Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World Book

The importance of mobility, connections between slave autonomy and slave geography. Came out before Walter Johnson's "On Agency," and BUchanan's book can definitely be read as part of the "everything is agency" paradigm. Most interesting (though also potential not of a piece with the rest of the book) is his chapter on the archetypes of rebellion: the "rascal" and "the badman." The Mississippi has been romanticized as the above-deck world of Mark Twain, Buchanan discusses the world below the deck (though he also frequently verges into a romantic depiction of life on the river). The river is both a source of freedom and the biggest road for the internal slave trade. Perhaps one of the ironies of the expansion of capitalism is that its expansion West and South required slaves and free blacks working on the river, where they could not be isolated from the experience of a freer life. Can be read as a Gramscian book in that the slaves and free blacks on the river are sort of an organic-intellectual vanguard disruptive of the hegemonic culture of Southern paternalism