Robert Gudmestad

necessarily.

And so you can transport a lot of this corn, which of course is going to be grown in the Midwest, through these steamboats into the South.

And Southern plantations were dependent essentially on importing corn.

Now, some of them produced corn, but for the most part, the South is a net importer of corn.

But then also what you're getting is these people in the Midwest are buying products

And these products are being moved on railroads east to west across the Midwest part.

But a lot of them are coming from New Orleans and then up the river.

And so these steamboats, if you're in the United States today and you drive on an interstate, you see 18 wheelers constantly.

Yeah.

And in some ways, they're the commercial backbone of our economy in America, 2025, 2026.

Well, that's what the steamboats are doing.

They're bringing consumer goods.

They're bringing agricultural goods.

They're bringing all manner of things that are supercharging the economy, as you put it, up and down the rivers.

There's a sense of connectedness.

There is.

Obviously, slavery is an area of our history that...

is difficult to understand for modern Americans.

The fact that you would own, that you would buy, that you would sell someone, and that we don't understand the extent to which slavery was based on force and violence.

Physical violence, psychological violence, and sexual violence.