Johnson, Walter

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

Belknap of Harvard (Cambridge)

2013

OUR SYNOPSIS: Walter Johnson demonstrates that New Orleans was a focal point of “slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the nineteenth-century Mississippi Valley.” (3) He shows the city was a global trade nexus for cotton, a key node in the export system of the nineteenth century United States, and an embodiment of attempts at white racial domination in the antebellum South. Fueling these developments was a capitalist cycle that “turned cotton into slaves and slaves into cotton,” colonizing and developing the region in the process. (7) He shows how the steamboat became the key vessel facilitating this cycle, streamlining the movement of enslaved people, goods, and capital through the Mississippi Valley. Industrialization thus accelerated racial capitalism, reshaping time and space.

BIG QUESTIONS:

To what extent did capitalism and the value it placed in enslaved people play a role in revolt and rebellion by enslaved people?
How did infrastructure relate to racial capitalism in antebellum in New Orleans?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“The history being made in the South was not the history that the slaveholders and cotton factors told themselves they were making, but another sort of history entirely. It was a history being made by their black slaves. And though that real history was evident every day in the physical labor with which those slaves created ‘the country,’ it was yet hidden from view by the forced conversion of their labor into wealth credited to the substance of their masters and by a stage-prop sovereignty designed to convince them they were alone in the world.” (68)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton, 1859), 74-80, https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/ball/ball.html.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

Significance of the Baltimore to New Orleans route of the domestic slave trade, not addressed directly but you could absolutely bring it in and connect it with Johnson’s arguments.