River of dark dreams [electronic resource] : slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom / Walter Johnson.
2013
E449 .J695 2013eb
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Title
River of dark dreams [electronic resource] : slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom / Walter Johnson.
Author
Johnson, Walter, 1967-
ISBN
9780674074880 electronic book
9780674045552
9780674045552
Publication Details
Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (526 pages)
Call Number
E449 .J695 2013eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
305.800977
Summary
This work looks at the history of the Mississippi River Valley in the nineteenth century and the economy that developed there, powered by steam engines and slave labor. When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. This book places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. Here the author traces the connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton's dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale. But at the center of the story the author tells are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton, who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description
Description based on print version record.
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River of dark dreams.
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Table of Contents
Preface: Boom : The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton
Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares in Louisiana
The Panic of 1835
The Steamboat Sublime
Limits to Capital
Race, Anxiety, and Escape on the Antebellum Mississippi
Dominion
"The Empire of the White Man's Will"
The Carceral Landscape
The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton
Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade
Tales of Mississippian Empire
The Material Limits of "Manifest Destiny"
The Grey-eyed Man of Destiny
The Ignominious Effort to Re-Open the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares in Louisiana
The Panic of 1835
The Steamboat Sublime
Limits to Capital
Race, Anxiety, and Escape on the Antebellum Mississippi
Dominion
"The Empire of the White Man's Will"
The Carceral Landscape
The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton
Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade
Tales of Mississippian Empire
The Material Limits of "Manifest Destiny"
The Grey-eyed Man of Destiny
The Ignominious Effort to Re-Open the Atlantic Slave Trade.