More fireman stuff.

THE RAMBLER IN NORTH AMERICA, 1832-1833, Vol 2., by CJ Latrobe, 1835.

Of a steamboat, "the wild song of the negro firemen." (pg 214).

THE BALTIMORE PHOENIX AND BUDGET, 1.11, Feb 1842.

Carried a story with this line in reference to a steamboat on the Ohio:

"The half-naked negro firemen busily casting huge sticks of wood into the mouths of the row of yawning furnaces beneath the serried boilers, accompanying their labor by a loud and not unmusical song;"

And a passage from MARYLAND STATE COLONIZATION JOURNAL, 1851. It mentions the firemen singing, but also the sort of "death of chantying" hypothesis that links it to the disappearance of Black laborers in related trades. I don't remember if it was Hugill (or who?) that has said this; maybe I imagined it myself! In no way did chantying "die" by the 1850s. But there is the idea --which Hugill has said -- that after the American Civil War, few new chanties were devised. Obviously, that is not strictly true, either. However, one can make a case that 1) Most of the "core" chanties were in existence by then -- cf. Lighter's list of chanties from Robinson; and 2) the later creations can be qualified in some way. For instance, "John Brown's Body" was simply taking up the march for the capstan. This was not the adding of new "frameworks" to the "chanties, proper" repertoire. The author of BLACK JACKS describes how, by the Civil War, African-Americans were largely pushed out of the maritime trades. What I am suggesting (and I really can't remember who may have also argued along these lines) is that the "formative period" of chanties had some correlation with the presence of African-Americans in the maritime trades. Anyways, here is the passage:

During the year 1850, the total immigration to the United States from all foreign countries, can hardly have been less than four hundred thousand persons; persons of a class that, at once, enter into competition with the black man in all the avenues of labor—and in most of them drive him to the wall. In Baltimore, my home, ten years since, the shipping at Fell's Point was loaded by free colored stevedores. The labor at the coal yards was free colored labor. In the rural districts around Baltimore, the principal city of a slave State, free colored laborers, ten years since, got in the harvest, worked the mine banks, made the fences, and, indeed, supplied, to a great extent, all agricultural wants in this respect. Now all this is changed. The white man stands in the black man's shoes; or else is fast getting into them. And where, fifteen years ago, nearly all the signs above shop doors on Fell's Point showed English names, now two-thirds of them are German—a fact of notoriety and almost daily comment.
In Cincinnati, the labor that used to be performed by free blacks in the great pork establishments, is now performed by white men—Irishmen and Germans ; and, as Mr. Coleman can bear witness, coming as he does from that city, the firemen on the steamboats on the western waters are now whites, where they used to be free colored men. The negro's song, as he filled his furnaces, has ceased on the Ohio and Mississippi. Instances of this sort, where the white man has driven the black man to the wall, might be multiplied indefinitely.