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

In 1853 Joseph G. Baldwin’s The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi provided a rollicking account of the boosterism and self-making that had accompanied the settlers’ appropriation of Native American lands there. Joshua Rothman’s new book pays homage in more than just title to Baldwin’s vision, although Rothman emphasizes the darker, more sinister aspects of the boom mentality in the new cotton states.

To explore this speculative frenzy, Rothman focuses on the cases of Virgil Stewart, chronicler of the “land pirate” John Murrell; the rumored slave insurrection of 1835; and the Vicksburg anti-gambling riot that same year. Virgil Stewart, like the events of 1835, shared a link to Mississippi; his career there and these events reflected, according to Rothman, “central paradoxes of the social, cultural, and economic changes that came to define the United States in the decades before the Civil War” (13). In other words, the author suggests that slavery and the South formed a crucial component of the capitalist transformation of the nineteenth-century United States.

Rothman depicts Virgil Stewart as epitomizing the challenges, possibilities, and dangers that young men on the make encountered in those heady times. Born to a poor family that migrated to Mississippi where his father died, the rootless young man tried his hand at farming in west Tennessee then moved back to Mississippi to gain land from the Choctaw cession. Stewart’s attempt to help a former neighbor recover a truant slave, who had either run away or been stolen, led in 1834 to an encounter with the criminal John Murrell. Testifying at Murrell’s trial in that year, Stewart vividly recounted the exploits told him during their ride. The book that Stewart published under a pseudonym further embellished these stories, picturing Murrell as head of a vast conspiracy of criminals, which as part of a scheme to cause anarchy, planned an insurrection among slaves in the Mississippi valley for Christmas 1835.

Yet months before that date, rumors of slave insurrection arose in late June and early July 1835 in Beattie’s Bluff and prompted a violent vigilante response there and in neighboring Livingston, a slightly larger town also in Madison County, Mississippi. A plantation mistress overheard remarks by slaves that led her to suspect a planned uprising. An interrogation carried out with whippings and beatings resulted in slaves “confessing” to the plot and naming other slaves and white men as possible conspirators. Although the numbers are difficult to sum up, over a dozen slaves were executed. In Livingston a provisional “Committee of Safety” sprang up to explore the rumors. In the end, at least five white men, some of them practitioners of alternative medicine or “steam doctors” also were hanged, while others were whipped, tortured, or banished. Although some of the accused were slave owners, generally these men were perceived as outsiders and overly sympathetic to the enslaved.

At virtually the same time as the executions in Madison County, a confrontation between a professional gambler and a militia officer occurred in Vicksburg on July 4, resulting in the tarring and feathering of the gambler. Two days later, after a committee of citizens called on gamblers to leave the city, a mob rushed a coffee house, and after the inhabitants opened fire, hanged five reputed gamblers. Rothman attempts to square the great popularity of gambling in Vicksburg with this riot and puts the latter in the context of a national anti-gambling campaign that viewed the practice as one of the greatest threats to America’s youth. In the author’s view these anxieties arose because of gambling’s similarity to other economic activities in boom time: “it was the prospect of easy money that pervaded American economic life in the flush times that got young men to sidle up to the faro table” (203).

Other historians, such as Laurence Shore...