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WINTER 2013 77 Review Essay Slavery and the Landscape of a Dismal Empire Mark D. Hersey P rovocative in the best sense of the word, Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams is ambitious, compelling, and uncommonly well written. At its heart lies an examination of the “slave-racial capitalism” that characterized the lower Mississippi Valley in the antebellum era, fostering a nightmarish slaveocracy that ruthlessly pressed downward onto the backs of slaves, testing their human limits and the material limits of the soils on which they toiled, before pushing outward into empire. Although much of the work takes up subjects familiar to historians of the antebellum South, River of Dark Dreams consistently frames them in novel ways that add up to a sidelong view of the era, one that promises to reshape significantly the historiography in years to come. Johnson begins by highlighting the tension between the material world of the Mississippi Valley and the abstractions that came to represent it in the market, a tension that runs through his entire narrative. The inherent gaps between maps and dirt, specie and paper money notwithstanding, these abstractions endowed capital investors with the confidence to distinguish between “a sure thing, a calculated risk, and a shot in the dark,” as speculators and slaveholders endeavored to transform a “decentralized frontier exchange economy” into “one of the greatest staple-crop exporting regions in the world” (40, 45). Predictably, a pervasive uncertainty accompanied that transformation, creating fissures in society, which Johnson productively explores. He turns his attention, for instance, to the slave-insurrection scare that marked the summer of 1835. The scare began in Madison County, Mississippi, where it “left at least sixteen slaves and seven whites dead, their backs scored by torture” Walter Johnson. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 560 pp. ISBN: 9780674045552 (cloth), $35.00. SLAVERY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF A DISMAL EMPIRE 78 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY in an effort to crush “a conspiracy that may never have existed” (47). Adroitly connecting landscape and race, Johnson points out that the whites executed by the vigilantes—for allegedly planning to steal slaves and incite insurrection— were implicated in large measure because they violated the new spatial norms of the Mississippi Valley, violations that called into question their support for the region’s racial norms. To the degree that the episode underscores an uncomfortable awareness of the limits of white authority (in a world ostensibly predicated on it) and a growing concern about the place of non-slaveholding whites who operated on the margins of the southern economy, “The Panic of 1835” proved more indicative of the broader anxieties (and haunting fears) that permeated the region than the more familiar and frequently invoked Panic of 1837.1 Arguing that that region’s economy proved more modern than historians often allow, Johnson re-orients the economic history of antebellum America away from the mills of New England and toward the steamboats plying the waters of the Mississippi. Not only were steamboats a powerful new technology—“a mere handful…docked along the levee in New Orleans on any given day could have run the entire factory complex at Lowell”—they constituted the leading investment sector in the region after land and slaves (6). Moreover, the degree to which contemporaries marveled over their modernity created a “steamboat sublime” that proved inseparable from a “global-commercial sublime” that placed the lower Mississippi at one of its vital centers (80). Ultimately, however, Johnson proves most interested in the symbolic power of steamboats, especially the ways in which they encapsulated the risks and ironies that characterized the era. Bound up in the “steamboat sublime,” for instance, was a cultural and commercial emphasis on speed, an emphasis that among other things heightened the risk of boiler explosions. Showy departures designed to advertise that speed—as a mean of attracting business in response to increasing competition and shrinking profit margins—simultaneously inspired the paeans of contemporary observers and marked the moment when the steamboats were most likely to explode. While newspapers and official reports documented the lost bales of cotton, along with the first-class passengers and slaves killed by...

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