River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson (review)

This book is an awe-inspiring, mesmerising example of historical writing. It is a deep meditation on the intertwined stories of the development of slavery and empire from the time of Jefferson through to the eve of the Civil War. At its essence the book is a horrifying journey through the minds of the slaveholding elite as they imaged a world of expansion and racial domination. Their vision was not always obsessed with sectional questions, but instead sought a global empire that would solve festering problems of labor supply, unfair tariff barriers, class divisions among southern whites, and perceived difficulties with producing enough cotton for the world market. The “River” is the Mississippi, and it runs through the center of the story, but after this “Dark Dream” of a book, readers won’t think of it in quite the same way ever again. This is a book for our times, a tale of empire in the name of freedom, paid for with a grinding capitalism that in Johnson’s story systematically works to reduce the humanity of enslaved African-Americans.

The book is structured as a loose collage of interlocking chapters, that each reveals something of the mentality of Mississippi Valley slaveholders, ironically yet soberly presented in a way that suggests the gravity of how those ideas affected life on the ground among the enslaved. Johnson begins his story with the demise of Napoleon’s dreams for the Mississippi Valley and the rise of Jefferson’s “Empire for Liberty,” which imagined the West as a necessary project to ensure white men’s liberties, amidst the “nightmares” of Native warfare, enslaved rebellion, and traitor outsiders who threatened the perceived harmony of early cotton boom. The steamboat economy, the commercial heart of the cotton economy, is the focus of chapters three through five. Johnson’s chapter on the “Steamboat Sublime,” which owes something to historian Thomas Ruys Smith, discusses how rapture with steamboat technology “became a sort of alibi for imperialism and dispossession” (76). Chapters four and five reveal various problems facing riverside planters and steamboat entrepreneurs, including the problem of river runaways amidst the racial fluidity of the commercial economy, steamboat accidents, and most significantly, the fear that the steamboat economy had reached its natural limits by the 1840s. Thus there were always problems, and while some of these topics have been written about before, never with the contextual richness, and stylistic grace that Johnson commands. Having established southern visions of commercial grandeur, he turns in the middle of the book to the cotton plantation proper. Here he makes notable and unsettling contributions by showing how the abstract, and commercially focused, language of the cotton planters were geared toward controlling their “hands” and the land in the same ways, towards the same ends. He discusses the “visual power” (167) of planters displayed within the plantation geography, but parses the ominous narrative of Foucauldian control with arresting observations such as when he notes a parallel between our modern day mainstream discussions of torture with planter observations that “Negroes require less sleep than the white man” (173). The book’s minor theme, that planters sought to control nature in the service of empire and racial domination, makes the reader feel downright dirty in chapter seven when he discusses the role of manure in planter’s imaginations. Soil exhaustion was a major topic of concern in the mono-crop cotton South, and schemes to import fertilizer, or incorporate manure producing pigs and cattle, were rife. Control over nature also included control over the food supply, which meant weighing how much food would be given to enslaved people versus domesticated animals, further evidence of the de-humanizing calculus that went into the mad pursuit of wealth in the cotton South.

The book culminates in a series of chapters outlining the various activities and beliefs of southern elites who sought to rectify the slave economy’s perceived problems by extending the...