When robert fulton invented the streamboat, he would turn over in his grave if he knew that this new mode of transportation would help transport runaway slaves.

gilby's edition of the "Odyssey" a stanza which reads likc a prophecy, and almost awakens a belief that the great poet had a knowledge of steamvessels in those early times­a thousand years before the Christian era. The prince thus addresses Ulysses:

"We use nor Helm nor Helmsman. Our tall ships have Souls, and plow with Reason up the deeps; All cities, Countries know, and where they list, Through billows glide, veilcd in obscuring Mist; Nor fear they Rocks, nor Dangers on the way."

19th Century industrial powerhouse. Fulton's introduction of a steamboat line from New York City to Al bany, New York along the Hudson River, and later expansion into the Mississippi River Valley clearly changed the face of American shipbuilding and commerce, and tragically, inadvertently further entrenched southern agrarian slavery.

Blowin' in the Wind

Fulton's introduction of the steamboat tragically embedded free labor in the south. Most steamboats were used to transport African slaves to ports where they would be sold into bondage.

But there was one steamboat, The Mark Twain, that used the river as an Underground Railroad before and during the Civil War. Like every steamboat, there was gambling and music where the color of money helped determine freedom. German operas, Irish folk songs, and black gospel music penetrated the air as it steamed up and down the Mississippi.

Characters like Frederick Douglas, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln interact on the steamboat and on shore to free slaves. Fictional episodes of romance, violence, and historical conversations intertwine with historical accounts of social realism.

There are over 100 historical books about slavery and the Mississippi River. My research has helped me create a novella about a steamboat named after its Captain who is played by Richard Dreyfess.

I want to create a TV script or/and movie about this historical moment in United States History. It starts in Mississippi and ends in Wisconsin with creative enactments along the river. It reads like a Star Trek episode but is also a pirate ship like Serenity that satisfies its own greedy needs while admittedly helping slaves and their sympathizers escape from the malice of anti-abolitionists.  

My book also includes the adventurous historical plight of Asians, Jews, Quakers, and Irish enslaved Catholics who hide in the same ship holes of black slaves after helping to destroy slave plantations (etc.) on their journey to freedom.

Mille fois merci.

Gardner