Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams is a haunting book. His stark, often violent prose sketches the landscape and people of the lower Mississippi valley as they grapple with American expansion, social and economic crises, and the apparent juggernaut of global capitalism, fuelled by an insatiable demand for cotton. Johnson's one constant is American slavery, which serves as a source of security, ambition and deep anxiety for southern slaveholders. Our reviewers agreed that River of Dark Dreams is a powerful and compelling piece of scholarship, and are sure that it will prove a work with which future historians of antebellum slavery and capitalism will have to engage. Our reviewers’ criticisms focussed on the book's sometimes murky chronology and related questions of change over time, the place of the nation-state in Johnson's analysis, and (ironically) the question of agency with regard to capitalist development in the South. These questions notwithstanding, each contributor below found much to praise in the book; each would have no hesitation recommending it as a significant analysis of antebellum slavery and the world the slaveholders made.

David Sim: In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson draws on a great range of recent, innovative approaches to the history of slavery in the United States. Do you think he moulds these together successfully?

Patrick J. Doyle: This is a hugely ambitious book. It has a refreshing, holistic approach to narrating the history of the antebellum United States, and moves far beyond the historiography of American slavery. Johnson draws on a wide range of approaches and analyses to build a vivid picture of the Mississippi valley. For instance, there's innovative material that draws influence from sensory history. He talks about the way that white masters utilized lines of sight to augment their domination, and the value of sound to runaway slaves navigating landscapes beyond the plantation (166–68, 234–36). It's an evocative, and inspiring, way of writing about this world.

Joanna Cohen: I agree. Through this book, I now have a mental picture of the Mississippi valley as a place that I never had before. I'd always thought of the South analytically as a political and economic construction, but he gives the region a grounded quality which roots the dynamics of power in the landscape itself. He has put the physical process of making the South into clear perspective. There is a fantastic chapter on “the carceral landscape” in which he talks about the transition from field to brush to forest and how the policing of slaves was shaped by that habitat. And throughout, of course, he pays close attention to the Mississippi river and the way in which it shapes and reshapes the environment in which his actors operate (209–43). It's a real triumph.

Sim: I agree. As a synthesis I think it's remarkable. He pulls together insights from political, social, economic, environmental, cultural and intellectual history to craft an impressively complex picture of the Mississippi valley. Describing something as a “synthesis” might sound dismissive, but I certainly don't mean it to be. It is a brilliant, bracing feat and it gives River of Dark Dreams an authority and concreteness that neatly complements the more abstract discussions of capital and value that mark its first two-thirds.Footnote ¹ The act of conjuring up such a strong sense of the plantation and its surroundings is fantastic.

Lydia Plath: I also think that the section on the carceral landscape is one of the strongest chapters in the book, and I agree that Johnson deserves great praise for pulling together old and new literature to build a compelling picture of life on a plantation. What seems to me of great importance is his focus on the Mississippi valley. Much of the good writing that we have on antebellum slavery deals primarily with Virginia and the Carolinas.Footnote ² In large part, this is because that's where the best records are, but so often you can be led to believe that these states exemplify the South. Johnson foregrounds the Mississippi valley and demonstrates its distinctiveness, whilst still telling us a great deal about the South more generally. In this sense he builds on Edward Baptist's research on Middle Florida and the role of the plantation frontier in developing the myth of the “old South.”Footnote ³ In many ways, the Mississippi valley was the West – or at least a West: the experience of slavery here in this period is very different to that which you would find in, say, Virginia. There's virtue in this focus. Many histories of this region are microhistories, which are very valuable but no one had, to date, offered a synthesis of the work on the Mississippi valley.Footnote ⁴ He uses his sources to evoke the pain, violence and anxiety of the region in an incredibly impressive way. Above all, it's beautifully written.

However, I thought this geographical focus was better sustained in the first two-thirds of the book than in its final section. Here he sometimes discussed “the South” more generally, and at other times qualifies his writing by talking about “many souths.” For example, he discusses the role of the sectional crisis in producing “an acute awareness of differences within the South” in the 1850s (373, emphasis in original), but these differences had existed long before this (as the first half of the book demonstrates). There's no problem with the focus that he's chosen, but one thing that would have been very helpful is a clearer sense of exactly what gets included when we talk about “the Mississippi valley.” At some points he seems to equate it with “the Deep South,” particularly when drawing a contrast with the “Upper South,” at others it refers to those states that border the Mississippi river (375). But Johnson isn't interested in Mississippi-the-state. Northeastern Mississippi, for instance, is a different world to the one that he's outlining here. A little more clarity with respect to the exact coordinates of the geographical area of analysis would help us to understand this region's importance and distinctiveness.

Sim: That's something that Brian Schoen does very bluntly – and I think very helpfully – in the introduction to his book on cotton and federal politics.Footnote ⁵ He spells out exactly where he's referring to when he uses the terms “South,” “Lower South,” “cotton belt,” and so on. I think that's very helpful. He also argues against using the term “cotton states … in recognition of the more diversified agricultural base of those states.”Footnote ⁶ But do you think this elision might be conscious on Johnson's part?

Doyle: Johnson doesn't offer a similarly rigorous definition. The “Cotton Kingdom” and the Mississippi valley overlap, but they're not synonymous. I wonder if that's because he's not as interested in specific geographic parameters as he is in exploring white slaveholders’ imaginations – the “dreams” of his title. Johnson doesn't really address Schoen's point about diversification either. You learn nothing from River of Dark Dreams about the South's sugar economy, for instance, even though this is clearly part of the Mississippi valley by any definition. Indeed, New Orleans plays a vital role in Johnson's book but he elides the sugar parishes that neighboured the city. We might ask how Richard Follett's work on sugar plantations in Louisiana fits with Johnson's portrayal of slavery and capitalism.Footnote ⁷ Sugar planters have their own ambitions, too, but they don't always coincide with those of cotton planters. The way that these two groups think about the global market is distinct: sugar planters were far more interested in tariff protection, for example, due to fierce economic competition from the Caribbean. Johnson's cotton planters, when they look at the global economy, often appear far more self-assured. Cotton gives them that arrogance. But is that arrogance shared by others in the valley?

Follett's work also raises a much bigger question that Johnson takes a stance on – that of paternalism. Follett gives greater credence to the concept of paternalism, demonstrating how sugar masters utilized incentives to fuse “a manipulative management style with an idealized notion of the master–slave relationship.”Footnote ⁸ Paternalism is a key tool for the capitalist ambitions of planters, according to Follett, but this is something that Johnson is less interested in exploring. Rather, the emphasis is firmly on the threat of the lash, which is omnipresent; he dismisses paternalism as a “patent fraud, a counterfeit worn threadbare by repeated gullible acceptances” (194).Footnote ⁹ And Johnson, of course, is right to discard any notion that slavery, as a functioning labour and social system, operated in a paternalist fashion. Yet, by the same token, some planters did clearly think of themselves as paternalists and so dismissing the idea outright seems hasty. There is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Exploring this fictitious and figurative construct, it seems to me, would have been helpful in trying to disentangle the fantasies and dreams that the Mississippi valley slaveholding elite held about their society. Walter Johnson's earlier work on the slave trade in fact demonstrated a more sophisticated consideration of paternalism, usefully interpreting it as “a way of imagining, describing, and justifying slavery rather than a direct reflection of underlying social relations.”Footnote ¹⁰ These questions of how and why slaveholders imagined themselves as paternalists, insightfully explored in the work of Michael Tadman and Lacy K. Ford, are absent in River of Dark Dreams, yet seem central to the intellectual terrain the book covers.Footnote ¹¹

Cohen: Paternalism might be absent, but the primacy and power of the relationship between master and slave – coming before relationships with other slaves – came through very clearly here. This was really interesting to me. Johnson's first book, with its focus on the commercial rhythms of the slave market and the ways in which slaves manipulated their fate on the auction block, seemed to me to be a radical reimagining of slavery's history.Footnote ¹² It was a dramatic step away from classic works, such as Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll or The Political Economy of Slavery, which focussed on the feudal, precapitalist world of the plantation. But in River of Dark Dreams, Johnson seems to return to the questions that Genovese posed about agency and resistance.Footnote ¹³ One of the things that Genovese asked us to recognize is that there is no way out of the system of slavery that he describes. Even when a slave steals a little food, or resists in some other small way, she or he hasn't overthrown the whole system and is therefore still somehow a part of it. For Genovese, everyday resistance was simply acquiescence to a larger system of oppression. Only revolution marked true resistance. Johnson has long been invested in challenging this dichotomy of revolutionary resistance versus subversive acquiescence, but even so, in this book he resurrects Genovese's point that the extent of a slave's agency was defined by the power of a master's domination.Footnote ¹⁴ As part of Johnson's broader argument about the limits of the idea of agency, this seems to me to be a really important reminder, as well as a challenge to the way in which we have been writing the history of slavery as the history of restored agency.

Sim: In a recent retrospective assessing Genovese's work J. William Harris noted that he assumed that “planters exercised their ‘hegemony’ over the white majority in the South, not just their slaves,” but that he spent little time analysing the “plain folk” of the South.Footnote ¹⁵ Is this something that Johnson could be accused of?

Plath: Non-slaveholding whites are a major constituency in the Mississippi valley, however you define it, and I think Johnson could have spent more time dealing with them. David Brown has written about the variety of this group, from yeomanry to poor white itinerants through to a southern middle class of doctors, lawyers and other professionals.Footnote ¹⁶ The kinds of South Carolinian yeomanry that, say, Stephanie McCurry describes in her work aren't so present in the region that Johnson's exploring, but here and there non-slaveholding whites make cameo appearances.Footnote ¹⁷ Perhaps the merchants of New Orleans, who are prominent in Johnson's writing, are the closest he gets to explicitly discussing those white southerners who don't belong to the planter class. But imperialism and whiteness remain his focus at the expense of white social class.

The episodic engagement with non-planter-class whites is most evident in his treatment of them in his excellent chapter on the “Panic of 1835,” which interrogates the sources, meaning and implications of an explosion of violence in Madison County, Mississippi in the summer of that year. He is absolutely right to describe the county as “in the midst of a furious transformation from a frontier exchange economy to a boomtime cotton economy … sitting on the leading edge of the international cotton market” (47). Madison County only comes into existence seven years earlier, in 1828, and people only start populating the area in (small) numbers at the beginning of the 1830s. By 1837 the town has pretty much vanished: the railroad bypasses it. This is a point of great fluidity, and therefore historical specificity is very important when thinking about the events that occur. Things look very different in the early and late 1830s, for instance. One of the most successful things about this chapter in particular is the way in which Johnson evokes the deep-rooted and locally particular anxieties of those who are caught up in this panic. Pretty much everyone in the county has just moved there; few people know or feel that they can trust anyone else. These settlers have just cleared the land; there are swamps and wild animals; there are still fears about local Native Americans. The slave population has doubled, as Johnson notes, over the past five years, and planters are uncertain about the stability and durability of slavery. A rumour goes around that a slave insurrection is imminent, someone takes it seriously, fear spreads and, ultimately, about a dozen white men and twenty or thirty slaves are executed. What fuels this anxiety is the presence of whites who aren't themselves planters, and who therefore may have different aspirations – or “dreams” – from the planter class with whom Johnson is concerned. But this delineation is complicated by the fact that several of them were actually slaveholders. Ruel Blake, who is at the centre of the insurrection rumours, is thought of as a poor white by his neighbours, but he owns five slaves – we know this because he wills them to one of the men who is involved in his arrest and “trial.” Elsewhere perhaps this number of slaves might lead us to characterize him as a small planter, but in Mississippi in the mid-1830s he's an almost impoverished ginwright who happens to own a few slaves, the actions of one of whom gets him executed. Another key player is Joshua Cotton, who is an itinerant steamdoctor, but who is also a slaveholder – and it is perhaps the disjuncture between these various identities that results in his death. The world that Mississippi valley planters imagine, and which Johnson describes, has no place for these kinds of men. As soon as the panic dies down and the violence is over, poor whites vanish from his narrative, but I don't think they disappear from the minds of his protagonists.

Doyle: I agree that non-slaveholders are not extensively represented here. The final chapters, on the reopening of the slave trade and the possibility of an empire for slavery, are where they come most clearly into focus. Here, they feature in the imagination of people like James DeBow, for whom they are an intellectual problem, maybe even an abstraction, rather than an ongoing social reality. For DeBow and others in the 1850s, the question is how best to conciliate these individuals, who might previously have held the reasonable hope of social mobility, but for whom slave-ownership has now become too expensive a proposition. As Lydia notes above, Johnson's focus is more squarely on whiteness and imperialism, rather than white social class, but the voices of these non-slaveholders would have been interesting to hear. Such voices are difficult to uncover, particularly at the lowest end of the white social spectrum, but they could have offered intriguing insights on the fundamental questions of race and capital that Johnson is interrogating.

Cohen: I wonder if as a consequence of this omission we end up with a history of capitalism that is a twisted version of the liberal consensus interpretation. Everyone seems to be on board with the onward march of global capitalism. And perhaps because non-slaveholders have such a small presence in River of Dark Dreams, we don't really get a sense of how or even if there are any non-slaveholders who contest this process. There's plenty of excellent material on slavery and capitalism, as we'll discuss, but there's no sense of the debate around an older historiographical concept, the market revolution. Is there a “transition-to-capitalism” debate occurring? If so, when and where?

By not highlighting the men and women who might have objected to relentless expansion of plantation slavery, the first half of the book gives way to a rather Braudellian conceptualization. The landscape, for Johnson, is key. The river itself is central. His actors are hemmed in by the Mississippi river and the dictates of the market. By the time Johnson has moved into the second half of the book we get a clear sense of the motivating actors: planters are driving this imperial project, planters are pushing for the reopening of the slave trade, planters are thinking in terms of the modernity of the South and the ever more refined “science” of extracting profit from bodies and land. But in the first half, Johnson presents us with a story of people bound up in forces beyond their control, tragic for slaves but relentlessly triumphant for masters.

Sim: I want to come back to a quotation that Lydia offered us earlier, about Madison County “sitting on the leading edge of the international cotton market” (47). This raises two interesting questions, I think. One concerns the way that Johnson connects the micro and the macro in his writing, which I think offers great benefits but perhaps at some cost. The other is the enduring argument about the modernity – and more specifically the capitalism – of antebellum slaveholders. Johnson writes that “few questions have occasioned the expenditure of so much ink in the service of so many circular arguments as the question of whether the planters who owned slaves and lived by their labour were capitalists” (252). What did you make of his treatment of the relationship between capitalism and slavery?

Cohen: Without doubt, Johnson has made a compelling case that the system that he is describing is capitalist. But there is an inherent tension in the way he has framed capitalism in this book. Through the specificity of his descriptions of labour and exploitation, through his emphasis on the means of extracting labour, Johnson makes the case that we should not assume that the capitalism of Manchester is the same as the capitalism of the Mississippi valley. Yet at the same time he makes it absolutely clear that the Cotton Kingdom is a part of a much larger international capitalist economy, all tied together by cotton and underwritten by the labour of slaves. This raises the question, then, of what, if anything, is distinctive about this region. It seems clear that the unequivocally coercive nature of the supply of labour is important – but then that also underpins the wealth of New York, Manchester and Boston, to a degree. The relentless expansionist tendencies that he describes in the final third of the book, the longing for Cuba and the hankering after Nicaragua, also don't accord the region a unique status. After all, Britain had long been engaged in its own capitalist imperial project and Manifest Destiny had its proponents among the Democrats of New York. If anything the Mississippi valley's distinctive capitalism rests on its landscape. It is the environment and ecology that make the South (as he defines it) into a unique capitalist system with its own imperatives.

Sim: This might sound obvious, but I thought that Johnson offered a strong argument for thinking historically about historically situated concepts. He makes the very good point that so much writing about slavery and capitalism rests on the application of categories formulated ex nihilo. From the blood and dirt of River of Dark Dreams Johnson is able to demonstrate that the two are not only compatible but also, thinking historically, inextricable. Here I thought he echoed some of the fantastic work that has been done by scholars like Catherine Hall and Nick Draper in a British context.Footnote ¹⁸

In a recent review of River of Dark Dreams historian Gabriel Winant suggested that Johnson's Cotton Kingdom “looks like nothing less than the homeland of neoliberalism, and … the origin story of contemporary America.”Footnote ¹⁹ I think it's an interesting characterization. It's certainly forceful, though I'm sceptical about playing down the historical specificity of modern neoliberal politics. One particularly interesting and important aspect of the best writing on neoliberalism concerns the role occupied by the state – but the state seems to be relatively absent here.Footnote ²⁰ Perhaps the nation-state is the casualty of binding the intensely local to the global. Of course, many historians –quite rightly – have written with great eloquence about the virtues of denaturalizing the state and making it less central to our analyses.Footnote ²¹ That said, I think there's space here for a more extensive account of the state, particularly as the processes of commodification he so vividly describes are supported by a sophisticated legal structure. Whilst the machinations of the Land Office feature in a fantastic early section, it seems fair to ask whether Johnson's protagonists are really so uninterested in – and have so little connection with – the federal state (31–42).

Is this really how contemporaries think? When northerners look at the federal government and think they can identify “the Slave Power,” that “goliath of all monopolies,” they're not thinking solely of the aristocratic patriarchy of the plantation, nor are they thinking, necessarily, in global terms about the international projection of planters’ power.Footnote ²² Instead, they're concerned about what they perceive as slaveholders' control of – or influence over – key governmental institutions at the federal level. Crucially, they think that influence is both intentional and illegitimate. By contrast, Johnson gives us the local anxieties and global ambitions of slaveholders in the Mississippi valley, but quite a thin account of their aspirations for national power. That need not be problematic in and of itself but it is a little odd when the introduction suggests that Johnson is, in part, offering a corrective to tired and anachronistic studies of the coming of the Civil War (14–17). Perhaps that framing isn't particularly helpful; Johnson offers an excellent analysis of inward- and outward-looking aspects of the world of slavery, and for the most part he keeps his account free of the war that we – but not his protagonists – know will destroy the slaveholders’ world. In fact, this is one of the things that I thought most powerful about his final chapter. There's an obvious temptation, I think, to lead the reader through to secession and the firing on Fort Sumter, but Johnson resists this. He deserves credit for doing so.

It seems to me that the relative absence of the nation-state might have something to do with Johnson's chronological emphasis. This focus on the 1830s and the 1850s – the dynamism of the Mississippi valley cotton frontier and the imperialist ambitions of those, like Matthew Maury, who argued that “the Valley of the Amazon is but a commercial appendage of the Mississippi” – offers us two elaborations of the “empire” of Johnson's title (300). There's a relatively thin account of a third. The imperial ambitions of slaveholders are not, of course, limited to wresting land from Native Americans and dreaming of a US-controlled Cuba: in the 1840s expansionist-minded slaveholders were very successful in using the federal state to secure their goals, not least in the form of westward expansion. (John Quitman, for instance, who is one of the most prominent boosters for both William Walker and Narciso López, is an enthusiastic participant in the Mexican–American War, and ultimately ends up as the civil and military governor of Mexico City.Footnote ²³) Again, the relationship between slavery, expansion and the nation-state is of obvious importance, but there's a chronological and analytical gap here.

It's also worth thinking about the place of the North in these narratives of empire. There are, for instance, plenty of New York Democrats who are vocally pro-slavery, either from conviction or from a sense of the city's unavoidable entanglement with southern slavery. And this has practical consequences. Someone like Lopez raises plenty of money in New York City. Likewise, Walker gains great swathes of support in northern cities, but not necessarily because northerners are replicating southern logic about the virtues of the slave trade and the importance of boosting New Orleans.Footnote ²⁴

Cohen: I agree that there's a gap here. Johnson is excellent when it comes to connecting the individual planters to the wider international market. The section that details the journey of a cotton bail from its creation on the plantation to its journey through the global market is very successful. But there is another level of story that is really missing here and that is the way in which the growth of the nation-state is defining the ways in which planters do business. I wanted a fuller account of the uses these slaveholders make of the federal state. It might well be that this omission is intentional, that Johnson doesn't want us to focus on what they're trying to grasp nationally, but on what they're trying to grasp internationally: Cuba, Nicaragua, and a larger empire of slavery. Better, he seems to suggest, to direct our gaze away from Washington, DC, not because it's unimportant, but because Washington is at the heart of so many narratives of the coming of the Civil War.

And yet southern slaveholders very clearly do care a great deal about what's happening in the nation's capital. Most obviously, they talk a great deal about the tariff, and here Johnson rightly notes the attention paid by DeBow's Review to the issue of direct trade and the pervasive sense that cotton cultivators have that the tariff is disadvantaging them.

If we turn from the national to the regional, River of Dark Dreams does a great job of sketching out the geographical sensibilities of those living in the Mississippi valley. The middle section of the book is particularly strong on detailing the sensitivity of slaveholders to questions of regional allegiance (284–96). Many of them, Johnson notes, see themselves in opposition to New York and, as far as they are concerned, New York represents the North (257–58, 291). What emerges clearly for me is that it's productive for us to think, as historians, not just in terms of the North versus the South, but also about New York versus New Orleans. Perhaps the latter is a better way of conceptualizing regional opposition. This conceptualization also gives us a much better sense of why people like DeBow were so keen to develop an alliance with the West. Johnson's writing on place and political economy makes us question the set regional dichotomies – North and South, East and West – that we are so familiar with and which we so frequently fall back on. Instead, he shifts our gaze to different kinds of regional alliance that could have been made, which in turn makes the development of the slaveholders’ world of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s much more contingent than it appears in other accounts of the slave South. Johnson includes a wonderful military map (Figure 25) that positions New Orleans as the epicentre of southern commerce. As you look at it you feel that it's so obvious that New Orleans is the centre of the world. No wonder these planters thought they could capture not just the West, but also the breadbasket states of the upper Mississippi river.

He also gives us a sense of how cities like St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi or Cincinnati on the banks of the Ohio fit into this imagined geography. Those cities’ hinterlands, the prairies of Illinois and Indiana and the hills of Ohio, are connected via riverine travel to New Orleans, and people are very conscious of this fact. When southern states seceded in 1861, politicians and newspaper editors immediately pointed out the implications for trade. In particular they worried about the consequences of New Orleans becoming a free-trade port. Their anxieties centred on their belief that all mid-western trade would now flow through the Crescent City rather than make its way east to the Empire City. Even worse, they worried that if a British merchant could choose between landing their goods in New Orleans duty-free or in New York under tariff, maybe these foreign traders would choose the former, even if internal transportation wasn't as developed. These shifts never transpire, of course. But they do illuminate the extent to which different regional sensibilities existed and the power they had to stoke the fears of men and women across the US.

Doyle: The pacing of Johnson's account changes as the book progresses, and this might have implications for the chronology of the story that he tells. The opening chapters are static and topical, offering a thick description of life in the region, before things become more dynamic and more attuned to changes in the valley over the final third. Both models work, I think, but the two parts of this read differently. The early sections, where description and analysis take precedence over change over time, raise questions about Johnson's selection of evidence. Johnson admits to using first-person narratives of the enslaved from outside the Mississippi valley because he believes the geography of slavery to be more defined by condition and space than is the state-by-state geography of slaveholding rule (455 n. 2). The implication of this assertion seems to be that the slave experience in the “Cotton Kingdom” was somewhat ubiquitous but this slightly jars with Johnson's microscopic focus on the local, as discussed above. The static, topical analysis of slavery makes River of Dark Dreams highly adept at vividly portraying the fundamental characteristics of the institution, but less able to pick apart some of the more subtle changes.

Temporality plays a far more significant role in the book's analysis of politics. Johnson posits that the crash of 1837 was an important turning point, exacerbating a growing friction between New Orleans and New York. These slaveholders are facing economic ruin in the Mississippi valley and they feel that they need someone to blame. They have no desire to blame themselves and so they look north, fostering a stronger sectionalism as terms such as “independence” and “the South” took on new significance (280–92). Of course, such sectional language was surely not merely rooted in concerns about merchants and capital, but also in an increasingly vocal abolitionist movement in the 1830s that demanded a unified southern response.

Cohen: Yes, and here again DeBow's is very valuable. Johnson uses it as a source for tracking the greater confidence that slaveholders have in articulating a pro-slavery ideology after 1837. We get a very clear sense of New Orleans as a literary centre, with authors like James DeBow and Thomas Kettle outlining an idealized version of what this slave society should look like. These people are boosters, and perhaps we should think about the middle section of River of Dark Dreams as a kind of record of representations of the political economy of the Mississippi valley. Vision and aspiration are central, as we transition toward the more quixotic imperial ambitions of the book's conclusion.

Plath: This raises an important question about coverage, though. Johnson writes very powerfully about the period before the Panic of 1837, and he is similarly persuasive about the period immediately following the crash. However, as has been suggested, he turns quickly to talk about the 1850s; there's not a great deal of attention paid to the years in between the two. As Jo noted above, the 1840s are a period in which Mississippi valley slaveholders have turned their attention to Texas, both in terms of imperialist visions of expansion and, more literally, by settling there as planter capitalists. Henry Stuart Foote, for example, left Mississippi in the wake of the financial crisis and travelled to Texas “on a mingled trip of pleasure and business,” only returning to Mississippi several years later.Footnote ²⁵ It seems unlikely that his visions and aspirations – and those of men like him – were not shaped by the events of the 1840s, so I'm surprised that Johnson spends so little time discussing this period.

More generally, the book raises interesting questions about periodization. Johnson opens by talking about the failure of any kind of non-slaveholding, Jeffersonian “empire of liberty”: rampant speculation in land sees to that (37). But does the outbreak of Civil War really bring an end to these dreams of race and empire? Or do they persist, albeit under radically different conditions?

Cohen: That's an excellent point. One could imagine framing a study so as to encompass the ambitions of Johnson's slaveholders in the 1850s, dreaming of Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Gulf of Mexico, but one which also connects with the comparative work that Rebecca Scott has done on Cuba and post-emancipation societies, and the terrain that Matthew Pratt Guterl sketches in his American Mediterranean, which investigates the way that southern slaveholders negotiated their new identities after abolition in the United States.Footnote ²⁶ We might also ask what a “Johnsonian” history of Reconstruction would look like, as many of these individuals desperately try to figure out how they can keep the world they know intact in the postwar world.

Sim: Yes, I can see the connections with Scott and Guterl – and also with Sven Beckert's work on situating the US experience of cotton cultivation within transnational networks of capital, labour and, ultimately, empires.Footnote ²⁷ Clearly a book has to end somewhere, and at over four hundred pages, Johnson has hardly short-changed his readers. But there is a tension, I think, between the radicalism of much of Johnson's presentation and the relative conservatism of his periodization.

Your mention of 1837 raises an interesting point. I think Johnson writes very persuasively about banking and credit. In the very first chapter he writes about various institutions that issued banknotes and then asks how people, confronted with these notes, could ever verify their legitimacy (42–45). Is there really a “Farmer's Bank of Tennessee”!? And if there is, how can you know how well managed it is? What if the note is a forgery? All these questions are asked in the specific context of a rapidly expanding market where trust might be in short supply and, as you note, Lydia, the population is highly transitory. How far is Johnson writing in the shadow of the financial crisis of 2008?

Plath: I think this shadow, as you put it, is most evident in Johnson's discussion of the journey that a bale of cotton takes from field to factory. Throughout the process value is made abstract, in the form of credit notes and entries in ledgers, and then made substantive again in the form of the bale itself – and, of course, the bodies of the enslaved, who are as commodified and financialized as any other factor in this process. What Johnson does so well is to sketch out what is essentially a house of cards. The Mississippi valley, he writes, was a place where “spirals of speculation were built out of insubstantial promises,” and where “doing business required a leap of faith … into an insubstantial medium of exchange … vouched for only by the appearance of those who presented it and by paper-thin representations of debtors who were no longer anywhere to be seen” (127–28). This is a world that is not quite so removed from ours, with its sub-prime mortgages and dodgy derivatives, as we might imagine.

Cohen: Yes, and commodification is everywhere. It's bracing how quickly he dispenses with the Jeffersonian vision of independent republican landholders. He's also brilliant at underlining the fact that slaves are the bedrock of value here. In the Mississippi valley, he notes, specie is rare, and slaves regularly function in its place. Property in people represents the only liquid capital these people have; it's what provides the land with value; and it's what provides these speculative scraps of paper with whatever value they might have. Ultimately it all rests on slavery. It's one sentence, and it's worth the whole book (40; the point is made in full throughout chapter 1).

Doyle: The early dismissal of the Jeffersonian vision is satisfying, as is its perverse return in the closing sections. Here Johnson elaborates on the costs of the dispersal of slaves from the Upper South and their increasing concentration in the Mississippi valley. As a consequence, the importation of slaves and the broadening of the slaveholder class become key to the maintenance of republicanism in a way that Jefferson could never have imagined. Slaves, rather than land, became the perceived guarantor of upward social mobility and an independent, prosperous yeomanry.

Sim: As you both note, slavery becomes a barometer of both southern wealth and southern stability. In Johnson's discussion of the networks of credit and trust that are built on top of this system of labour we get a very clear sense of the fictions that this system requires in order to function. People buy into those fictions and they perpetuate them. I struggled, though, with the closing sentence of the book, in which Johnson writes,

If he's drawing an analogy between the unfreedom of slavery and the unfreedom of labour in late capitalism, then that strikes me as crude and hardly in keeping with the sensitivity that Johnson displays here and elsewhere to the importance of bloody coercion, sexual violence, and the enduring threat of sale. If it's intended as a historicized argument, then does this southern imaginary really better describe our world than do those contemporary views to which it was opposed? It's rhetorically impressive but I'm not certain how we should interpret it.

Plath: It's certainly blunt. Maybe we should think of it in more literal terms. There are approximately thirty million people enslaved in the world today: far more than there were in the nineteenth-century United States. The linkages between slavery and capitalism did not end with the 13th Amendment, and I think that is the point Johnson is making. As L. Diane Barnes, Frank Towers, and Brian Schoen explain in their recent volume about the Old South's essentially “modern” nature, when southern planters imagined the future, they did not conceive of something as fundamentally different to our present as perhaps we would wish.Footnote ²⁸

Doyle: We sound overcritical, I think. These issues and these connections are testament to a book that speaks to a multitude of literatures in a sophisticated, insightful and sometimes exhilarating way. A thought to end with, though: why is the subtitle Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom? If I were picking two themes to emphasize from the book it would be slavery and capitalism, not empire.

Plath: I think the answer is to do with the “dreams” of the title. It's not quite an intellectual history of slaveholders in the Mississippi valley, but it is partly this. The dreams are those of a particular group of slaveholders, and their vision for expanding their Cotton Kingdom imperially. The aspiration is not to be a successful capitalist – though they may be that and more.

Sim: Yes, I agree. In large part this is a book about ambition, and not just an intellectual history of what a particular group of protagonists would like to happen, but a material, environmental, social and cultural history of what led these people to have confidence that these ambitions were feasible. That those dreams look quixotic today, Johnson suggests, is no reason to dismiss this as an aberrant diversion from the American national story. And he's right, isn't he?

Plath: Johnson also reminds us that while these intellectual ambitions were vitally important to the development of American capitalism and empire (quixotic as they were), they were ultimately founded on human labour. As he notes, “the Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit” (9). Planters’ dreams were a living nightmare for the enslaved people whose suffering made them possible.

Cohen: This is a historian writing in the shadow of one of the nation's greatest economic failures in recent history. Johnson reminds us that failure and greed are very much a part of American history, and that we should not overlook the ways in which hubris has fractured the nation in the past. The American political landscape is more divided than it has been for over a century, with plenty of accusations about quixoticism and craziness to go around. Perhaps his point, at one level, is that a failure to take these ambitions and opinions seriously is a failure of vision on a much greater scale.