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
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.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 7: “The Empire of the White Man’s Will”
Manure may be a homely subject, but on its preparation and use every thing is depending. Without it, the deep green of our pastures, the golden yellow of our corn-fields, and thfine beef and white loaf of our tables, could not exist.
The American Cotton Planter
Throughout the antebellum period, the Lower Mississippi Valley, declared by its chroniclers to be the richest agricultural region in the world, imported most of the wheat, corn, beef, and pork its residents required to live from the Mid-West and Ohio Valley. It was an entire economy devoted to agriculture, and it could not feed itself. Cotton, it was said by one planter, was “so much more profitable than other kinds of cultivation,” that planters supplied themselves “almost entirely from the upper country.” There were, scattered amongst the many plantation owners who planted nothing but cotton, a few planters who tried to diversify their crops, usually with corn. Corn would provide feed for livestock, who could in turn reduce Southern planters’ dependence upon imported foodstuffs—a concern that became particularly pressing during the Depression of 1837, when a sharp drop in the price of cotton made imported food appear even more dear. “We were driven by necessity to break our intolerable bondage to the grain growing states, and raise within ourselves what was necessary for our own consumption,” wrote one Hinds County planter in what most would have regarded as a too-optimistic assessment of the potential of the plantations in the Mississippi Valley to feed their owners.
Planters who valued self-sufficiency used corn to feed the cattle and pigs they hoped would reduce their reliance upon imported foodstuffs. Cattle and pigs were marked with patterns cut into their ears or brands on the flank, turned out into the woods, swamps, and roadways to forage for feed. In the autumn, Charles Ball remembered, “Neither the hogs nor the cattle required any feeding at our hands. The woods were full of nuts and the grass was abundant.” Hogs were generally driven in from the woods to be slaughtered after the cotton had been shipped, but while it was still cold enough to preserve their flesh while it was processed into meat. “Each carcass is cut into six parts,” explained Solomon Northup, “and piled one above the other in salt, upon large table in the smoke-house. In this condition it remains a fortnight, when it is hung up, and a fire built, and continued more than half the time during the remainder of the year.” “This smoking,” he continued, “is necessary to prevent the bacon from becoming infested with worms.” For planters this feral economy—forage to flesh to meat and milk—had the advantage of providing protein at the cost of little extra labor: the cows and pigs themselves did much of the work of converting nature to the service of the cotton economy (as well as, in many cases, the bounty of the public domain into the benefit of private consumption).
There were, however, well-known limits to stock-raising in the agro-capitalist ecology of “the Cotton Kingdom.” Like corn, livestock drew upon the same land and labor as cotton. The energy of each sector of earth could be converted to stock or staple, but not both; the labor of each hand had to be committed to raising either fodder or fabric. In an economy where both planting and productivity were measured by a calculation of bales per hand per acre, allocation of either land or labor away from cotton and towards corn, cattle or hogs represented an unaccountable loss in the minds of cotton-crazed planters. Or at least an unaccounted loss, suggested one planter in observing that “large plantations” were not suited for the raising of pigs, “for it is found to be almost impossible to prevent the Negroes stealing and roasting young pigs.” And so planters throughout the Mississippi Valley (and elsewhere in “the Cotton Kingdom”) imported food in order to export cotton throughout the antebellum period.
