River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson

Abstract

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2013. vi, 526 pp. $35.00 US (cloth) In 1803 the custodian of Spanish Louisiana, Napoleon Bonaparte, sold the territory to the United States for approximately 15 million dollars. price included a debt from the War for Independence. Bonaparte was at war, needed the money and had no strategic need of the territory. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson's government had simply sought freer access through the port of New Orleans. French cession put the Mississippi River and New Orleans wholly within the United States and doubled the nation's sovereign territory taking it west to the Rocky Mountains. Louisiana Purchase would expand Jefferson's luminous of liberty, a boundless space populated by independent republican farmers. And so it appeared in the northwestern reaches of the Purchase. But a darker vision of empire took shape in the sub-tropical lower Mississippi Valley, in a powerful slave-based society within the ambit of the Mississippi River. That bright to dark imagery introduces Walter Johnson's ambitious new study of the Cotton Kingdom. rich soil and abundant land of Louisiana, Mississippi, and adjacent states were exploited with distinct strains of cotton, steam-driven riverboats, and global textile markets. Most important was the labour of hundreds of thousands of slaves, measured by planters as so many hands. millions of bales of cotton that went through New Orleans every year began with the toil of the enslaved. By 1850 the Cotton Kingdom was the wealthiest region in the United States. Johnson's treatment of life, racism and human degradation, and of the as labour producing commodity is powerful and depressing. Some 95 per cent of all African Americans in the Cotton Kingdom were in bondage, in a conspicuous colour line between slavery and freedom. As with all scholars seeking a perspective, Johnson has to rely on limited sources. few available narratives, including that of the well-known Solomon Northrop, cannot speak for the millions of illiterate, trapped slaves who lived and died in the Cotton Kingdom. However, for the most part, the narratives amplified by ancillary evidence are handled with tact and some theorizing. It seems that in order to address scholarly theories of accommodation and fatalism, Johnson's cotton-bound slave community did not succumb to the regime but adopted caring and cooperation as defensive and resistance strategies. Otherwise, Johnson's typical appears to be malnourished, ragged, intimidated and routinely whipped or beaten. reader will find no benevolent masters in Johnson's composite plantation culture. Johnson is a polished writer. His fondness for allusion in some of his fourteen chapter titles, leads, for example to the self-evident The Steamboat Sublime, Dominion, Carceral Landscape, and The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny. He also uses detail effectively to illustrate a particular theme or topic. In one example he traces the fate of a bale of cotton with great facility by following the trail from the worn fingers of the picker across thousands of miles to the appraisal of the bale's value by a Liverpool broker. Johnson's chapters on the Mississippi's unique hydrology, seasonal shifts in river usage, on steamboat technology, and the logistics of a thousand plus miles of commerce and communication include a lively analysis of the sociology of the river's class- and race-layered culture. …