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.
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