironworks, and other examples of industrial slavery—and insists that steamboats “made slaves more efficient and more valuable” (p. 29). In one of the final chapters, “The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom,” Gudmestad shows how steamboat operators and cotton planters mutually constituted the Cotton Kingdom through a newly possible division of labor, increased and intensified production, expanded markets, and global integration. Steamboats, he argues, increased the value of slave labor by creating markets for cotton and for renting slaves during the off-season.

In the next section of the book, Gudmestad weaves an impressive array of primary and secondary sources into reconstructing the social and cultural worlds of workers and passengers aboard Southern steamboats. These were hierarchical worlds realized architecturally in the stacked decks of the boats. The social worlds of steamboats at once reproduced and threatened the social orders of race, class, and gender of the terrestrial world. Working on a steamboat might allow enslaved or free people of color much greater mobility, the chance to escape, and the means of building black networks of information and community across the Cotton Kingdom. Steamboats remained deeply racist spaces, however, with clear racial segregation and tensions among white and black workers. For white men, steamboats became spaces where class dissolved—often around the saloon and gambling—into rituals of equality and masculine solidarity. For women, though, even for white women, gender norms remained rigidly and spatially enforced. In other words, although Gudmestad does not put it so, antebellum steamboats were important sites in the production of a democratic white patriarchy.

The fourth chapter, on the importance of steamboats for the process of Indian removal, is both one of the most original contributions and where Gudmestad gets most tripped up by his apparent framing of steamboats as agents. Despite the famous Cherokee Trail of Tears, the vast majority of removal (he estimates around 75 percent) took place on steamboats; Gudmestad argues that white cultural understandings of steamboats as efficient and modern helped to make removal seem more civilized. In reality, though, the forced steamboat migrations were at least as deadly and alienating as the better-known overland removal. This is an important story, and needs to be told.

The issue is in the way Gudmestad seems to make it really all about steamboats. “Steamboats,” he writes, “gave shape to and made possible the economic exploitation and theft of Indian land” (p. 79). Steamers, it seemed, created the conditions, means, and limits of removal in what became Indian Territory. The process began when, as “steamers penetrated Indian lands, white settlement coiled around the Native Americans and began to squeeze” (p. 81). Then, because low rivers kept steamers out of Indian Territory, he writes, “Native Americans could be safely dumped into that space with little fear that whites would covet the land” (p. 79). In Gudmestad’s rendering, white supremacy figures as a constant, inevitable force of nature that steamers, seemingly acting on their own, directed across the continent.

Gudmestad is careful to say that there “is no question that Indian Removal would have taken place without riverboats” (p. 81). It is understandable that Gudmestad wants to avoid implying that steamboats caused Indian removal, but to suggest that removal was inevitable denies history, empire, and violence and replaces it with mechanical metaphors. At the very least, we need to be clear about who made removal happen and how deliberate and violent it was. The other problem arises when Gudmestad tries to show that steamboats could have fulfilled the vision of a more “efficient, relatively humane, and orderly” removal process if only army officers had possessed less of “a casualness toward the Indians’ health and welfare” (pp. 87–89). The awkward insistence that removal could have been more humane does not appear to be the product of an intentionally apologetic retelling of removal, but rather the result of trying to defend the neutrality of steamboats. There was no need. Steamboats were not moral agents, but the expression of social relations.

With more emphasis on social relations, change over time, and more attention paid to the “rise of the Cotton Kingdom,” Gudmestad could have avoided most of these pitfalls. There is no doubt that steamboats were critical technologies and social spaces in the production of the Cotton Kingdom and U.S. political economy, but Gudmestad’s largely reified conception of steamboats makes this history much harder to see.