One day in 1852, The Princess, one of the finest steamboats afloat on the Mississippi River one hundred years ago was rounding the bend a Duncan�s Point about ten miles below Baton Rouge, when the boilers exploded with a frightful loss of life. The disaster occurred in front of the Conrad cottage where a descendant, the late G. Mather Conrad, of New Orleans, was born and lived as a youth. Lyle Saxon in his Old Louisiana tells of having known an old gentleman who remembered the awful holocaust. Then a little boy, this old gentleman was awaiting the return of his mother and father from New Orleans. He saw the Princess come around the bend and then turn in toward the bank. As he watched he heard a terrific explosion and saw the steamboat burst into flames. Mr. F. D. Conrad, plantation owner of that generation, so Saxon tells us, sent his slaves out in skiffs to rescue the men and women who crew struggling in the water. Many of them were frightfully scalded by steam from the broken boilers. Sheets were spread on the ground under the oak trees on the lawn and barrels of flour were broken open and the contents poured on the sheets. As the scalded people were pulled from the river, they were stripped and rolled in the flour, where they writhed and shrieked in agony. The little boy went from one sufferer to another seeking his father and mother. They were not there. They returned from New Orleans on a later boat, but he never forgot the anguish of his search.

All along the Mississippi--on country plantation landings, urban levees and quays, and the decks of steamboats--nineteenth-century African Americans worked and fought for their liberty amid the slave trade and the growth of the cotton South. Offering a counternarrative to Twain's well-known tale from the perspective of the pilothouse, Thomas C. Buchanan paints a more complete picture of the Mississippi, documenting the rich variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked on the lower decks and along the river during slavery, through the Civil War, and into emancipation. Buchanan explores the creative efforts of steamboat workers to link riverside African American communities in the North and South. The networks African Americans created allowed them to keep in touch with family members, help slaves escape, transfer stolen goods, and provide forms of income that were important to the survival of their communities. The author also details the struggles that took place within the steamboat work culture. Although the realities of white supremacy were still potent on the river, Buchanan shows how slaves, free blacks, and postemancipation freedpeople fought for better wages and treatment. By exploring the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, Buchanan sheds new light on the ways African Americans resisted slavery and developed a vibrant culture and economy up and down America's greatest river.

When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.

"Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man for mayor with 91 percent of the vote"--

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A new edition of a classic history of the Mississippi River Delta Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the 200-year-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. The book measures the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations firsthand, while tracing the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debate. Despite countless defeats under the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice. Throughout this remarkably interdisciplinary book, ranging across fields as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies, and anthropology, Woods demonstrates the role of music—including jazz, rock and roll, soul, rap and, above all, the blues—in sustaining a radical vision of social change.