River of Dark Dreams

Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom traces the development of an imperial ethos among southern planters and firebrands in the Mississippi River Valley between roughly 1820 and 1861. Throughout the volume, Johnson tries to detail a specific vision of empire held by southern planters that encompassed a common appraisal of "race, sex, slavery, space, and time—a vision that outlines what the world and the future looked like to slaveholders and other white men in the Mississippi Valley on the eve of the Civil War" (418). Johnson steps back from the common narrative of causes for the Civil War, asserting that secession after the Election of 1860 was the "lowest common denominator" for most southerners. Instead he presents a compelling, if sometimes overstated, argument that before secession southerners in the Mississippi Valley tried to remedy their growing dependence on the North by extending the Cotton Kingdom first into the Caribbean by trying to provoke a revolution on Cuba and later by filibustering the Nicaraguan government and pressing for a re-inauguration of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Johnson advances his argument through a narrative that combines histories of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism during the nineteenth-century with a sprinkling of environmental/ecological history to freshen our understanding of the cotton plantation.

Steamboats, surveying crews, and land organization came to the Lower Mississippi before cotton plantations dominated the landscape. The early chapters of the book detail the process of creating the region. Steamboats allowed for faster commercial exchange up and down the river and surveyors, speculators, and the Land Office created private property allotments and provided the means for future planters to settle the region. Johnson's chapters on the Steamboat are brilliant both in the level of technical detail and his attention to the diverse peoples that traveled by steamboat during the period. For slaves, the steamboat might represent their road toward bondage if they traveled down-river, but it might represent freedom if it traveled up-stream. Gamblers and confidence men used the steamboats as opportune times to scam unsuspecting planters out of their money, smuggle runaways, or rig card games. And free peoples of color (usually of a mixed-race descent) often passed for white aboard the steamboats—and the fact that many could not distinguish a free person of color from a respectable white gentleman or lady only undermined social hierarchies based on racial difference.

The main thrust of Johnson's argument starts from chapter ten onward. The Panic of 1837 (and subsequent depression) led southern planters, championed by Matthew Maury, to play with ideas of a direct trade with the global economy. Rather than relying on New York City to trans-ship cotton to Liverpool, England, southern planters began eying Cuba, Latin America, and the Atlantic to increase profits and expand their growing race-based empire. Maury's early machinations translated into New Orleans lauding and supporting Narsico Lopez's (failed) invasion of Cuba in 1851. By the late-1850s, southern yeoman desperate to make inroads in the slave economy followed William Walker into Nicaragua, where they temporarily overthrew the government. Finally on the eve of Civil War, many in the South promoted re-opening the trans-Atlantic slave trade to serve two purposes. First, it would alleviate the "slave drain" from the Upper South and unmoor perpetuation of the slave economy from the reproductive capacities of slave women. Second, an infusion of slaves would depress slave prices and allow yeoman and middling whites to acquire slaves, have a stake in the cotton trade, and diminish class conflict. Cuba, Nicaragua, and the slave trade represented alternatives from secession—all of them rooted in ideas of white supremacy and pro-slavery progressivism. Before 1861, a distinct group of southerners mostly from the Lower Mississippi advocated a regional or sectional foreign policy distinct from the homogenous national foreign policy. It was not yet a fully developed secessionist movement wherein extremists advocated total political separation from the Union.

Perhaps the biggest problem among academics today is the recourse to gibberish and obfuscating language, and historians are not exempt from this trend in their own writing. For the most part Walter Johnson is an exception to this rule because he writes a lucid account of the nineteenth-century Lower Mississippi that includes fine-grained, stunning and horrifying accounts of slave punishment, cotton harvest, runaway slaves, and the novel steamboat. In fact, his chapters on steamboat technology and transportation should be the example that all historians of technology and the market revolution should emulate. His tactical narrative of Lopez's failed Cuba expedition rivals that of the best military historians. Unfortunately, the middle chapters rest on an assortment of jargon—Chapter 6, "Dominion"; Chapter 7, "The Empire of the White Man's Will" ; Chapter 8, "The Carceral Landscape." Here you will find unexplained and often unnecessary buzzwords and phrases such as: choreography (of space, place); theatrics and theatrical performances of domestic slavery; space-determining technology; agents of their own actions; subjectivity; horses as a "tool that converted grain into policing"; and "techno-enhanced visuality" [a phrase that sounds more appropriate for a dystopia sci-fi flick than a historical account of nineteenth-century slave societies]. Other words are considerably overused in the volume: "human condition"; space; place; twinned; agency that usually short-cut full explanation of subordinate claims in certain chapters. On the whole, these jargon phrases obscure more than they reveal in certain sections of the work and often make over-complex very qoutidian interactions that happened daily on plantations. At one point Johnson describes a slave who "had been harvesting not cotton but fish, which he had transformed into bacon by means of barter" rather than stating more directly that the slave secretly caught fish that he bartered for bacon.

My quibble with jargon in these middle chapters is probably symptomatic of my broader critique of Johnson's employment of environmental history to add nuance to our understanding of plantation life. Labor historians have wrestled with the usefulness of environmental history for understanding working-class history for quite some time and the debate primarily centers on whether coupling an analysis of the natural environment with working-class mobilization, activism, or oppression can actually tell us anything new about human experience.

In River of Dark Dreams, Johnson draws on environmental history to distinguish between "work" as human energy expended upon the natural world and "labor" as slaves' relationship to their master, or a workingman's relationship to his employer. Johnson thus describes the plantation as a "landscape of labor" where slaves dialectically engaged with an environment that they modified and that in turn changed their bodies. Johnson does suggest a use for environmental history through work, because it provided indispensable skills for cotton picking and memorizing local waterways, woods, and "off-grid" locations that allowed slaves to have pride and satisfaction with their own capabilities independent from the grueling labor performed for the master. When Johnson describes the mundane and brutal aspects of plantation life—toiling in the fields, hewing wood, constructing quarters, using whitewash, washing, sleeping, hunting—he describes the power relations between slave and master and how the landscape and topography could tilt the balance of power one way or another. Masters wielded more power on the plantation because they constructed the house, fields, and sight lines so they could easily monitor slaves and spot/punish potential runaways. When slaves did escape into the woods, bayous, and swamps of the Mississippi they gained the upper-hand because masters relied on dogs and sound to track men. Despite Johnson's description of the plantation as a "landscape of labor" and trying to interpret the differences between the visual orientated cotton field and aural-centered woodlands, his overall narrative of brutality on the plantation largely coheres with previous assessments of plantation life provided by Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Ira Berlin, and countless other historians of slavery, even if Johnson does reject the idea of paternalism as the essence of southern plantation culture. The environmental methodology, despite the specialized vocabulary and jargon, doesn't provide anything profoundly different for understanding that narrative.

Despite these criticisms, Johnson has written a solid narrative of nineteenth-century slavery in the Lower Mississippi that will surely become the basis for future historians' engagement with the subject. His middle chapters excepted, the chapters on steamboat technology, the failed Cuban invasion, the botched Nicaragua coup, and vociferous debates to reopen the Atlantic slave trade are compelling additions to our understanding of "southern identity" before the Civil War and some potential causes of that conflict. He leaves us with a thought-provoking catalogue of antebellum racial-imperial thought—the chanting of "freedom" that concealed enslavement, pseudoscientific racism, and white supremacy—that he suggests have some analogue in contemporary discussions of promoting "freedom" and "democracy" abroad (p. 420).

3.5 stars.