In history's house there are many mansions, space aplenty for good work of all types. As a result, a vast array of subjects, geographical areas, temporal periods, approaches, rhetorical strategies, levels of analysis, and ideological preferences can all be accommodated comfortably in the same disciplinary space. And historians who don't like the scholarly decor in one particular unit have ample opportunity to find others that suit.

The prefatory comments above are not meant as a throat-clearing exercise, but rather as a serious entrée into Joshua D. Rothman's award-winning book Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. The appraisal offered here is not meant to be normative, but, with a nod to reader-response theory, is an attempt by one individual to engage a text, and, in so doing, perhaps to extend, if not complete, its meaning through critical analysis and interpretation.

This said, let me cut to the chase. Although I fully acknowledge that Rothman's well-researched and clearly written book will appeal to many readers – for numerous reasons, some good, some otherwise – I must say straight away that I had a very hard time completing it. The study differs in almost every conceivable way from the type of history I do and the type of history I valorize and prefer to read. However, just as even cowgirls can get the blues – to which novelist Tom Robbins famously attested in 1976 – even naysayers can heap some praise, which I will do before I conclude.

Flush Times and Fever Dreams is at once a finely granulated microhistory of an alleged criminal conspiracy in the Old Southwest in the mid-1830s and an ambitious attempt to use this alleged conspiracy and the responses thereto as a prism dispersing light on both capitalism and the cultural development of this region, if not on the cultural development of the United States as a whole.

Rothman's study is first and foremost an incredibly detailed account of several convoluted, overlapping narratives relating to conspiracies, cabals, and intrigues allegedly being planned in the Old Southwest and other parts of the American South in 1834 and 1835. The purported existence of these schemes, their supposed relationships with one another, and the often gruesome responses to the schemes were all set in motion by an ambitious young, perhaps delusional, no-count named Virgil Stewart. Hoping to ingratiate himself with his perceived betters in Madison County in western Tennessee, Stewart seized an opportunity in early 1834 to hunt for a poor, petty criminal from the area, John Murrell, who had stolen or at least aided the escape of two slaves owned by a locally prominent minister/planter. Stewart caught up with Murrell in western Tennessee and, using a ruse, befriended him and accompanied him into the Arkansas Territory, then back into Tennessee, before splitting off and returning to Madison County. By then he had been able to extract information about the whereabouts of the stolen slaves and, Stewart claimed, Murrell's admission that he had stolen them. Shortly after returning home, Stewart related this information to the owner of the slaves. Once Murrell himself returned to Madison County, the slave-owner had him arrested. Murrell managed to break out of jail, but was subsequently retaken, and tried and convicted in late July 1834, receiving a lengthy prison sentence. All well and good – or so it seemed.

Throughout the first half of 1834 Stewart had been embellishing and exaggerating his actions while in pursuit of Murrell, spinning wilder and wilder tales of derring-do in hopes of establishing himself as a man of substance and honor. His “betters” in Madison County – and in Yalobusha County, Mississippi, where he also spent time – knew that he was neither, and paid little respect, much less homage, to Stewart, whom they viewed (correctly) as an unscrupulous opportunist. The disregard of some and disrespect of others led an increasingly manic Stewart more and more to embellish the story of his role in the capture of Murrell and the figure of Murrell himself, who, according to Stewart, was in fact not a small-time thief, but rather nothing less than the criminal mastermind of a large “mystic clan” or “mystic conspiracy” comprising robbers, gamblers, hustlers, confidence men, and murderers that threatened both the Southwest and other parts of the South. One particularly heinous aspect of said threat purportedly involved the conspirators' encouragement of enslaved blacks to revolt against their masters, which not surprisingly caused many an ear to perk up in the rapidly expanding plantation belts of the Old Southwest.

Stewart's fantastic tales, alas, moved rapidly from orality to print, first in a pamphlet, but soon after and more ominously – in the early spring of 1835 – in an eighty-four-page book entitled A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murel, the Great Western Land Pirate, written by Stewart but published under the pseudonym Augustus Q. Walton. It was arguably the “success” of this book, more than anything else, that linked Stewart's self-regard and his pitiable and vainglorious attempt at vindication to a series of grisly acts of violence in west central Mississippi later in 1835, which acts constitute the heart of Rothman's book.

These episodes – centered around a bloody attack on gambling and gamblers in Vicksburg, and a viciously cruel campaign to suppress a rumored slave rebellion in Madison and Hinds counties – were characterized by acts of unthinkable brutality and various and sundry forms of injustice, including torture, coerced confessions, forced betrayals, kangaroo courts, and murder via quasi-judicial and extrajudicial means. Over twenty individuals – black and white, slave and free – were executed in July 1835, when violence peaked, the result of frenzied mob actions ostensibly directed against both the “mystic clan” and its natural confederates and confreres: slaves, poor whites, drifters, petty crooks, people thought to be deviating from conventional standards of community morality, and even those who were merely unpopular or little-known.

Rothman reconstructs these painful episodes in excruciating detail. The author is a formidable, well-nigh indefatigable, researcher, leaving few evidentiary stones unturned in said reconstruction. If he pulverizes some stones into dusty particulates – the “inventions” of Stewart and Murrell and the actions of the Livingston Committee of Safety, for example – it nonetheless can safely be said that anyone obsessed with west central Mississippi in the summer of 1835 is deeply in his debt. Those looking for the broader meaning of that Mississippi summer will find themselves less beholden.

Not that Rothman doesn't try to provide such meaning. Indeed, the author's overarching intent is captured in the subtitle of Flush Times and Fever Dreams: as much as anything else, this is intended as “a story of capitalism and slavery in the Age of Jackson.” More to the point, in Rothman's view the heinous social behavior of ruling groups in west central Mississippi during the summer of 1835 was related to, indeed grew out of, apprehensions and fears occasioned by the “market revolution” that these groups were then living through. Moreover, the author believes that the extraordinary nature and degree of nastiness that manifested itself in that particular locale cannot be separated from the speculative frenzy displayed by such high-rolling groups as they risked their futures on plantation building, the vagaries of the international cotton market, and potentially rebellious slaves. Whether self-consciously or otherwise, those involved in the poisonous hysteria described earlier were attempting at once to comfort themselves and rationalize their own behavior by projecting their own socioeconomic anxieties onto others whom they either resembled (in the case of gamblers, thieves, confidence men, etc.) or depended on (in the case of slaves). Viewed in this way, their actions can be interpreted as violent boundary-marking exercises designed to differentiate what they considered their own socially productive and morally legitimate forms of risk-taking behavior in capitalist markets from the asocial, nonproductive, immoral, and often criminal behavior (or tendencies) of subaltern groups comprising deviant and degenerate free populations and enslaved blacks.

From my perspective, there are several problems with Rothman's interpretive line, which line grows out of a particular approach to and understanding of matters economic. For example, although the concept of a “market revolution” during the Jacksonian era has gained considerable purchase in recent decades among historians who do not specialize in economic history, few scholars in the actual field of economic history buy it. Most economic historians, that is to say, do not see any revolutionary economic changes occurring during that era, viewing developments therein as the continuation of longer-term patterns and processes whereby more and more Americans responded to market signals and signs in economically rational ways and more and more aspects of American life began to be influenced, if not yet governed, by market criteria. To most economic historians, if there ever was a market revolution that had a major impact on American history – and this possibility itself is debated – it happened not in the Jacksonian era, but much earlier.

The evocation of the “market revolution” concept perforce leads us to a broader economic concept still: capitalism. Here, too, there are problems with Rothman's line in Flush Times and Fever Dreams, though much must be inferred because, despite the book's subtitle, there is little discussion, much less analysis, of capitalism in the book, as Gavin Wright has also pointed out.Footnote ¹ Rather, like many scholars associated with the “new history of American capitalism,” Rothman is critical of this form of economic organization – mode of production, if you will – but signifies his dissatisfaction not through rigorous analysis of its overall workings in discrete historical contexts, but by confirming his biases and focussing only on negative features, tendencies, or outcomes sometimes associated therewith.

Rothman is particularly concerned with one such feature or tendency – speculative financial practices – which he believes “looked a lot like gambling.” Why focus so? Because blurring the distinction between markets and instability and between speculation and gambling, and, withal, drawing links among capitalism, slavery, immorality, and even criminality, have become de rigueur in nineteenth-century scenes in the “new history of American capitalism” script.

Not that that script is entirely inaccurate. There was plenty wrong with American capitalism in the 1830s – its imbricated relationship with the institution of slavery, most notably – just as there is plenty wrong with capitalism today. But that hardly means that this economic system lacks positive features, much less that the negatives outweigh the same. Rothman's depiction of the workings of capitalism in west central Mississippi in the Jacksonian era is not so much wrong as woefully incomplete. Had he undertaken more economic analysis of change over time in economic outcomes, wealth-holding patterns, and material life more generally in Vicksburg, Madison County, and Hinds County, we would, I suspect, get a fuller picture of capitalism's longer-term effects in these areas, both positive and negative. We might also get a better and certainly more satisfactory understanding of the different responses to the slave panic in Madison and Hinds Counties, one likely with less riding on the behavior of a single individual – Patrick Sharkey of Hinds County – the deus ex machina in Rothman's story.

And, before moving on, I can't resist a word or two in defense, if not in praise, of speculation and speculators. In Flush Times and Fever Dreams, speculation is depicted as an inherently pernicious practice qua practice and speculators are viewed as evil villains and nothing but. Full stop. Neither of these characterizations is accurate. Speculation and speculators are neither good nor bad, but efficient or inefficient, for both the practice and the practitioners play necessary roles in markets of all types – financial, art, land, etc. Speculators buy or sell assets hoping to gain from changes in their prices. To be sure, some speculators pay little regard to the underlying value of said assets, but others certainly do. Similarly, some speculators have short-term time horizons, but others prefer holding assets for medium- and long-term periods. In any case, in efficient financial markets, their role is at once to absorb excess risk and to provide liquidity when necessary, while other participants – hedgers, arbitrageurs, and normal investors – perform different functions.

In land and real-estate markets – more germane here – speculators help to render more efficient the intertemporal distribution of resources under conditions of uncertainty. In principle, it may be a good idea for some people to hold back some land for use in the future rather than to plow under every acre and farm post to post. Who knows what the future will bring? Recall for a moment Joseph's interpretation of the Pharaoh's dream in Genesis 41, seven fat years followed by seven lean years, and all that. Moreover, speculators often buy and sell when no one else will, whether out of inclination or out of capacity. Rothman's own evidence in chapter 1 – relating to the results of the speculative behavior of the Chocchuma Land Company in Mississippi in the wake of the Choctaw Cession – suggests that the effects of such behavior in that particular case weren't half bad (which the author admits, albeit grudgingly).

The fact that a panic began in the US in 1837, which panic was actually rather more a depression, is easier to write about in 2014 than it was to predict in 1834 or 1835. In this regard, one recalls the old saw about the economic forecaster who predicted five of the last two recessions. Although developments in the Old Southwest, including inefficient speculation (not “overspeculation”), helped to create the conditions necessary for the panic of 1837, they were not alone sufficient. Similarly, although economic and perhaps even moral anxieties probably played roles in the social “panics” in west central Mississippi in the summer of 1835, I am not convinced that such anxieties can bear the interpretive weight placed upon them in Flush Times and Fever Dreams. There were numerous panics and scares centering around alleged slave plots in the South, some in good times and some in bad, some in booming areas and some in areas long past their prime. Even in the light cast by historical detective work as impressive as that on display in the book, many aspects of darkness relating to the goings-on in Mississippi in 1835 remain. For starters, the links between events in Vicksburg and those in the rural interior counties in the summer of 1835, and the differential responses in the interior, indeed even the basic economic and social structures of Madison and Hinds Counties, deserve further attention, for more information on these matters would likely shed additional light on Rothman's principal concerns.

Let me hasten to add that in I am in no way calling for a longer book, but a different one, one weeded and pruned and maybe organized somewhat differently. But that is unfair, for it is Rothman's book, after all, and not my own. As stated at the outset, I had a hard time as it is getting through all of the detail included by the author. Although just over three hundred pages of text, Flush Times and Fever Dreams reads long. This judgment may say more about this reviewer, though, than it does about the author's prose or the readibility of his book. I readily admit that I much prefer to study history over la longue durée than to study histoire événementielle, and to read what Andre Gunder Frank has rather infelicitously referred to as “horizontally integrated macrohistory” than microhistory.Footnote ² Rothman's book is anything (and everything!) but history over la longue durée or horizontally integrated macrohistory.

At the end of the day, then, I may not accept Rothman's broader claims, or, for that matter, his overall interpretation. And I may not even like very much the genre within which he writes or his scholarly MO. But, this said, I recognize that his is an important, imaginative, and provocative study well worth the many hours I spent getting through it. The author's receipt of the Southern Historical Association's prestigious Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award for the book in 2013 was well deserved and hardly surprising, for he has made the “foreign country” that was Jacksonian Mississippi a little less so.