River of dark dreams : slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom / Walter Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, Walter, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slavery--Mississippi River Valley--History--19th century.

Slavery.

Cotton growing--Mississippi River Valley--History--19th century.

Cotton growing.

Slavery--Economic aspects--Mississippi River Valley--History--19th century.

Capitalism--Mississippi River Valley--History--19th century.

Capitalism.

Social change--Mississippi River Valley--History--19th century.

Social change.

Imperialism--History--19th century.

Imperialism.

Slave trade--History--19th century.

Slave trade.

Mississippi River Valley--Race relations--History--19th century.

Mississippi River Valley.

Mississippi River Valley--Commerce--History--19th century.

United States--Territorial expansion--History--19th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

526 p.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award "Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully." -Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement "[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years." - The Nation "An important, arguably seminal, book...Always trenchant and learned." - Wall Street Journal A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism. 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 reconsideration 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 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."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 "River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write 'history from the bottom up.'" -Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books

Contents:

Preface: Boom : The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares in Louisiana

The Panic of 1835

The Steamboat Sublime

Limits to Capital

Race, Anxiety, and Escape on the Antebellum Mississippi

Dominion

"The Empire of the White Man's Will"

The Carceral Landscape

The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton

Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade

Tales of Mississippian Empire

The Material Limits of "Manifest Destiny"

The Grey-eyed Man of Destiny

The Ignominious Effort to Re-Open the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674074880

0674074882