"Until I read this book, William Walker's late 1850's takeover of Nicaragua seemed to me like an odd and violent folly, or maybe a precursor of the century's later decades. In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson demonstrates that Walker's thinking was a pure form of mainstream thinking in the white South. Slavery and its imperative maintenance became an engine of expansion — financial, geographic, and technological — that fueled the South's dreams while making their future ever more precarious. Everything that came later looks different. One of this year's best history books, and immediately essential for understanding American slavery."
Publisher Belknap Press
Publication Date 2013-02-26
Section New Hardcover - Nonfiction / African American Studies / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780674045552
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. River of Dark Dreams 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.
Walter Johnson deftly 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 Johnson 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.
