Research Catalog

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

Title
River of dark dreams : slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom / Walter Johnson.
Author
Johnson, Walter, 1967-
Publication
  • Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • ©2013
Supplementary Content
  • Book review (H-Net - by Caitlin Rosenthal)
  • Book review (H-Net - by Ruth P. White)
  • Book review (H-Net - by Hilary N. Green)

Items in the Library & Off-site

Filter by

2 Items

StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
Request for On-site UseRequest Scan

Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.

TextUse in library JFE 15-6447Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315
Request for On-site UseRequest Scan

Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schomburg Center to submit a request in person.

TextUse in library Sc E 13-351Schomburg Center - Research & Reference

Details

Description
526 pages; 25 cm
Summary
This work looks at the history of the Mississippi River Valley in the nineteenth century and the economy that developed there, powered by steam engines and slave labor. 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. This book 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. Here the author 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 the author 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.
Subjects
Genre/Form
History.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 423-508) and index.
Contents
Introduction: Boom -- Jeffersonian visions and nightmares in Louisiana -- The Panic of 1835 -- The steamboat sublime -- Limits to capital -- The runaway's river -- 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 reopen the slave trade.
Call Number
Sc E 13-351
ISBN
  • 9780674045552
  • 0674045556
  • 9780674975385
  • 0674975383
LCCN
  • 2012030065
  • 40021980241
OCLC
809365647
Author
Johnson, Walter, 1967-
Title
River of dark dreams : slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom / Walter Johnson.
Publisher
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.
Copyright Date
©2013
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 423-508) and index.
Connect to:
Book review (H-Net - by Caitlin Rosenthal)
Book review (H-Net - by Ruth P. White)
Book review (H-Net - by Hilary N. Green)
Chronological Term
1800-1899
Other Standard Identifier
40021980241
Research Call Number
Sc E 13-351
JFE 15-6447
View in Legacy Catalog