Robert Gudmestad

Many of the crews who worked on steamboats, especially south of Louisville, were enslaved Americans.

And they are rented out

by owners of steamboats to work in various capacities on these boats.

I'll get to that in a second.

And another thing is that steamboats were also a way that slave traders, so the men who bought and sold slaves, so they buy them more or less in the upper South, like Kentucky and Tennessee, and transport them down to Louisiana or Natchez, which was a booming plantation economy.

they're transported on steamboats as well.

And they're in coffles.

In other words, they're chained together in long lines with a chain passing in between them with manacles on the wrists.

And one person commented that it's so common to see a coffle on a steamboat that nobody mentions it anymore.

It's just taken for granted that these steamboats are transporting enslaved people to these southern markets.

But the people who are forced to work on these steamboats

There's a bit of a measure of almost quasi-independence for them as opposed to working on a plantation.

Now, they're going to work as roustabouts for the most part, which are the people who carry things on and off the boat.

So it's hard physical labor, especially if you're –

wrestling with a cotton bale, you know, trying to get it onto a boat.

They don't have steam winches on these boats.

You know, it's mostly done by human power.

But then you also had enslaved people who were working as slaves.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then you had a few women who worked on these boats as well, who were enslaved, and they were chambermaids.