steamboat

Steamboats are river-faring boats powered by steam that proved fashionable and commercially pertinent in the 19th century.

In William Faulkner’s // Absalom, Absalom! // the steamboat is an indicator of industry that Thomas Sutpen’s narrative frequently intercedes with.

As with any technological advent, the steamboat proved a marker of the time period, at its zenith dominating trade and commerce and the next being superseded by the railroad. Regardless, in its heyday, “ the Mississippi was dotted with steamers, crewed by both white and African American boatmen and carrying pork, whiskey, lead, tobacco, cotton, and ticketed passengers” (Allen 387 - 388).

In Thomas Sutpen’s narrative, he is approximately fourteen years old when he sets off from home towards the West Indies in search of riches as professed during a read-aloud by his school teacher (AA 195). Sutpen embarks on his journey down the river and while his memory of the events remain hazy, the significance of the journey and the vessel taken to get there are not.

Most namely, the steamboat represents “progress” (vis a vis the Industrial Revolution), a concept innately tied to colonialism/imperialism. Comparably, in Europe, “ The Ganges River... provided a natural highway for steamboats to deliver goods, troops, and mail across the wide expanse of the northern frontier. In essence, steam power was used to shrink the size of northern India” (Fitzgerald 516). The utilitarian nature of the steamboat in Europe with regards to capital aligns closely with the picture painted of steamboat excursions in Absalom, Absalom! --

It seemed to Quentin that he could actually see them… the glaring eyes in which burned some indomitable desperation of undefeat watching that dark interdict ocean across which a grim lightless solitary ship fled with in its hold two thousand precious pounds-space containing not bullets, not even something to eat, but that much bombastic and inert carven rock which for the next year was to be a part of the regiment (154).

To both Quentin and Sutpen, the first thought associated with the steamboat is the alluring nature of the cargo on board and though described as “bombastic and inert”, the rock still surpasses the mentioning value of bullets and food, even.

On the note of “cargo”, however, a pertinent sub-definition of the term includes that of “human cargo” and the steamboats proved instrumental in the trafficking of said cargo. Now it’s no surprise that sea-faring vessels had been used for centuries for the purpose of the slave-trade but what caused not just surprise but outright discontent was when slaves and free blacks mixed on-board steamboats. According to one news source, The New Orleans Bee, “free black steamboat workers were “prowling about the cities of the South” “ and were “formenters of disturbance” (Buchanan 797).

Thomas Sutpen not only recruited Creole workers from his travels in the West Indies, those same workers became his wandering troupe that he fought with, interbred with and who inevitably became inseparable with his image in the town of Jefferson -- “wild niggers” so to speak. The foreignness of the negroes Sutpen brings to Jefferson causes contention in a town so rooted in traditional, Puritan values.

The irony here is that while a young, venturesome Sutpen set out for riches, he came back realizing that the human collateral better served the long-term purposes of his plan: “the wild blood which he had brought into the country and tried to mix, blend, with the tame which was already there, with the same care and for the same purpose with which he blended that of the stallion and his own” (67). The attempt is failed as his negroes desert him for the Yankees and his own family caves into the cruelty of fate, however, the steamboat still proves a vital symbol of what constitutes capital investment in one’s home-state and areas abroad.

Allen, Michael. "Mississippi River." N.p.: n.p., 2006. 387-88.

Buchanan, T. C. (2001). Rascals on the antebellum mississippi: African american steamboat workers and the st. louis hanging of 1841. Journal of Social History, 34(4), 797-816.

Fitzgerald, Richard D. "The Steamboat: First Instrument of Imperialism." Science and Its Times. Ed. Neil Schlager and Josh Lauer. Vol. 5: 1800 to 1899. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 516-18. Gale Virtual Reference Library.