"No Backward Step": Slavery and Freedom in Multiple Contexts

"No Backward Step": Slavery and Freedom in Multiple Contexts RIVER OF DARK DREAMS: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. By Walter Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013.THE LONG, LINGERING SHADOW: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere. By Robert J. Cottrol. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. 2013.ENVISIONING EMANCIPATION: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2013.BEYOND REDEMPTION: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War. By Carole Emberton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013.For over a century, there has been a plethora of studies that consider slavery and emancipation. In the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, scholars are challenging old assumptions and grappling with new theories concerning the "peculiar institution." Even Hollywood entered into the debate with its adapta- tion of Solomon Northup's personal account of kidnapping and enslavement in 12 Years a Slave (2013). This essay considers four recent studies on the subject matter. Two of the works are grounded in the United States' system of slavery, with one venturing a comparative approach that contrasts the system in North America with primarily Spanish-speaking nations to its south. Through photo- graphs, another study considers the long process of emancipation in the United States. The last illustrates how the language of redemption was appropriated by-for often vastly different reasons-Radical Republicans, southern white supremacists, and freed people.In River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Walter Johnson commences with a quote from W. E. B. DuBois. It states, "The slave barons looked behind them and saw to their dismay that there could be no backward step. The slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century must either die or conquer a nation-it could not hesitate or pause." While this an appropriate introduction to Johnson's work, it is also relevant to the other three studies under review in this essay.The notion of an inability to take a "backward step" once the course has been charted can be used to discuss the rise of the Cotton Kingdom that fueled an international market in a single crop. It can also extend to the racial structures that grew out of slave societies in the United States and Latin America. The idea that slavery "must either die or conquer a nation" can be applied to emancipation and its photographic representations. Additionally, it can capture the determina- tion of southern white supremacists that resisted the destruction of an institution that had gripped the nation for almost two hundred and fifty years.In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson traces the rise of the Mississippi Valley Cotton Kingdom. The Mississippi Valley, in Thomas Jefferson's imagin- ings, was to be a place for white yeoman farmers who headed households that practiced self-sufficiency. These white yeoman farmers would occupy a vast land mass far removed from cities. This reality would force them to provide for themselves and their families. They would eschew the debtor-creditor relationship and their distance from factories would prevent a dependence on wage labor. In order to make way for this isolated white man's utopia, the federal govern- ment engaged in actions that subjugated and removed Native Americans from their newly acquired territory. By doing so, Jefferson's vision of producing the landscape where white men were "masters of their own destiny" could become a reality. In this "empire of liberty," white men would reproduce families opposed to a commodity for the national or international marketplace.However, Jefferson's vision never took hold in the Mississippi Valley. Speculators descended upon the territory and purchased land meant for first-time buyers. This effectively transformed Jefferson's ideal of an "empire for liberty. …