Levees of Hope

Abstract

The Mississippi River system was an important site of African American resistance to slavery. This article illustrates that slaves used the western steamboat economy to run away from their masters, a history that has been neglected by historians. Western cities, and the commercial working class that grew with them, were crucial to these escape networks. The labor mobility of the river, and the freedoms that came with it, were a dramatic extension of the relative freedoms of urban slavery. Runaway slaves knew that cities offered the hope of contact with a broader pan-Mississippi African American community that could allow them to ride the decks of steamboats to freedom.