River of Dark Dreams by Walter Johnson

[Matt McKeon]

In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson describes the conquest of the Mississippi River valley from the Spanish, French and Native Americans and the establishment of the "cotton kingdom." Slaves, travelers, goods and above all, cotton, were moved by steamboat to New Orleans, and linked to a national and global ocean going trade.

Johnson describes the economics and social aspects of steamboating, operating and working a cotton plantation, and credit and banking systems that financed it, the ecological impact of the "monoculture" of cotton.

At times difficult to follow(the elaborate structure of planter debt and credit, which stretched from Mississippi to London I had trouble with) and sometimes he gets lost in the weeds of steamboating. A little too fond of statement like, "planters sought to restructure the spatial and temporal limits of the global networks of...." you get the picture.

But a great read and a lot of wonderful stuff in it. Johnson is a author of Soul by Soul, a study of the New Orleans slave markets.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Great stuff. The showmanship, cutthroat competition and frequent explosions among steamboats are illuminated: there were too many steamboats for the traffic on the river, especially after the introduction of the railroads, the boats were cheaply built, practically disposable items, the engines cheap and unsafe "high pressure" boilers, the engineering crew often incompetent and untrained.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Johnson recounts the constant debate among the planter leadership about the drawbacks of an economy based on a single staple crop. Even corn and basic items had to be imported. "Reformers" called for self reliance: grow one's own corn, and develop Southern manufacturing. But such industries were never likely to blossom in the Mississippi River Valley dominated by slave produced cotton: there weren't enough consumers to make a profitable market. Nearly half the population had no money and planters often squeezed the already meager rations to the slaves to cut their own costs.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Duplicate

 

[Matt McKeon]

The last section was on the filibustering movement and the unsuccessful lobbying by some planters to reopen the trans Atlantic slave trade. Both were attempts to break out a national economy that seemed to be orientating itself, not north to south down the Mississippi, but west to east, along the new railroads.

As the price of slaves rose, filibusters and the promise of cheap African slave sought to make slavery more democratic and affordable, and to provide white men on the slaveless margins of the cotton economy a chance at the brass ring

 

[rittmeister]

pic is from amazon

 

[rittmeister]

Duplicate

this is for everybody: if you want a duplicate deleted, just say so
i guess i want to read thisone