Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams is a thorough account of the political economy of

slavery and the cotton kingdom in the Mississippi Valley between 1800 and 1860. In his

introduction, Johnson claims that the significance of slavery in economic history was not found

in Massachusetts, but rather along the Mississippi River. Following the Louisiana Purchase,

Johnson argued, the Mississippi Valley turned to intensive cotton monoculture and became one

of the world's economic centers, resulting in the expansion of the land market, cotton market, and

slave market, and resulting in a new social order dominated by large landowners controlling vast

plantations and hundreds of thousands of slaves, thus destroying President Thomas Jefferson's

dreams of making the region a land of plenitude.

The first chapter discusses Thomas Jefferson's dreams and visions for establishing America as a

revolutionary state, which revolved around ideas about the liberties of white men, rather than

human beings, and are based on the polity of independent householders who owned the land they

lived on, commanded the labor of their wives and children, and produced the necessities of their

own subsistence. They were white men who were patriarchal, noncommercial, and self-

sufficient. Because these yeomen held their own land and provided their own subsistence,

Jefferson believed they could neither be purchased or bossed, nor could they fall into debt-

entangling ties that would make them economically vulnerable to those who may wish to

influence their votes. At the same time, there was the issue of establishing true American

sovereignty, as Jefferson feared that certain residents of the "empire for liberty" would become

so remote from the government in Washington, D.C. that they would slip completely out of its

orbit.

The second chapter examines the 1835 Panic, which concentrated on the fears of slave rebellion,

which contradicts Jefferson's "empire for liberty" concept of social order. The author recounts
the process by which the presumptions of social and spatial order on which the Cotton Kingdom

was created were destroyed by racial anxiety. This chapter examined the gory trail of

confessions, charges, and executions that occurred in Madison County as a committee of citizens

took the law into their own hands and ordered the execution of numerous slaves accused of

insurrection. The third chapter discussed the power of steam, which enabled the Mississippi

Valley to be independent of the Mississippi River by freeing it from its reliance on animal

energy, allowing a concomitant increase in cargo ratio, which allowed steamboats to move goods

to market and markets closer to the goods. The Mississippi Valley's commercial geography had

been altered by steamboats, which enabled capital and labor investment in agricultural

production to be returned in an equal quantity of consumption.