The Worst Steamboat Money Can Buy…

ED AYERS: Depending on your perspective, the power of the river can either be a hindrance or a blessing. If you’re trying to move down the river, well, the river currents are obviously a force for good. But if you’re heading the other direction, not so much.

PETER ONUF: And so you can imagine how revolutionary a change it would have been for people along the river when the first steam boats came along in the 18-teens. Suddenly a trip that would have taken weeks, like the trip from New Orleans up to Saint Louis, could be completed in a few days’ time. Observers at the time remarked that the new technology annihilated both space and time.

ED AYERS: And that’s not the only thing it annihilated. Over the course of the half century in which steamboats plied the Mississippi, tens of thousands of people unlucky enough to have boarded the wrong boat at the wrong time met their ends in all manner of grisly accidents. In 1856, a book called Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters itemized these accidents.

WALTER JOHNSON: America, explosion of. America South, burning of. Anglo Norman, explosion of. Atlantic and Ogdensburg, collision of.

ED AYERS: This book went on to reproduce, in all their gory detail, newspaper accounts of each of these accidents. You may or may not be surprised to learn that the book was a bestseller.

WALTER JOHNSON: The best one down here is “Phoenix, burning of. Phoenix number two, explosion of.”

ED AYERS: Our reader here is Walter Johnson, a historian at Harvard, who has just published his own book about the 19th century river economy. He sat down with me to explain what he thinks was really fueling all this carnage.

WALTER JOHNSON: There are about 1,000 serious steamboat accidents over the course of the period between about 1820 and 1860. And what that really amounts to is 5% of the boats in any given year are subject to a catastrophic loss. And so if you imagine that as a block of houses in your neighborhood, that means that one of the houses on your block every year would explode.

ED AYERS: So how long would a boat last?

WALTER JOHNSON: The depreciation on these boats is fantastically quit. The boats last anywhere from three to five years. At the beginning of the era, it’s said that there’s no better way to make money faster than the steamboat business.

And there are rumors of returns on investment of 200% per year. And so more and more people invest in steamboats. There’s more and more boats on the river.

And so in order to compete, steamboat owners try to run faster. And they try to run longer hours. They run through the night. Or they run deeper into the season.

And so running deeper into the season, you run more boats on less water. And you cause strandings. Running at night, you run boats into the trees that are buried in the bottom of the river, that are hidden by the river’s surface. Trying to run boats faster, longer, you create hotter engines and cause explosions.

ED AYERS: So in this hyper-competitive world, you’re a steamboat captain. And you’re trying to get your share of this and dwindling business while the profits are high. And you want to cut out the other guy. What are some of the things which you would do to make sure you get the maximum profit on your run?

WALTER JOHNSON: Well, there’s two things. And both of them make you want to run faster. This is a word-of-mouth economy. And so steamboats gain reputations. And one of the ways you get a good reputation is by putting out a good buffet.

ED AYERS: Some things never change.

WALTER JOHNSON: Right. And cabin passengers, the more privileged among the passengers, travel with all-you-can-eat privileges in the buffet. Well, that costs money. And because, I guess, along the Mississippi, wood is comparatively inexpensive, the response is to try and run the boat faster to cut down the amount of time that the passengers have to gorge themselves at the buffet.

The other and more famous way to get a reputation for speed is obviously by racing. And the races on the Mississippi are legendary today. And they were even more legendary in their day. People turned out along the river banks when there was going to be a big race to watch. And the results were posted in newspapers. And a reputation for speed is one of the ways, then, that boat owners compete for business.

There is a subsidiary reputation for safety, which I guess some travelers also are interested in. But that’s certainly not what comes through the 19th century literature of the Western waters.

ED AYERS: So the Volvos of the Mississippi.

WALTER JOHNSON: Exactly. The Sabre owners are going to travel more slowly and safely but make it there in time.

ED AYERS: Exactly. So in 1852, Congress passes an “act to provide for the better security for lives of passengers on board of vessels propelled in whole or in part by steam.” Very 19the century verbosity.

WALTER JOHNSON: Steamboat Act of 1852, right.

ED AYERS: Now it was a kind of consumer safety measure. But you write that it was, quote, “structured around a series of fables.” What do you mean by that?

WALTER JOHNSON: So what the Steamboat Act of 1852 tries to do is it makes captains responsible for everything that happens on their boat. And it sets up a series of licensing procedures for pilots and engineers. It provides for the inspection of boilers.

And so the Steamboat Act of 1852 addresses the problems on the boats without addressing the problems on the river. The problem on the river is that the boats are running too fast. And they’re running too many hours. And they’re running on not enough water.

And so all of the structural incentives that have made the steamboat economy so dangerous, both for boats and for capital– because by this time, it’s a difficult to make money off the steamboat business by 1852– remain in place.

ED AYERS: So the other question, and the obvious question, in many ways, is what is feeding this frenzy? I mean, obviously once they start racing against each other, sort of self-reinforcing. But what is the fuel, other than the wood that they’re burning here, that’s driving all of this, Walter?

WALTER JOHNSON: Well, it depends on how far back historically you want to go. But I think that really what is really driving this is the global cotton market. And so what’s happening from the 1820s on is that the southeastern tribes are being pushed off of their historic homelands by the United States’ government.

And that land is being privatized through the General Land Office. And so there’s a tremendous amount of investment and speculation in the land market. And that land is, in most people’s minds, perfect for the cultivation of cotton. And that cotton, they believe, can only be and will only be cultivated by enslaved people.

And so this process from the 1820s results in the internal slave trade, the shipment of about a million people from places like Virginia and Maryland to places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the greatest economic boom in the history of the United States up to that moment. The Mississippi Valley is the leading edge of the global economy in the 19th century. Cotton is the leading sector of the economy.

85% of the cotton that is produced in the Mississippi Valley is shipped to Great Britain. And 85% of the cotton that is processed in the mills in Manchester in the leading sector of industrial development in the world at that moment comes from the Mississippi Valley. And steamboats are both integral to that process and emblematic of it.

ED AYERS: Walter Johnson is a professor of history at Harvard. He’s the author of River of Dark Dreams, Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. We’ll post a longer version of our conversation at backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN BALOGH: It’s time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll take a closer look at one particular steamboat accident that’s mostly notable for what it crashed into.

PETER ONUF: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.