River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom - Hardcover

"River of Dark Dreams" is an important, arguably seminal, book...It is always trenchant and learned. And in highly compelling fashion, it helps us more fully appreciate how thoroughly the slaveholding South was part of the capitalist transatlantic world of the first half of the 19th century.--Mark M. Smith"Wall Street Journal" (02/22/2013) Johnson has written a book as big and bold as the Mississippi River valley region it surveys. In it, he maps the various interlocking connections among slavery, land surveys and speculation, steamboats, capital and credit, cotton planting, and more to show how President Jefferson's promise of an 'empire for liberty' to come from the Louisiana Purchase became instead a place of people grasping for advantage, gouging for wealth, and gaining through will and brutality. Readers will find Johnson's discussions of steamboat technology, adaptations of new strains of cotton, and credit and market arrangements especially compelling as he makes the case for a modernizing, slave-based cotton empire that sought to extend its reach across the continent and, through violence, to claim Central America and Cuba as well...An essential book for understanding the dynamism and direction of American economic ambitions and the human and environmental costs of the physical, political, and social energy that drove such ambitions and ended in civil war.--Randall M. Miller"Library Journal (starred review)" (03/15/2013) [Johnson] firmly believes that the booms of the early 1830s, followed by the devastating collapse of cotton prices and fortunes in 1837 and then the same cycle again in the 1850s, culminated in the Civil War. For those who have the penetration to see it, the cycles were written on the land, the technology, the crafty new financial instruments, and the bodies of the enslaved. Johnson never misses a chance to remind us of the relevance of all this today: the deregulation, speculation, profit, bubble, bust, misery, and war...Johnson's book attempts something daring and bold. Instead of perpetuating the regularly compartmentalized treatment of American slavery and the global antebellum political economy, he follows the example of Eric Williams's "Capitalism and Slavery" (1944) by bringing both together. He does this with an eye toward the enslaved on the ground, observing what they ate and produced, how they lived, how they were brutalized and died. Johnson is brilliantly attuned to the stories of the enslaved whose lives were coexistent with the cycle of production, who planted and harvested cotton but were at the same time commodities themselves, whose every biological function (reproduction, waste elimination) was an economic calculation.--Lawrence P. Jackson"Los Angeles Review of Books" (05/30/2013) Johnson paints a picture of slavery in the Mississippi Valley as rich in twists and surprises as the Mississippi itself...A seminal study.--D. Butts"Choice" (07/01/2013) Walter Johnson's "River"" of Dark Dreams" is a unique, brilliant, and relentless critique of the sordid logic of American slavery as it unfolded on cotton plantations, aboard steamboats plying the Mississippi, and in toxic proslavery adventures that spilled across the country's borders. The next generation of debates over slavery in the United States must wrestle with Johnson's startling and profound insights.--Adam Rothman, author of "Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South" With deep insights, original readings, expansive vision, and dramatic narratives, Walter Johnson reconfigures both the political economy of American slavery and the landscape of struggle in the slave South.--Steven Hahn, author of "A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration" "River"" of Dark Dreams" solidifies Walter Johnson's standing as a brilliantly gifted interpreter of the past, whose work sets the benchmark for a powerfully lucid--sometimes heart-wrenching--vision of what enslavement meant for slaveowners, for the women and men they enslaved, and for the nations that participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.--Jennifer L. Morgan, author of "Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery" As the Harvard historian Walter Johnson explains in his bracing new history of slavery and capitalism in the Deep South, River of Dark Dreams," the slaveholders were the quintessential American capitalists River of Dark Dreams" casts his insight about slavery-as-capitalism onto a broader canvas: the history of the Mississippi Valley and its political economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Johnson, of course, is hardly the first historian to think about slavery in the context of capitalism But Johnson moves in another direction. The relationship between slavery and capitalism, he insists, does not depend on any connection between American slavery and European (or American) industry. On the contrary, plantation slavery was" capitalism.--Robin Einhorn"The Nation" (02/11/2014)" [One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.--Timothy Shenk"The Nation" (11/05/2014) An important book Johnson sees slavery not just as an integral part of American capitalism, but as its very essence.--Sven Beckert"Chronicle of Higher Education" (12/12/2014)" The artistry of River of Dark Dreams" lies in the close-up--in Johnson's mesmerizing attention to the 'material' in historical-geographical materialism. In the pointillist style so dexterously displayed in his reconstruction of the New Orleans slave market, Soul by Soul," Johnson zooms in on the 'nested set of abstractions' that made the Cotton Kingdom run: money, markets, maps, labor...River of Dark Dreams" delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write 'history from the bottom up': from the soil tangy and pungent with manure, and the Petit Gulf cotton plants rooted into it, and the calloused fingers plucking its blooming, sharp-edged bolls. This is a history of how wilderness became plantations that became states, nations, and empires--of how an overseer's lashes sliced into a slave's back turned 'into labor into bales into dollars' into visions of America's future in the world... Johnson recreates the grinding, sometimes deadly work of moving in the Mississippi Valley with such originality that it doesn't much matter that the analytical payoff rests largely in metaphor...Whereas Johnson's analysis of steamboat imperialism turns on metaphor, his detailed description of slavery acts as a rebuke to the oversimple metaphors that are used to describe slaves' lives and labor: money and markets. --Maya Jasanoff"New York Review of Books" (10/10/2013) "River of Dark Dreams" is at its best when it focuses on the day-to-day lives of slaves in the valley. Johnson empathizes with his subjects, allows them to speak for themselves through written records they left behind, and is a gifted enough writer to make the past come alive in his prose...Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully as River of Dark Dreams."" --Ari Kelman"Times Literary Supplement" (07/26/2013) Johnson shows in horrific detail how the culture of slave society--intellectual, social, sexual--arose out of the imperative of more and more cotton cultivation. In a brilliant chapter titled 'The Carceral Landscape, ' Johnson's book reads as a kind of scholarly companion to Quentin Tarantino's studiously gothic film Django Unchained."..What makes Johnson's book more than a catalogue of horrors is its account of how slave-owners, too, were caught in the cycle of fear...As new technologies (not only the cotton gin) and new markets (Europe as well as the industrializing North) drove the expansion of cotton production against any and all compunction, talk of ending slavery, which had once been central to debate about the future of the republic, became a deadly threat to the economy of the South and, to a significant degree, of the whole nation...Johnson's point is not to equate the suffering of slaves with the anxiety of slaveholders; but his book has the effect of showing their interdependence in a way that makes the abstractions of political history--'property, ' 'expansion, ' even 'slavery' itself--feel vivid and immediate. --Andrew Delbanco"New Republic" (08/19/2013) Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams" shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor. --A. O. Scott"New York Times" (09/27/2013) This most impressive piece of history writing will be a source of inspiration and debate for many years to come. It demonstrates the national significance of regional history and the transnational scope of 'slave holding agro-capitalism.' It has an overarching story to tell and argument to make, but many of its meaty chapters take a vital area of research and decisively reorder it. --Robin Blackburn"Dissent" (07/01/2013)

When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton's dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale. But at the center of the story Johnson tells are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton--who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.