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, Mass., and London; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. [x], 526. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-04555-2.) In this big, important, ambitious, and thought-provoking book, Walter Johnson argues that slavery, capitalism, and imperialism were entwined together in the nineteenth-century Mississippi River Valley. Once the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase, prevailed on the federal government to use military power to impose their vision of white supremacy. The War of 1812, the Seminole War, the acquisition of Florida, and Indian removal were all of a piece and created conditions for the growth and spread of the Cotton Kingdom. Johnson limits most of his examples to Louisiana and Mississippi, but he implies the wider applicability of his ideas to the Deep South. Refreshingly, Johnson puts steamboats near the center of his narrative. Steam power emancipated the valley from its reliance on animal energy and allowed New Orleans to sit at the confluence of the global economy. Johnson argues convincingly that riverboats were more powerful--in both an economic and an energy sense--than the mills of New England. He also points out that steamers lagged behind only land and slaves for investment in the South. The result is that riverboats nurtured the Valley's capitalist development (p. 149). Some readers might quibble with Johnson's emphasis on the capitalistic nature of the South, but he effectively shows how southerners were sophisticated in their manipulation of the paper and credit economy. While the book spends much time describing the dark dreams of slaveholders, it does not neglect the lives of the slaves; and here Johnson provides countless examples of slavery's unstinting brutality. Enslaved Americans were deprived of sleep, beaten within inches of their lives, barely clothed, repeatedly raped, deliberately starved, and emotionally scarred from hearing others punished. There are numerous insights from the book, but to cite just one example, planters used food to control hungry slaves. As Johnson writes, slaveholders converted black hunger into white supremacy by withholding not only food but also shoes, blankets, and clothing in order to limit escape attempts (p. 187). Despite the odds against them, slaves did try to escape. They moved in an alternate geographic space that limited the power of the masters' visual landscape and enhanced the slaves' aural one. Johnson outlines a vision of an unstable South: slaves unexpectedly ran away; the price of cotton was volatile; steamboats could explode at any minute; the rate of importation kept climbing; factors shifted the bulk of risk onto planters. There were so many uncontrollable elements that planters, who compared themselves to gamblers, worked to shore up the shaky foundations of their society with geographic expansion and the ruthless enforcement of racial hierarchy. Many southern whites became obsessed with developing direct trade with Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. More and more of them came to believe that expansion was an easy fix to an economy that was overinvested in land, slaves, and steamboats. In their twisted universe, if Cuba, Nicaragua, and other countries could be absorbed into the South's commercial and political space, then the divergent interests of planters and merchants would be reconciled. John Quitman, Narciso Lopez, and William Walker personified this jingoistic impulse and sold a vision of the future not far from that of riverboat gamblers or land speculators. They became confidence men in their own right. One great prize was Cuba--the most important issue in the early 1850s--which feared would fall into England's lap (p. 15). Should that happen, abolition of slavery on the island would be next, and the South's trade through the Caribbean would be imperiled. …