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

by Walter Johnson

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."

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Race, Economics, African American, American

560 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom and, most recently, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Slaves often remembered the work they did as a form of extended, repetitive torture. John Brown recalled that when the slaves ‘scraped’ the cotton, they were ‘compelled to go across a thirty, forty, or fifty acre field without straightening themselves for one minute, and with the burning sun striking their head and back, and the heat reflected upwards from the soil onto their faces.’ Making it to the end of the row, where one might briefly stand straight up and perhaps drink some water, took between an hour and an hour and a half… In picking season, Brown continued, ‘the boll of the plant when split by ripeness, pricks the fingers, even when you are careful and lacerates the flesh round the nails to cause great soreness…till the blood runs from the tips of their fingers, where they have been pricked by the hard pod…The perspiration, meanwhile, streams from every pore of the body till the whole of it, head, hair, and all, are covered with a crust of mud…’ In Brown’s account, we see the outlines of the gradual process by which human life was turned into cotton: the tortuous conversion of labor to capital, and of living people to corpses.”
- Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

I hesitate to use the word “entertaining” when describing a book about slavery, but that’s what comes to mind. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams is entertaining. It is compelling. It is a book that is brilliant, weird, passionate, ambitious, filled with unnecessarily big words (“concupiscence” is used not once, but twice), and razor-edged in its condemnations of the antebellum slave society in the American South. (And yes, unfortunately, there are still those who need to be convinced that slavery was not only terrible, but left an indelible mark). Being entertaining, though, is not a bad thing. Being entertaining means this book is readable, and that's important because it should be read.

This is not a perfect book. I thought it too scattered at times, too digressionary. Rather than honing in on his point, Johnson tends to rattle around like a pinball. There are also moments when his rhetoric exceeds his primary sources. And his word choice – well, his word choice sometimes seems designed to woo freshmen at a Harvard mixer. (Which Johnson should not be doing, since he is a professor there). But all in all, this is an original take on an uncomfortable subject.

River of Dark Dreams centers on slavery in the Mississippi Valley, and places it firmly within the context of worldwide 19th century capitalism. It’s a heavy topic, but I knew I was going to dig this book, when Johnson opens up with a scene about the steamboat Anglo-Norman, which blew up on her maiden voyage. The explosion sent correspondent H.A. Kidd high into the air and deposited him – alive, somehow – in the river. Kidd later wrote about the incident in an essay entitled The Experience of a Blown-Up Man. Johnson quirkily uses the anecdote to give us a view of the main setting for his narrative:

If he had dared open his eyes at the top of his arc, Kidd would have seen the Mississippi Valley laid out before him. Downriver was the great city of New Orleans: the commercial emporium of the Midwest, the principal channel through which Southern cotton flowed to the global economy and foreign capital came into the United States, the largest slave market in North America, and the central artery of the continent’s white overseers’ flirtation with the perverse attractions of global racial domination. Upriver lay hundreds of millions of acres of land. Land that had been forcibly incorporated into the United States through diplomacy…and violence…; land that had been promised to white yeoman farmers but was being worked by black slaves; land that had been stripped bare and turned to the cultivation of cotton; land that had been stripped bare and turned into the cultivation of cotton; land in the United States of America that was materially subservient to the caprice of speculators in distant markets; land…for which, in a few short years, young men would fight and die.

Johnson’s overarching goal is to trace the many strands of the capitalist web connecting Mississippi Valley cotton to New Orleans’ ports, New York commodities markets, and foreign purchasers. He begins with the land itself. It was good land. However, driven by speculators, fueled by slavery, the Mississippi Valley became a monoculture. Despite having some of the most fertile land in the world, the area had to import foodstuffs.

In the Valley, Jefferson's yeoman farmer gave way to large plantations. These plantations relied on slaves. Cotton is labor intensive; slavery made it profitable. Johnson takes us into the fields to show us what this life was like, making it visceral, rather than theoretical.

Picking cotton was one thing; getting it to market something else entirely. Accordingly, Johnson devotes a fascinating chapter to steamboats, which allowed for travel both upriver and down, and helped to “annihilate” space and time. This chapter emblemizes what I liked so much about River of Dark Dreams. It is freewheeling and beautifully detailed. It covers the mechanics of steamboats, the difficulties of navigation, the dangers of steam propulsion, the segregation of the boats, and even the tactics of card sharps.

Johnson also devotes considerable space to the global finances of the cotton trade. He describes the multitudinous instruments by which cotton was insured and sold on consignment. The complexity of the commercial paper developed for this process is very modern, and gave me jarring flashbacks to various finance and law classes I’ve taken (and repressed in memory). Johnson does a decent job explaining these transactions, though sometimes the lucidity of his descriptions gives way to buzzwords like “commodity fetishism” and “commercial fungibility.”

River of Dark Dreams concludes by exploring Southern expansionist policy before the Civil War. Not westward expansion – Johnson does not cover the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of 1850, etc. – but rather down into Central and South America. The hope of expansionist proponents was to enlarge the empire of slavery into more favorable climes. Some even pushed for a resumption of the international slave trade. Johnson follows various filibuster schemes, which are both insane and weirdly admirable in their breathtaking ambitions (though not their intentions). Chief among these filibusters was William Walker, the “grey-eyed man of destiny,” who was stood up against the wall by un-amused Hondurans in 1860. Once again, in these chapters, Johnson has an eye for excruciating detail. Take, for instance, his description of the end of filibuster Narisco Lopez. Lopez was executed by the Cubans in Havana’s town square, with an adjustable metal collar around his neck.

As it closed, the collar would occlude and perhaps crush [Lopez’s] windpipe, and drive the base of his tongue upward into his throat. The closing off of his air supply and the rising level of carbon monoxide in his blood would cause him to experience a sensation of intense anxiety before he lost consciousness, his heart racing in a desperate effort to reoxygenate his blood. The blockage of his jugular vein would close off the drainage of blood from his head, causing his face to turn blue and swell and his eyes to swim forward out of their sockets. It would take the general several agonizing minutes to die.

I read this book as part of my own History of Slavery in America reading project. As the name implies, it’s simply my personal attempt to find books that integrate slavery into the history of America, from the Founding to today. To that end, I found River of Dark Dreams to be an important volume. Unlike, say, David Potter’s The Impending Crisis, we are not viewing slavery from the perspective of white men in the halls of Congress. While the political processes of antebellum America are obviously necessary to understanding the prolongation of slavery, as well as the war that ultimately ended it, it also tends to abstract the reality. It turns forced human labor into an ideological issue regarding a state’s relationship to the federal government in a republic.

River of Dark Dreams is a corrective, of sorts. It has a global scope, but it is intently focused on the human experience: of the slaveowners, the steamboat captains, the filibusters, and most importantly, the enslaved persons themselves.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a reviewer, I couldn't possibly do better than this:

"The enlightening, progressive force of liberalism has carried us far from slavery, we like to think. We are not those people and never could have been. In River of Dark Dreams, we are reminded that between the slave empire and our own age lies only a handful of generations. Johnson shows the historical meaning of this proximity. We are connected not just through the shortness of time but through the persistence of the liberal capitalist tradition itself. The form of freedom fantasized by the slaveholding South, in turn, is the freedom of our own society: ensuring a standard of living sufficient to confirm our self-image and limit domestic conflict; built upon ecological degradation, the conquest of darker nations by international bureaucracies, their enslavement by debt, their forcible integration into a global commercial network; enforced by our own armies of the night, surveilling, killing, torturing without oversight. The myth of our great distance from slavery—of the old South’s fundamental illiberalism—exists precisely to give us a way of managing our experience of this continuity, and to let us continue to enact it."

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-17/revi...

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary book; a compelling history of the carceral empire of the Mississippi River valley and its inhabitants, written with a theoretician’s eye for the social, political, and economic currents of imperial history, and a novelist’s ear for the emotional and psychological subjectivities of those who built the Cotton Kingdom, justified it, and were enslaved by it. Walter Johnson maintains a brilliant sense of relationality; between the personal and the impersonal, ideology and lived experience, inevitability and contingency; and in so doing is able to weave the seemingly-disparate people, places, and events he describes into a single historical and cultural continuum.

The Mississippi River was the jugular vein of the American slaveocracy. We often think of American slavery as the residual taint of the social regimentation of old Europe; a type of neo-feudalism which coiled its way into the American Constitution like the serpent, where it enjoyed an artificially-prolonged life under the auspices of the United States before being at last defeated by the true American ideals nested in the Declaration of Independence. Johnson tells a very different story, one in which the slave society of the Mississippi was a radical social innovation, created, strengthened, and legitimized by the modernizing forces emerging in the nineteenth century: global mercantile capitalism, industrialization, biological or pseudo-Darwinian racism, and “progressive” colonialism among them.

Slavery in the antebellum United States was not an antiquated social system on its last legs, struggling vainly against the forces of progress and humanity. The Mississippi valley, with its hub at New Orleans, was the center of a dynamic and expansionary mercantile empire with global aspirations and enormous civilizational pretensions. The stewards of the Cotton Kingdom believed (or at least told themselves) that they were the agents of progress, leading the world toward a necessary and inevitable future in which the dark-skinned and heathenish peoples of the world would be united and improved under white tutelage.

Our contemporary ideals being what they are, we think of racism as a symptom of social primitivity; a sort of inwardness and provincialism that prevents us from seeing ourselves in others. But if we use the Mississippi valley as a case study, we find that racism—or, more exactly, the racialization which provides cogency for racist ideology—was an ideological mechanism by which the Euro-American project of economic expansion and accumulation perpetuated itself. Racism was a conceit of Western cosmopolitanism. While modernity was commodifying the world, racialization provided for the commodification of certain groups of people.

When the United States acquired the Mississippi as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson dreamed that it would become part of a vast, decentralized web of (white) independent yeoman farmers stretching across the American continent; a continental republic of cincinnati. But when the public land went on sale, the financial power of the land barons showed its hand. Land speculators and venture capitalists bought up every parcel of land along the Mississippi (the parcels were rectangular in shape, with the short sides of the rectangle adjacent to the river so that more parcels could be sold), not to become self-sufficient subsistence farmers, but to devote every inch of arable land to the cultivation of cotton for sale on the global market.

Slaves cleared the forests, planted and picked the cotton, and packed it into bales that were shipped down the river to New Orleans; and from there to cities like Liverpool and Manchester, where they fed the European textile industry.

To some extent, the Cotton Kingdom may be thought of as an economic and political sphere quite distinct from that of the United States. Its world was the world of the Black Atlantic, encompassing the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, the West Indies, and Central America. It was only incidental that the valley was located within that amorphous, uncongealed cartographic mass known as the United States of America. There was a real fear in the early decades of the nineteenth century that the Mississippi would become a breakaway republic in order to have fuller control over its economic and diplomatic affairs.

Reading this book will take you beyond the well-intentioned but intellectually-inept moralizing about American slavery. You’ll learn about the mechanics of how the system actually functioned. You’ll learn about the tension between the human agency of the slaves and their status as material objects in an economic order. You’ll learn about the dangerous but incredibly lucrative steamboat industry, which fed the American interior with capital before being threatened by the transcontinental rail system. You’ll learn about the alienation of poor whites in this racialized society, and how this influenced their interactions with runaway slaves.

You’ll meet people like John Murrell, a highwayman and slave-stealer who would lure slaves away from their masters, obscure the paper trail linking them to those masters, and then sell them to other slavers before repeating the process; Solomon Northrup, who, of course, wrote one of the most important primary source documents on the life of a slave and a runaway; and William Walker, a filibuster who led a private army of Kentuckians to Nicaragua and seized power there for the purpose of establishing white supremacy and expanding the Cotton Kingdom.

Most importantly, this book will help us look beyond superficialities in our present discussions about the nature and legacy of American racism and racial oppression.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom traces the development of an imperial ethos among southern planters and firebrands in the Mississippi River Valley between roughly 1820 and 1861. Throughout the volume, Johnson tries to detail a specific vision of empire held by southern planters that encompassed a common appraisal of "race, sex, slavery, space, and time—a vision that outlines what the world and the future looked like to slaveholders and other white men in the Mississippi Valley on the eve of the Civil War" (418). Johnson steps back from the common narrative of causes for the Civil War, asserting that secession after the Election of 1860 was the "lowest common denominator" for most southerners. Instead he presents a compelling, if sometimes overstated, argument that before secession southerners in the Mississippi Valley tried to remedy their growing dependence on the North by extending the Cotton Kingdom first into the Caribbean by trying to provoke a revolution on Cuba and later by filibustering the Nicaraguan government and pressing for a re-inauguration of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Johnson advances his argument through a narrative that combines histories of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism during the nineteenth-century with a sprinkling of environmental/ecological history to freshen our understanding of the cotton plantation.

Steamboats, surveying crews, and land organization came to the Lower Mississippi before cotton plantations dominated the landscape. The early chapters of the book detail the process of creating the region. Steamboats allowed for faster commercial exchange up and down the river and surveyors, speculators, and the Land Office created private property allotments and provided the means for future planters to settle the region. Johnson's chapters on the Steamboat are brilliant both in the level of technical detail and his attention to the diverse peoples that traveled by steamboat during the period. For slaves, the steamboat might represent their road toward bondage if they traveled down-river, but it might represent freedom if it traveled up-stream. Gamblers and confidence men used the steamboats as opportune times to scam unsuspecting planters out of their money, smuggle runaways, or rig card games. And free peoples of color (usually of a mixed-race descent) often passed for white aboard the steamboats—and the fact that many could not distinguish a free person of color from a respectable white gentleman or lady only undermined social hierarchies based on racial difference.

The main thrust of Johnson's argument starts from chapter ten onward. The Panic of 1837 (and subsequent depression) led southern planters, championed by Matthew Maury, to play with ideas of a direct trade with the global economy. Rather than relying on New York City to trans-ship cotton to Liverpool, England, southern planters began eying Cuba, Latin America, and the Atlantic to increase profits and expand their growing race-based empire. Maury's early machinations translated into New Orleans lauding and supporting Narsico Lopez's (failed) invasion of Cuba in 1851. By the late-1850s, southern yeoman desperate to make inroads in the slave economy followed William Walker into Nicaragua, where they temporarily overthrew the government. Finally on the eve of Civil War, many in the South promoted re-opening the trans-Atlantic slave trade to serve two purposes. First, it would alleviate the "slave drain" from the Upper South and unmoor perpetuation of the slave economy from the reproductive capacities of slave women. Second, an infusion of slaves would depress slave prices and allow yeoman and middling whites to acquire slaves, have a stake in the cotton trade, and diminish class conflict. Cuba, Nicaragua, and the slave trade represented alternatives from secession—all of them rooted in ideas of white supremacy and pro-slavery progressivism. Before 1861, a distinct group of southerners mostly from the Lower Mississippi advocated a regional or sectional foreign policy distinct from the homogenous national foreign policy. It was not yet a fully developed secessionist movement wherein extremists advocated total political separation from the Union.

Perhaps the biggest problem among academics today is the recourse to gibberish and obfuscating language, and historians are not exempt from this trend in their own writing. For the most part Walter Johnson is an exception to this rule because he writes a lucid account of the nineteenth-century Lower Mississippi that includes fine-grained, stunning and horrifying accounts of slave punishment, cotton harvest, runaway slaves, and the novel steamboat. In fact, his chapters on steamboat technology and transportation should be the example that all historians of technology and the market revolution should emulate. His tactical narrative of Lopez's failed Cuba expedition rivals that of the best military historians. Unfortunately, the middle chapters rest on an assortment of jargon—Chapter 6, "Dominion"; Chapter 7, "The Empire of the White Man's Will" ; Chapter 8, "The Carceral Landscape." Here you will find unexplained and often unnecessary buzzwords and phrases such as: choreography (of space, place); theatrics and theatrical performances of domestic slavery; space-determining technology; agents of their own actions; subjectivity; horses as a "tool that converted grain into policing"; and "techno-enhanced visuality" [a phrase that sounds more appropriate for a dystopia sci-fi flick than a historical account of nineteenth-century slave societies]. Other words are considerably overused in the volume: "human condition"; space; place; twinned; agency that usually short-cut full explanation of subordinate claims in certain chapters. On the whole, these jargon phrases obscure more than they reveal in certain sections of the work and often make over-complex very qoutidian interactions that happened daily on plantations. At one point Johnson describes a slave who "had been harvesting not cotton but fish, which he had transformed into bacon by means of barter" rather than stating more directly that the slave secretly caught fish that he bartered for bacon.

My quibble with jargon in these middle chapters is probably symptomatic of my broader critique of Johnson's employment of environmental history to add nuance to our understanding of plantation life. Labor historians have wrestled with the usefulness of environmental history for understanding working-class history for quite some time and the debate primarily centers on whether coupling an analysis of the natural environment with working-class mobilization, activism, or oppression can actually tell us anything new about human experience.

In River of Dark Dreams, Johnson draws on environmental history to distinguish between "work" as human energy expended upon the natural world and "labor" as slaves' relationship to their master, or a workingman's relationship to his employer. Johnson thus describes the plantation as a "landscape of labor" where slaves dialectically engaged with an environment that they modified and that in turn changed their bodies. Johnson does suggest a use for environmental history through work, because it provided indispensable skills for cotton picking and memorizing local waterways, woods, and "off-grid" locations that allowed slaves to have pride and satisfaction with their own capabilities independent from the grueling labor performed for the master. When Johnson describes the mundane and brutal aspects of plantation life—toiling in the fields, hewing wood, constructing quarters, using whitewash, washing, sleeping, hunting—he describes the power relations between slave and master and how the landscape and topography could tilt the balance of power one way or another. Masters wielded more power on the plantation because they constructed the house, fields, and sight lines so they could easily monitor slaves and spot/punish potential runaways. When slaves did escape into the woods, bayous, and swamps of the Mississippi they gained the upper-hand because masters relied on dogs and sound to track men. Despite Johnson's description of the plantation as a "landscape of labor" and trying to interpret the differences between the visual orientated cotton field and aural-centered woodlands, his overall narrative of brutality on the plantation largely coheres with previous assessments of plantation life provided by Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Ira Berlin, and countless other historians of slavery, even if Johnson does reject the idea of paternalism as the essence of southern plantation culture. The environmental methodology, despite the specialized vocabulary and jargon, doesn't provide anything profoundly different for understanding that narrative.

Despite these criticisms, Johnson has written a solid narrative of nineteenth-century slavery in the Lower Mississippi that will surely become the basis for future historians' engagement with the subject. His middle chapters excepted, the chapters on steamboat technology, the failed Cuban invasion, the botched Nicaragua coup, and vociferous debates to reopen the Atlantic slave trade are compelling additions to our understanding of "southern identity" before the Civil War and some potential causes of that conflict. He leaves us with a thought-provoking catalogue of antebellum racial-imperial thought—the chanting of "freedom" that concealed enslavement, pseudoscientific racism, and white supremacy—that he suggests have some analogue in contemporary discussions of promoting "freedom" and "democracy" abroad (p. 420).

3.5 stars.

[Bfisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book, in spite of several issues with it. The book was generally very readable, but the author sometimes resorted to an academic style; highfalutin language when simpler words would probably have done as well. The larger structural issue was that the book read more like a collection of essays, so I came away without a sense of an overall theme. I felt that with a really good editor to impose some order, this could have been a great book.

In spite of the above reservations, it is a very worthwhile book for anyone interested in the slave-based economy and society of the antebellum lower Mississippi Valley. The chapters are almost standalone, in the discussion of such issues as the tug-of-war between open and closed markets, fears of servile insurrection, financial risk-taking like the steamboat bubble, the social issues of racial mixing, the commoditization of humans as well as the view of humans as farm livestock, accounting methods for slave-raised cotton, annexationists and filibusterers like William Walker, and the pressure for a resumption of the Atlantic slave trade.

[Jacob Vigil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book ranks as one of the most entertaining and beautifully written scholarly works I have ever read. Johnson's turns of phrase and coinages are sharp, accurate, contextual, and packed with so much insight.

Each chapter covers a different aspect of the slave-based economy/social structure in the antebellum Mississippi Valley. These topics include: The technology and economics of steamboats, the attempts by pro-slavery filibusters to invade and take over Cuba and Nicaragua for the United States, an examination of how credit and debt worked in the cotton economy, the importance of food as a tool of control on plantations, and many others.

The narrative and analysis alone are excellent, but added to that Johnson's incredible use of language and wit, this was a thoroughly fascinating and engaging read from beginning to end.

Several chapters were devoted to painting a picture of the lived experiences of slaves in the Mississippi Valley cotton empire, and Johnson's use of former slaves' memoirs in these chapters is stunning and powerful. The connections between intimate bodily violence, capitalism, imperialism (and Manifest Destiny), white supremacy, technology, and ecology are illustrated in this book like no where else I have ever seen, and done so with remarkable clarity and insight.

One chapter for example, entitled "The Carceral Landscape," was haunting and disturbing in hwo it exposed the ways in which the reorganization of the land itself in service of one single export crop became a physical medium through which master oversaw, controlled, and inflicted violence on enslaved bodies. Throughout the book, Johnson holds no punches when it comes to breaking slavery down into its most fundamental elements. Black labor and Black flesh (and Indian land)were "converted into" bales of cotton and thus, white wealth. The mechanism for this conversion was not complicated: it was the torture of Black bodies, the destruction of Black families, the commodification of Black labor (and the conversion of Indian land into white property).

Johnson ends his study with an implication that reappears throughout the book: That in American history, the very idea and reality of "freedom" may not be an inevitable outcome of human progress, but rather the consequence of intentional and systematic violence and extraction directed at others. In other words, Black slavery (and Indigenous removal) were not incidental to White freedom, empire, and democracy-- they were its very foundation.

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. It views the slave economy of the American South as part of a global economic system, and does not shy away from the inherent contradictions in the political philosophy involved or the horrifying conditions under which enslaved people lived their lives. It offers a panoramic view and still manages to paint a portrait.

[Jee Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absorbing read. The history of steamships on the Mississippi. The very material and physical work of slavery. The last five chapters argue persuasively for a kind of racial-capitalist imperialism that has been missed by more conventional histories of the American nation and the Civil War. The cotton kingdom in the Mississippi Valley was never merely pre-capital; it formed capital and was formed by it.

[Wendy G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read Walter Johnson's "Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market," I was very eager to read his next work of historical genius. Johnson is a pretty extraordinary writer, especially considering historians aren't trained to be writers and so many of them write dull stuff. Johnson's prose is lovely, if 'lovely can be used to describe a book about slave-holding imperialism in the Cotton Kingdom. Johnson asks us to reconsider the Southern slaveholder; he wasn't only concerned with his slaves and his land. His wealth, his well being (such as it was), his future was intimately tied to the Mississippi River, the steamboat, slave men and women, and the very real possibility of expanding slavery not west, but south. Even small slaveholders, according to the author, were capitalist imperialists to the core. ...Thank you, Walter Johnson, for another beautifully written history with theory that is accessible to all of us.

[Inna · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book on the intersection of global cotton economy and slavery in the Mississippi Valley. The main claim is that concentration on cotton with exclusion of other crops made the area economy extremely vulnerable. The constant need to buy more and more slaves to tend cotton created a dangerous situation, especially when the profits from cotton started to go down. Basically the author says that the plantation owners acted as if there is no tomorrow - concentrated on cotton and became dependent on other regions for their food, diminished the capacity of the soil to produce, and kept buying slaves whom they had a hard time supporting with diminished orders.

[Danny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read that expands beyond the sectional borders of what would become the confederacy, and examines southerners desire for expansion of their "cotton kingdom." Johnson's examination of steamboats along the Mississippi River and his attempt to understand the southern mind in regards to expansion, whether that be toward Cuba or Nicaragua is fascinating. I have problems with his monolithic examination of slaveholders, with little discussion of the diversity that existed within this class. Overall, a very ambitious book that is worth a read for those interested in slavery and capitalism.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for class. A very interesting interesting book that relocates the center of US industry away from the north east and to the Mississippi River valley slavery plantations, with special emphasis on steamboats as a method of transporting goods and persons up and down the river in service for the rising industry needs.

It’s a compelling, common sense argument, and it’s articulated well. Definitely makes you reconsider the symbol of the steamboat in American Culture. I recommend this book on the strength of how well the author articulates his argument.

[Bill Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very dense, very complete. Worth the effort.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

"River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom" by Walter Johnson is an exceptionally dry read. The research appears to be solid and he does present some little-known ideas in a new context, but there is little flow to the writing. It was exceptionally difficult to discern his thesis in this book and the facts he chooses to share meander, much like the river he bases his book upon. I read this book as part of a book club assignment, otherwise, I really would not have bothered to finish it. The writing is pedantic and poorly edited. I definitely would not recommend this book.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a study of the lower Mississippi River valley in the 19th century with a focus on the economy and thus the slavery in the region. It's fascinating and horrifying at the same time. Johnson doesn't pull any punches in describing the treatment of slaves during this period. In the space of a few decades, a million human beings were sold and transported from states like Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. This book is well documented, pulling from many sources including accounts from escaped slaves like Solomon Northrup (12 Years a Slave) and others.

[Ian Divertie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you wonder why things like Ferguson, Trayvon Martin and the out and out hatred of the current president are with us this book should help you understand that dynamic. Also alludes to the fact that many contemplated a much larger and wider US empire even as far back as the 1840's and 1850's, which dovetails with our current situation separate from our race relations and yet how driven by a racist context that desire for empire seems to be.

[Richard Pierce · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a waste of money to buy, a waste of time to read and a waste of space to put on my bookshelf. If you have read nothing about the history of the Mississippi valley then you may find something of interest in this book. For being 420 pages long, this book was a huge disappointment.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is rare that I read a historical-academic work, especially one of such length, and be almost immediately engrossed and in awe of the author's prose. Johnson excels as a wordsmith, constructing beautiful and horrific paragraphs detailing the history and political economy of the Mississippi Valley from the Louisiana Purchase to 1860. Consider, for example: "The Americanization and commercialization of the Mississippi Valley were concomitant with its racial pacification...The market would turn Indian lands into white farms and conquest into cultivation: empire into equality." (37-39). Unfortunately, however, Johnson's wide command of prose is at times the work's greatest weakness. See, for example, Johnson's "Through the bond issue, belief in the possibility of success was converted into a condition of possibility for the attempt: the ideology of 'manifest destiny' was transformed into the materiality of a real invasion through the magic of fictitious capital..." (331-332). What does this means? "...money paid in advance for a stake in something that did not yet exist" (332). Put that way, the paragraph becomes more comprehensible, and the idea of "condition of possibility" is important to Johnson's analysis of pro-slavery imperialism, but there must have been a better and more conducive way to word it.

The book itself is a history of the Mississippi Valley from the time of Jefferson and the volksrepublican "Empire for Liberty" to the pro-slavery imperialist and expansionist efforts towards Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s. Particular attention in the first half or so of the book is paid towards the nature of the Mississippi—the intention of Jefferson to make it a land of petty-bourgeois freeholders, its ethnic cleansing by Andrew Jackson for nearly 30 straight years, the anxieties of slaveholders about slave revolts, cultural conceptions surrounding the nature of steamboats as well as their economic necessity to the Mississippi Valley, and how slaveholders attempted to exert "dominion" over both the enslaved as well as nature. The second half of the book, the most interesting and insightful to me (mostly because of my own interests), is dedicated to analyzing pro-slavery intellectualism, their political economic thought, and their efforts to implement these idealist images into material condition. Particular attention is paid to the contradictions of the "Cotton Kingdom," particularly its dependence upon constant debt, and how pro-slavery ideologues twisted these defects to an image of slavery as the most progressive force of historical development, and attempted to idealize their way out of them through their imperialist efforts.

The main defects of the book, aside from the issues inherent with Johnson's commendable command of prose, is that he does not engage enough with previous historiography on the topic. Johnson argues that slavery was a crucial part of the capitalist world-system, what he calls "slave-racial capitalism," and briefly mentions the two competing schools of thought within the historiography of Southern slavery which debate the nature of the mode of production, but does not actively engage with them. I would have loved, for example, to see Johnson engage with Eugene Genovese's understanding of Southern slavery as a closed paternalist society, or other historical political economists who engaged on the topic.

It is a long read, one I took a copious amounts of notes on, but it is well worth it.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is controversial. I've seen people call it pornographic, and that's kind of fair as some of the descriptions of violence are difficult to read. Yet it is a vitally important intervention on the political economy of slavery. Johnson's ability to work in the tradition of both the history of the body and the spatial turn, without losing sight of older historiographic threads surrounding material life in the antebellum South is pathbreaking. Johnson probably could've achieved the same ends with a less explicit book, but I'm not sure.

I have two critiques, both fairly major.

I'm not sure his sources are good enough to prop up his analysis. He relies extensively on published accounts, which is fine, but I didn't get the sense he really interrogated the context of those sources' production. This is particularly problematic for sources related to criminal cases as the authors/publishers might have had good reason to misrepresent the facts. If I were writing a real book review, I would spend a lot of time picking this apart.

The other flaw is that the book can feel like a series of disconnected essays. There is no obvious linkage between the material on the technology behind the steamboat revolution and the latter chapters on overseas imperial projects. The latter undermines the centrality of the former to his story, tbh.

[Zach Hollifield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Think you know why the South seceded? If you haven’t read this book then I doubt you do. At least, I doubt you know the reason Johnson reveals in this book. Yes it’s slavery, but it’s far crazier than you’ve thought: The South seceded in large part due to its aspirations (and perceived necessity) of global/imperial market expansion (it’s way more interesting than that sounds).

First, my one negative: Personally, I could have done without all the chapters on steamboats, but hey, maybe that is your thing.

But even still, this book is just incredible. Not only is it a fine history of antebellum slavery in general, but the thesis Johnson sets out to prove, that the standard version of the reasoning of the South’s secession is anachronistic and ignores the imperialistic aspirations of the South is completely framework shifting. And he proves it. Invasions of Cuba paid for and performed by southerners? The toppling of the Nicaraguan government and the installation of a white southerner as Nicaraguan president? Like I said, incredible.

If you don’t want the full 420page treatment, and you don’t need (all of) it for the thesis really, then I suggest reading the Introduction and the final four chapters.

[Xander Dale]

no rating bc nonfic

one of the most enlightening things i've ever read for school. johnson does such an incredible job at displaying so many dimensions of the transatlantic slave trade, in not just its racial dimensions but also spatial and capitalist.

johnson uses really captivating writing. this isn't written like your typical academic text. he really puts you there, in sights, sounds, and smells.

his project here is to display the integral connection of the mississippi river valley and new orleans ports to the project of American dominance in the global market. this, of course, relied on the backs of enslaved people. he recounts the ways that violence was used as a form of liquid capital, and how slaveocracy was dependent on the imperial history of the united states.

quite readable. my only slight critique would be that occasionally, it felt as though johnson pinballed around on tangents. even those were 'beautiful.' i hesitate to call them that because of their depictions, but this is definitely a must-read for someone interest in the history of chattel slavery, and american racial capitalism.

[Justinmmoffitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a well-researched book made mediocre by needless academic tomfoolery. If you read it, maybe fooled like me by its Pulitzer prize, you'll find sentences like this: "Even before the Pampero left the dock, Lopez confronted the materiality of absolute space - the irreducible difficulty of using a boat to move a large load across a long distance."

It's needless abstractions like the "materiality of absolute space" that will eventually drive you crazy. The author speaks of space quite often, possibly in an attempt to justify the environmental aspect of the book's thesis, but its exhausting and pointless because any thesis this book has is ruined by its disorganization.

Pick it up at the library, read the early chapters (the highlight for me was how the steamboat changed the Mississippi Valley), but avoid the middle part, it's where things really get bogged down in... I'm done, just done, this book is just bad.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

How is this book not better known? This book gets into the weeds, but like my favorite science podcast says, “We love getting into the weeds.”

River of Dark Dreams takes a deep dive into the history and economics of the Mississippi Valley. I learned so much about the economics around cotton, from steamboats to the economic chain of moving cotton from plantation to factory to the quest for land expansion (I never knew that the US desire to invade Cuba and Central/South America was driven by slavery). Johnson did an outstanding job using slave narratives to illustrate his points, which added both a story aspect to the text and grounded it in the lived experiences of enslaved people.

This is a wide-ranging book that added information in a new dimension about many different aspects of slavery and the slave economy that I have not encountered anywhere else. Excellent, and highly recommended.

[Ai Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow what a book. I actually skimmed this once for a class and then went back to try to read it more carefully--and while it took me a really long time, it was so worth it. Johnson (as I'm sure many other people will tell you) is an amazing writer, while also being so intellectually rigorous in his work and with his argument. And that argument is so important--drawing together imperialism and its connections in the US to slaveholding culture, to the absolute necessity of expansion that I think really still is glossed over in teaching US history. I will say, if read in as many disjointed ways as I did, it can feel a little disconnected (especially the last three chapters from the initial readings) but each piece is so beautiful and really does connect. It's long but boy is it really, deeply worth it if you're at all interested in slavery studies and connection to empire.

[William Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I’m an amateur history buff and really enjoyed the breadth of subjects with which the author covers. Almost in a molecular fashion the geography and culture are dismantled and examined. Plus, the author is a great scholar and has a knack for telling stories. Here, he walks that line between dense erudition and readability and, at times, seems to write for writing sake. But standing back from the many details within this narrative helps see the larger picture rather than every word in Johnson’s thesaurus. Could he have used fewer words, and seemingly less repetition to capture this moment in our history? Perhaps, but I would hate to have to make that judgement.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

"According to this vision, slavery was a sort of axial rod that ensured social order and historical progress. Remove it and society and history would collapse into a nightmare of social and sexual overturnings. Without slaves, many white men would remain incompletely realized vessels for the historical purpose that was vested in them; without slaves, their sacred whiteness, their destined power, their phallic privilege would remain vulnerable to the most perverted notion of social and sexual order."

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary compendium on Mississippi River Valley's history of slavery and the cotton economy. Mr. Johnson provides the reader more than a 100 pages of references in support of his narrative on cotton's capitalistic use of slavery. When insurance was procured for bales of cotton and slaves, but was not for paying ridership aboard steamboats traversing the Mississippi River; little doubt is left to the darkness of slavery's economics.

[Mason Wyss · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read Charles Post’s review for Catalyst: https://catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/...

I agree with Post that Johnson suffers by not having a definition of capitalism based in social-property relations. I am also convinced by Post’s argument that Johnson severely underestimates the diversification in crop production in the South and its self-sufficiency in foodstuffs.

[Kiara · Rating 1 out of 5]

LA VIE DE QUE J’AVAIS ENVIE DE ME TIRER UNE BALLE TELLEMENT C’ÉTAIT LONG …

De toutes façons les livres pour les cours c’est tjs comme ça mais bon au moins j’ai appris des trucs quoi.

mtn faut que je fasse un rapport dessus … kill me now

[Dustin Aro · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW…one of the best history books I’ve ever read. Goes way beyond the facts of slavery to give a sense of the development, dependence and anxiety of the slaveholding economy up to the eve of the Civil War. A must read for anyone interested in American history.