Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson - Paperback

by Joshua D. Rothman (Author)

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.

Author Biography

JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN is professor of history and chair of the history department at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in the history of slavery, race, nineteenth-century America, and the American South. He is the author or editor of four previous books, including Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861; Reforming America, 181501860: A Norton Documents Reader; Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Georgia), and, most recently, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery and the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery. He is also the co-director of "Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery."