Walter Johnson. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2013. 560 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-04555-2.
Reviewed by Caitlin Rosenthal (Department of History, University of California-Berkeley)
Published on H-Business (February, 2015)
Commissioned by Tracey Deutsch
Slavery, Capitalism, and Empire in the Global Mississippi Valley
in history spoiled these expectations, diminishing the
value of the Mississippi valley to the French and opening
up new territory for the expansion of American agriculture. After the Louisiana Purchase, an army of surveyors,
clerks, bankers, and auctioneers sliced and priced the valley into large tracts of land.
Like his 1999 Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson’s recent River of Dark
Dreams is an eloquent and horrifying book. Where Soul
by Soul examined the tight confines of New Orleans slave
pens, Johnson’s new book opens up on the vast expanses
of the Mississippi River valley. Broader in scope (and
length—the book spans fourteen chapters), River of Dark
Dreams is far more ambitious if somewhat less tightly
constructed. This is a book to wrestle with.
Planters expanded west both despite and because of
the threat of slave rebellion. A current of terror pulses
through the book: slaves feared their enslavers, but masBridging environmental history and the cultural his- ters also feared their human capital. White anxieties
tory of empire, River of Dark Dreams describes the evolv- could spin out of control at the slightest sign of revolt.
ing geography and political economy of the Mississippi Ironically, the specter of uprising propelled the expanRiver from the late eighteenth century to the American sion of bonded labor. For, as Johnson eloquently obCivil War. Johnson argues that over the antebellum pe- serves, retreat was not an option. When prices fell or
riod, the increasingly commercial Mississippi valley be- the soil failed, human capital “would not simply rust or
came more closely aligned with the Caribbean and South lie fallow. It would starve. It would steal. It would revolt”
America. Planters and merchants actively pursued an ex- (p. 13).
panding geographic scope for slavery, their efforts culmiAgainst this backdrop, Johnson turns to a series of
nating in attempts to reopen the slave trade on the eve of
chapters
(chapters 3-5) about the role of the Mississippi
the Civil War.
River as a conduit for goods and people. Steamboat caThe early chapters of River of Dark Dreams (chapters pacity expanded rapidly over the early nineteenth cen1-2) describe the importance of the Haitian revolution tury as captains and inventors deployed a mix of techniand the shadow of fear it cast over the slaveowning At- cal and experimental knowledge. In 1814, the 268-mile
lantic world. St. Domingue, “the richest colony in the journey upstream from New Orleans to Natchez took
world,” had been the foothold for French aspirations in more than six days. By 1844, the Sultana made the trip in
the Western Hemisphere (p. 22). In Napoleon’s imperial a record nineteen hours and forty-five minutes (p. 79).
visions, the Mississippi valley would serve St. Domingue, Johnson’s depiction of the river as explosive and unproviding food and supplies to support a colony devoted predictable fits into his portrait of southern capitalism:
to sugar monoculture. The most successful slave revolt the river was as dynamic and dangerous as the planta-
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tions it knit together. Because they did not have to build
tracks, steamboat captains required relatively little capital, and they could organize individually rather than as
joint stock companies. This structure facilitated a frenzy
of entrepreneurial activity, but also accidents and overcrowding.
sissippi is really the Florida Pass,” where the waters of
the Amazon “flowed through the same channel” (p. 299).
Framed not by land but by flows of water and capital, the
basins of the Amazon and the Mississippi united in service to a slaveholder’s empire.
River of Dark Dreams concludes with an account of
efforts to reopen the slave trade in the late 1850s (chapter 14), a choice that underlines the vitality of southern
aspirations. Slavery was not just strong on the eve of the
Civil War: it was expanding. Johnson opens River of Dark
Dreams with a sobering quotation from W. E. B. Du Bois:
“The slave barons looked behind them and saw to their
dismay that there could be no backward step. The slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century
must either die or conquer a nation—it could not hesitate
or pause” (p. 1). Johnson’s conclusion reveals how close
the cotton kingdom came to realizing this vision.
From here, Johnson turns to the development of plantation technologies in the Mississippi valley (chapters 69), writing evocatively about the environmental refigurings engendered in cotton production. He describes how
planters pursuing higher yields introduced new strains
of cotton like “Petit Gulf” for their “pickability.” As they
adopted these varieties, Johnson describes, they molded
plant to person and person to plant, melding agricultural
science and labor management. Viewed through this
lens, the plantation “was not simply a way of organizing
labor, but a way of organizing nature” (p. 154). Slaveholders also used dogs and horses to control the sensory
landscape of the Deep South. These animals enhanced
planters’ sight, smell, and hearing, enabling them to track
men and women who escaped into the swamplands that
surrounded plantations.
Closing with these failed efforts sets up the dark commercialism of slavery as a prelude to something that did
not actually happen. Even as Johnson illuminates a counterfactual Mississippi where slavery might have flourished, he directs attention away from real continuities
In these middle chapters, Johnson also describes plan- with postbellum America. The legacy of slavery should
tation management practices, exploring the relationship be sought not just in the untold history of what might
between quantification and violence. Business and eco- have been but also in the development of the American
nomic historians will find these chapters interesting, economy as it actually unfolded both before and after the
though at times the basic details of plantation manage- Civil War.
ment get lost in lofty language. For example, Johnson
River of Dark Dreams joins an exciting wave of regestures to a “trinomial accounting of acres, bales, and
search
that returns to the political economy of slavery.
hands” but does not offer precise descriptions of recordRecent
texts on the American South include John Makeeping practices or how they were changing over time
jewski,
Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vi(p. 153). Still, these chapters invite further research on
sion of the Confederate Nation (2009) and Lorena S. Walsh,
the ways that mid-nineteenth-century practices for gradMotives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Maning commodities like cotton found further application in
agement in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763 (2010),
the disciplining of human chattel.
and for the West Indies, B. W. Higman’s Plantation JaIn the late chapters of River of Dark Dreams (chapters maica, 1750-1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Econ10-13), Johnson makes his most important contributions omy (2005) and Justin Roberts’s Slavery and Enlightento reimagining the geographic scope of the Mississippi ment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807 (2013). Johnson
valley. He describes plans to connect the Mississippi val- enriches the field, artfully bridging geographic divides.
ley more closely to the Caribbean, and Central and South But River of Dark Dreams also represents a missed opAmerica. Johnson recounts debates over the annexa- portunity to bridge disciplinary divides and engage with
tion of Cuba, the potential of Brazil as a safety valve for research in economics departments. Though the work of
the rapidly growing population of American slaves, and economic historians of slavery asks very different questhe fight over slavery in Nicaragua. Along the way he tions than Johnson, incorporating their findings would
shows how southern imperial visions mapped on to the have enriched the study. For example, in his analysis of
Mississippi River itself. One striking example is Captain the development of new strains of cotton, Johnson would
Matthew Maury’s description of the Amazon River as a have benefited from more engagement with the research
tributary of the global Mississippi. Maury wrote that “in of Paul W. Rhode and Alan L. Olmstead, whose recent
consequence of the Gulf Stream, the mouth of the Mis- Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American
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Agricultural Development (2008) documents the role of
These critiques should not detract from the volume’s
biological innovation in American agricultural develop- overall contribution. This is a landmark text, rich with
ment.
ideas. If not as artfully constructed as Soul by Soul, River
of Dark Dreams is far more ambitious in scope. It is also
Also somewhat disappointing is Johnson’s descrip- equally successful in the ways it immerses readers in the
tion of plantations as producing only salable commodi- daily muck and brutality of the slave system. “The Cotties. He writes, “in an economy where both planting
ton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; aniand productivity were measured by a calculation of bales
mal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh,
per hand per acre, allocation of either land or labor and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, seaway from cotton and toward corn, cattle, or hogs rep- men, and shit” (p. 9). Johnson’s thick descriptions of the
resented an unaccountable loss in the minds of cotton- economic machinery of slavery paint a vivid picture of
crazed planters” (p. 177). Though historians at one time both the South as it was and of a Mississippi empire that
believed that the plantations of the Deep South produced
might have been. At times, his vivid language teeters on
little food, plowing all of their resources into cotton, we
the edge of luridness, but this is part of his critique of
now know that this misconception resulted from trade capitalism. The Deep South was as dynamic as it was vistatistics that did not fully account for the extent to which olent, nursing a kind of capitalism where terrifying brumidwestern foodstuffs that arrived in New Orleans were tality went hand in hand with innovation.
re-exported to consumers outside the South.[1] Many
plantations produced large amounts of food, and indeed
Notes
growing corn and raising hogs complemented planters’
[1]. See, for example, Robert E. Gallman, “Selfefforts to grow more cotton. Corn and cotton were
Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum
counter cyclical, requiring labor at different times of the
South,” Agricultural History 44, no. 1 (January 1, 1970):
year.[2]
5–23; Diane Lindstrom, “Southern Dependence upon InThough Johnson acknowledges that some plantations terregional Grain Supplies: A Review of the Trade Flows,
produced food, he overemphasizes the extent of cotton 1840-1860,” Agricultural History 44, no. 1 (January 1,
monoculture. Describing plantations’ more diverse out- 1970): 101–113; and Albert Fishlow, “Antebellum Interput might have reshaped Johnson’s analysis without un- regional Trade Reconsidered,” The American Economic Redercutting his larger conclusion. Planters grew food pre- view 54, no. 3 (May 1, 1964): 352–364.
cisely because they hoped to maximize the output of their
[2]. Jacob Metzer, “Rational Management, Modern
human capital. They followed the logic of labor as capiBusiness
Practices, and Economies of Scale in the Antetal with chilling sophistication, growing food to nourish
bellum
Southern
Plantations,” Explorations in Economic
their investments even as they also deployed hunger as a
History
12,
no.
2
(1975):
123–150.
tool for management.
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Citation: Caitlin Rosenthal. Review of Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton
Kingdom. H-Business, H-Net Reviews. February, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42153
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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