Bibliograph

Flush times and fever dreams, a story of capitalism and slavery in the age of Jackson, Joshua D. Rothman

Type

Label

Flush times and fever dreams, a story of capitalism and slavery in the age of Jackson, Joshua D. Rothman

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical reference (pages 307-381) and index

Illustrations

mapsplatesillustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Flush times and fever dreams

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

792884026

Responsibility statement

Joshua D. Rothman

Series statement

Race in the Atlantic world, 1700-1900

Sub title

a story of capitalism and slavery in the age of Jackson

Summary

Winner of the Frank L. and Harriet Owsley Award, Southern Historical Association Winner of the Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award, Gulf South Historical Association. In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the "Arkansas morass" in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart's adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart's story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson. As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America's Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Table Of Contents

Inventing Virgil Stewart -- Inventing John Murrell -- Exposing the plot -- Hanging the conspirators -- Purging a city -- Defining a citizen -- Suborning chaos -- Imposing order

Classification