River of Dark Dreams

Walter Johnson

“River of Dark Dreams is an important, arguably seminal, book… It is always trenchant and learned. And in highly compelling fashion, it helps us more fully appreciate how thoroughly the slaveholding South was part of the capitalist transatlantic world of the first half of the 19th century.”—Mark M. Smith, The Wall Street Journal

“Mining journals, correspondence, public records and popular literature, Johnson reminds us that New Orleans, not Richmond, was the engine of Southern prosperity: its largest city, largest slave market and the center of a booming international trading system… Mixed with fascinating anecdotes, grim accounts of slave life and a convincing argument for plantation slavery’s essential role in the 19th century’s burgeoning industrial capitalism.”—Kirkus Reviews

“With deep insights, original readings, expansive vision, and dramatic narratives, Walter Johnson reconfigures both the political economy of American slavery and the landscape of struggle in the slave South.”—Steven Hahn, author of A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

“River of Dark Dreams solidifies Walter Johnson’s standing as a brilliantly gifted interpreter of the past, whose work sets the benchmark for a powerfully lucid—sometimes heart-wrenching—vision of what enslavement meant for slaveowners, for the women and men they enslaved, and for the nations that participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”—Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery

“Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams is a unique, brilliant, and relentless critique of the sordid logic of American slavery as it unfolded on cotton plantations, aboard steamboats plying the Mississippi, and in toxic proslavery adventures that spilled across the country’s borders. The next generation of debates over slavery in the United States must wrestle with Johnson’s startling and profound insights.”—Adam Rothman, author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South

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