Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines how rivers shaped slavery’s development and how enslaved people used rivers. The South’s waterways served as arteries for slavery’s expansion. Yet these same rivers that made enslaved agriculture possible also proved dangerously unpredictable, as the risk of flooding kept slave owners awake at night. To control water’s creative and destructive potential, planters used enslaved labor to alter the flow of Southern rivers, build levees, and dig canals. The chapter focuses on the use of enslaved labor to create elaborate hydraulic works on rice plantations and levees on the Mississippi. Enslaved people who worked on rivers used them as a means of escape from bondage.
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