Mississippi Dreamin’ and the American Nightmare

Over the course of a gory fortnight in the summer of 1835, white citizens of Madison County, Mississippi—fearing that their way of life if not their very lives were at stake—executed roughly two dozen persons for the crime of plotting a massive slave insurrection. A majority of those killed were enslaved black men, but the victims also included seven white men. Most were hanged on orders of a self-styled Committee of Safety established by popular vote in Livingston, the county seat. In lieu of regular court proceedings, Committee members identified and interrogated suspects, tortured them to obtain confessions, and then pronounced them guilty of a capital felony. The magnitude and immediacy of the threat justified such extralegal measures—or so the respectable citizens of Madison County believed. But was there actually a slave rebellion, supported—even instigated—by white allies, in the offing? What caused this deadly social panic and what was its larger historical significance?

In the books under review, Joshua D. Rothman and Walter Johnson chronicle these grim events and explicate what they reveal about the social (dis)order of the Mississippi Valley during the Jacksonian era. Although both authors recognize that slaves had excellent reasons to revolt against the status quo in Madison County, each concludes that the insurrection scare of 1835 represented not evidence of the agency of the oppressed but, more likely, the collective delusion of insecure white strivers searching desperately for social esteem and economic success on the cotton frontier. “That a genuine plot existed in 1835 for a gang of white robbers to collaborate with the enslaved in a massive region-wide rebellion . . . is highly improbable,” writes Rothman (p. 265). Johnson observes vividly that “what happened in the end was less a revolt than a pogrom, a preemptive strike against a conspiracy that may never have existed and left at least sixteen slaves and seven whites dead, their backs scored by torture before their necks were snapped and their legs left quivering at the end of the gallows’ arc” (p. 47).

Yet the question of why Madison County exploded in a frenzy of paranoia in the summer of 1835 remains. Rothman devotes most of Flush Times and Fever Dreams to this question and to analyzing another social panic that erupted the same summer in the same region of west-central Mississippi. A major factor was the area’s shifting racial balance, as plantation-based cotton agriculture rapidly took root in the region. In 1830 slaves comprised less than half of Madison County’s total population; in 1840 they accounted for three-quarters. By Rothman’s estimate, at mid-decade, the ratio of blacks to whites in the communities where the frenzy first hit exceeded fifty-to-one. “Making matters even more volatile,” he explains, “as of 1835 settlers in Madison County had failed to establish reliable mechanisms of law and order or even an organized militia system” (p. 99). He faults the rising slaveholding class for this lack of social infrastructure: “It was whites’ own greed that crowded out institutional development and created racial demographics that endangered their own families and threatened the very abundance they believed slave labor made possible” (pp. 99–100).

Even taken together, however, greed and demographics fail to explain the decision of the Livingston Committee of Safety to hang whites as well as blacks in the summer of 1835. Expanding upon the research of earlier scholars, Rothman highlights the indirect yet pivotal role played by Virgil Stewart, a maladjusted vagabond and the author (under a pseudonym) of an inflammatory pamphlet titled A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and...