Allen on Paskoff, _Troubled Waters: Steamboats, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 1821-1860_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (July 2008)

Paul F. Paskoff, _Troubled Waters: Steamboats, River Improvements, 
and American Public Policy, 1821-1860_. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 
University Press, 2007. xvii + 324 pp. $48 (hardcover), ISBN: 
978-0-8071-3268-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Michael Allen, Department of History, 
University of Washington, Tacoma.


When Louisiana State University professor Paul F. Paskoff first began 
to study early American western river navigation dangers and 
resultant government policy, he sought to "establish quantitatively 
the extent of the antebellum federal government's failure to make the 
country's major rivers safe for steamboat navigation during the 
decades before the Civil War" (p. xv). But after extensive research, 
Paskoff reached a far different conclusion. In fact, he learned the 
antebellum American federal government's "river improvements program 
... accomplished quite a lot, not least being the provision of a 
vital means for the settlement and development of the lands of the 
public domain" (pp. 187-88).

Louis Hunter's masterful _Steamboats on Western Rivers_ (1949) and 
Eric Haites, James Mak, and Gary Walton's _Western River 
Transportation_ (1975) stand at the apex of a dozen significant 
economic and technological histories of steamboat commerce on 
America's Ohio and Mississippi river systems. Paralleling these 
efforts have been, literally, thousands of books, newspaper and 
magazine articles and movies by "buffs" in a field only slightly less 
popular (and romanticized) than railroading, George Armstrong Custer, 
and World War II. Alongside scholarly and lay interest in steamboat 
technology and economics has been a deep-seated (and at times morbid) 
fascination with steamboat explosions -- the "disasters" component of 
this book's title. These were first described in grisly detail in 
James T. Lloyd's _Steamboat Directory, and Disasters on Western 
Waters_ (1856), Frederick Way's _Way's Packet Directory_ (reprinted 
1994)) and, of course, Mark Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883). 
In _The Americans: The National Experience_ (1967), Daniel Boorstin 
effectively used steamboat explosions as a metaphor to portray the 
reckless side of antebellum American itinerancy, materialism, and 
exuberance.

No one has done so thorough a job studying federally subsidized 
western river improvements and public rivers policy as the author of 
the volume under review. In this sense, _Troubled Waters_ serves the 
desired end of all monographic literature, providing bricks in the 
building of a truthful historical narrative based on thorough primary 
source research.

Paskoff systematically describes myriad explosions and wrecks, 
placing them into the context of the federal government's evolving 
work in building and subsidizing infrastructure. He does this 
chronologically, using James K. Polk's Democrat anti-infrastructure 
presidency as a demarcation line. Throughout, Paskoff carefully 
follows Congressional hearings, debates, and votes -- from John 
Quincy Adams' and Henry Clay's "American System" proposals, to debate 
over the "Army Engineers" river and harbor clearing and dredging 
projects, through Polk and states' rights Democrats' reactive 
opposition, to the 1860 eve of a Republican pro-internal improvements 
resurgence. The narrative is based on extensive data shown in nearly 
one hundred charts, figures, tables, and maps; the results and 
significance of the data are also woven into the narrative. Paskoff 
concludes, as noted, that the federal government "largely succeeded 
in making steamboat navigation safer by removing natural hazards on 
the Mississippi and its major tributaries" (p. xv).

This work is based on impressive primary source research, especially 
in government documents and congressional reports. The author might 
have done more work in extant marine insurance and marine hospital 
records. Paskoff's work bolsters the assertions of classical liberal 
economists he does not cite. For example, Burton Folsom in _The Myth 
of the Robbers Barons_ (reprinted 1996) argues that historians of 
nineteenth century American capitalism have often failed to 
distinguish between "political" vis-a-vis "market" entrepreneurs. 
Paskoff agrees that supposedly pro-market antebellum Whigs (and 
Lincoln Republicans) lobbied for subsidies and government assistance 
to business while many supposedly pro-labor Democrats espoused a 
laissez-faire economic platform aimed at keeping the federal 
government out of the marketplace.

Paskoff rightly concludes that one of the goals of river improvements 
advocates was "the welding together of distant and disparate regions 
into an even stronger federal union" (p. 188). This goal of economic 
and cultural nationalism was left to postbellum Republicans, and the 
Army Corps of Engineers, to fulfill.


Michael Allen, Professor of History at the University of Washington, 
Tacoma, worked for three years as a deckhand, tankerman and cook on 
the Illinois, Arkansas, and Mississippi rivers and the Gulf of 
Mexico. He has written five books, including _Western Rivermen, 
1763-1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator 
Horse_ (LSU Press, 1990) and _A Patriot's History of the United 
States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror_ 
(Penguin/Sentinel, 2004). He is currently writing a book with a 
working title of _Mississippi River Valley: The Course of American 
Civilization_.

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