River of dark dreams: slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom

Abstract

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. By Walter Johnson. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 526. Illustrations, tables, notes, acknowledgments, index. $35.00.)Nearly million slaves arrived in the Mississippi Valley between 1820 and 1860, Walter Johnson tells us. There were more millionaires there in 1860 than in any other region of the United States and, in that same year, 3500 steamboat trips brought $220 million worth of cotton and other com- modities to the port of New Orleans. The dark dreams of the book are the aspirations of planters, whose path to riches required the cruel and ma- nipulative treatment of enslaved black people and who eventually sought expansion into Central America and the Caribbean Sea in violation of federal law. This regional approach to the Mississippi Valley makes sense, although non-specialist could finish the book unaware that there were plantations in Louisiana that used the labor of 125,000 enslaved people to produce half of the sugar consumed in the United States.Historians and general readers alike, however, will come away from this book knowing good deal more than they did. Johnson's two chapters on steamboat transportation, for example, explain the technology of the boats, the operation and limitations of the industry, the pilots' skill, the public's enthusiasm, passenger accommodations and behavior, the intense competition over speed, and the significant possibility of collision or explosion that would result in large numbers of people being drowned, scalded, or both. Johnson gives an excellent description and analysis of cotton production as well as the credit and marketing mechanisms that made it possible. Placing all this within world-historical context of busi- ness enterprise, he makes convincing case for the idea that cotton plant- ers were simply capitalists of non-industrial sort.Southern imperialism grew out of economic limitations. As early as 1840, steamboats had connected the 17,000 miles of navigable rivers in the Mississippi Valley, making the shipping industry less attractive to valley capital. In the 1850s, when railroads began to reach the Mississippi, the outlook worsened. Meanwhile, planters and merchants increasingly felt themselves under the yoke of northern economic and political interests in Congress and wished for direct access to world markets. In the New Or- leans region, the answer to these problems involved expanding into Cuba and Nicaragua rather than Kansas and Nebraska. Johnson argues that greater appreciation for filibustering and the complementary movement to reopen the foreign slave trade would free Civil War historiography from a set of anachronistic spatial frames and teleological narratives limited to secession and the land area that became the Confederacy (p. …