Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson by Joshua D. Rothman (review)

Joshua Rothman has written a profoundly important and highly readable book about the social, cultural, and economic impact of the Market Revolution on the American South. While most of these studies look at growing urban spaces in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, the author has instead focused on the rural frontier of central Mississippi. He concludes that concerns over market values of profit and loss informed the actions of rural Mississippians as much as their more bourgeois contemporaries in the North. The boom, and later bust, of the area proved to be a true “intertwining of northern capital and southern slavery,” designed ultimately to fully integrate the South into the national economy (299).

Rothman begins by vividly describing the rapid and tumultuous economic swell the region experienced during the 1830s. The expanding cotton economy lured migrants to cash in on cheap land. Mississippi “boomed like nowhere else in the region,” and boosters confidently touted the land’s unlimited economic opportunity (5). At the same time, the state experienced volatile incidents of corruption, disorder, and violence. The explosive and haphazard character of the frontier’s growth bred a mixture of “divergent and contradictory interests” that strained the psyches of its inhabitants (13). Development attracted individuals in search of economic opportunity and social mobility. Yet, upon arrival many disappointed people found a preexisting system of social stratification that privileged the well connected and well heeled. The path to prosperity flowed through complex systems of credit that allowed for the purchase of land and slaves. These, however, proved so unregulated and poorly understood that borrowers were left vulnerable to the mercy of the market and the unscrupulous methods of lenders. The region’s long-term economic viability rested on the continued availability of slave labor. The continuous importation of bondsmen, however, increased not only the aspiring planter’s debt burden but also the perceived likelihood of an insurrection. Though communities sought stability and cohesion, the very nature of the state’s economic development produced feelings of anxiety, suspicion, and fear.

The apex of this fear came during the summer of 1835, when alarm over a slave insurrection coincided with a popular riot directed against professional gamblers. The insurrection scare emerged from the trial testimony of one Virgil Stewart, who claimed knowledge of the rebellion based on his encounters with John Murrell, a local farmer and small-time criminal suspected of kidnapping slaves. To inflate his own importance in Murrell’s capture, Stewart deceitfully painted him as the leader of a gang of outlaws driven to incite rebellion as a cover for plundering the region’s wealth. In Madison County, Mississippi, fears of an uprising led by Murrell’s fictitious gang, commencing on the Fourth of July, prompted a full-fledged panic. Vigilante patrols roamed the countryside arresting suspected whites, while extra-legal committees conducted ramshackle trials adjudicating the guilt or innocence of defendants through “highly irregular” applications of due process (120).

In Vicksburg, about fifty miles southwest of Madison County, a similar breakdown ensued, as a lynch mob aimed to purge the city of professional gamblers. For two days, property destruction, street violence, and artificial legal proceedings replete with summary executions were pervasive. The event was thoroughly documented by visitors, whose reports painted the mob as impulsive and dangerously irrational. Vicksburg city leaders, however, defiantly characterized the mob as “acting with moral righteousness and the official sanction of a militia to eliminate dangerous criminals” (170).

At the heart of both episodes, argues Rothman, were anxieties about economic development in Mississippi and the broader frontier southwest. In Madison County, slave stealers like John Murrell could potentially undermine a slave regime still in its nascent stage. In Vicksburg, professional gamblers defrauded the unsuspecting and promoted acts of desperation, all the while skirting the traditional ties and obligations of...