On River of Dark Dreams

This has been an incredibly illuminating work and one that I love for the way that it functions on different levels.

Johnson argues that slaveholders in the Mississippi River Valley became increasingly radicalized in the years leading up to the Civil War because slavery effectively destroyed their prospects. At the beginning of the cotton revolution, cotton was a ludicrously profitable crop and any slaveholder could make loads of money on it. However, as the decades wore on, more slaveholders became involved in the cultivation of cotton, leading the share of profits to drop. In order to maximize profits, they stopped growing food so they could use the land for cotton, and they put the bulk of their profits into buying more land and slaves. Because nearly all of their capital was in land and slaves, they had very little liquid money. In response, nearly all of their everyday purchases were done on credit, which was established by fronting cotton profits to banks. To keep up, it became necessary for slaveholders to expand. The thin margins on which they lived had become so diminished that the whole system would collapse without expansion, and their need for expansion played a considerable role in the lead-up to the Civil War.

In making this case, and on another level, Johnson reorients our view of American space in the antebellum years. Today’s major textbooks and the bulk of professional scholarship look at the North American continent for information about the expansion of slavery. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all play key roles here. However, Johnson says, “Wait, hold up a minute, you’re looking at this the wrong way.” While the American West was important to the expansion of slavery, looking exclusively at the West gives us the past from a presentist angle—we think about those territories because they remained part of the Union and became states.

However, there were crucial territories and aims that did not. Cuba, for instance, was critical to slaveholders’ thinking about expansion of the institution. They saw the entire Gulf as the mouth of the Mississippi, and there was no better place than Cuba to get access to the rest of the world markets (perhaps undercutting Liverpool’s cotton brokers). Nicaragua was also critical to slaveholders’ view of the world, as they saw Nicaragua would give them access to Pacific markets as well as Atlantic ones. Some slaveholders believed so strongly in this that one of them, William Walker, launched an invasion of Nicaragua during the 1850s and proclaimed himself president of the country (and held de facto power for just under a year). Finally, slaveholders wanted to reopen the Atlantic slave trade to ensure that there were enough slaves to cultivate all of the necessary cotton. This was such an important issue to them that the Mississippi and Louisiana state legislatures actively discussed this in 1858, and some made the case that reopening the slave trade was the best way to keep the South in the Union. I am so glad that none of these aims were successful—they would have constituted a Caribbean hellscape.

Because of the two-levels approach that Johnson gives us, he illuminates a great deal about the economics of Southern slavery and the way that mid-19th century Americans saw the world around them. With this in mind, it also makes sense why many slaveholders fled to Central America and the Caribbean (and Brazil—for instance, there’s a town in São Paulo called “Americana,” settled by Confederate slaveowners) after the Civil War came to an end.

I really can’t speak highly enough about Johnson’s work here.