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Scott C. Martin, Joshua D. Rothman. Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1522–1523, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1522
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Flush Times and Fever Dreams explores the darker side of the growth of capitalism and slavery during the “flush times” before the Panic of 1837. Joshua D. Rothman situates 1830s Mississippi, the focus of his study, in the booming American Southwest, a region recently settled, ripe for economic development, and supposedly unfettered by the stultifying social and economic hierarchies of the East. Many aspiring young men responded to the promise of easy credit, land speculation, and a burgeoning cotton trade, only to find that navigating an expanding economy shaped by chattel slavery and market capitalism proved more difficult than anticipated. Rothman relates the experience of one such young man, Virgil Stewart. Rothman uses Stewart's story to highlight the anxiety produced among Mississippi whites in their quest to transform the “wilderness into money” (p. 12). Fellow whites might have shared their commitment to property rights and racial dominance, or might have betrayed their neighbors for personal gain in a frontier society that lacked order. The Southwest during the “flush times,” Rothman notes, “was defined as much by suspicion, fraud and extraordinary levels of violence as by opportunity, confidence, and enterprise” (p. 13).
