Joshua D. Rothman - Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson

Flush Times and Fever Dreams

Race in the Atlantic World, 17001900

Published in Cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphias
Program in African American History

SERIES EDITORS
Richard S. Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology
Patrick Rael, Bowdoin College
Manisha Sinha, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

ADVISORY BOARD
Edward Baptist, Cornell University
Christopher Brown, Columbia University
Vincent Carretta, University of Maryland
Laurent Dubois, Duke University
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, University of Delaware and
the Library Company of Philadelphia
Douglas Egerton, LeMoyne College
Leslie Harris, Emory University
Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky
Sue Peabody, Washington State University, Vancouver
Erik Seeman, State University of New York, Buffalo
John Stauffer, Harvard University

A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson

JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN

were originally published as
The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence,
and the Anxieties of Americas Market Revolution in the
Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (2008): 65177.

2012 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
All rights reserved
Set in Adobe Caslon Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc.
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Printed in the United States of America

12 13 14 15 16 C 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rothman, Joshua D.
Flush times and fever dreams : a story of capitalism and slavery in the age of Jackson /
Joshua D. Rothman.
p. cm. (Race in the Atlantic world, 17001900)
ISBN 978-0-8203-3326-7 (hbk.: alk. paper)ISBN 0-8203-3326-3 (hbk.: alk. paper)
1. SlaverySouthern StatesHistory. 2. TheftSouthern StatesHistory19th
century. 3. CriminalsSouthern StatesHistory19th century. 4. Vigilance
committeeSouthern StatesHistory19th century. 5. Slave insurrections
Southern StatesHistory19th century. 6. Southern StatesHistory17751865.
7. Southern StatesEconomic conditions19th century. I. Title.
E441.R82 2012
306.3 620975dc23 2012030124

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4466-9

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

This publication is made possible, in part, through a grant
from the Hodge Foundation in memory of its founder,
Sarah Mills Hodge, who devoted her life to the relief and
education of African Americans in Savannah, Georgia.

For Rebecca

He came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before, knew for certain was his own anymore than the horse was his own or even the pistols, seeking some place to hide himself.

WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!

We have become the most careless, reckless, headlong people on the face of the earth. Go ahead is our maxim and pass-word; and we do go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of consequences and indifferent about the value of human life. What are a few hundred persons, more or less?

PHILIP HONE, May 22, 1837

Flush Times and Fever Dreams

As he rode from the Choctaw Cession in northern Mississippi toward the plantation districts of western Tennessee, Virgil Stewart likely pondered his future and its possibilities. Possessed of a discontented soul and a firm sense that he was fated for greatness, the twenty-four-year-old Stewart was an impatient and easily frustrated man for whom present circumstances never quite satisfied. His current situation was no exception. It was January 1834, and Stewart had managed to acquire a few small parcels of land and achieve a middling status that many would have considered impressive for someone from beginnings as modest as his. But mostly he peddled furnishings out of a trunk, and he dreamed of doing grander things with his life. His ambitions were no less fierce for their lack of focus, and like many young men of his generation he believed his destiny could be waiting over the next hill. So Virgil Stewart kept on riding.

On arriving in Tennessees Madison County, Stewart paid a visit to John Henning, a minister and cotton planter with whom he had become acquainted several years earlier. As they talked, Henning mentioned that two of his slaves had recently vanished and that a local farmer and petty criminal named John Murrell had stolen them. Henning had no real evidence that Murrell was the thief. But he was certain, and he asked Stewart if he was willing and had the time to help him corroborate his suspicions. Rumor had it that Murrell would soon be taking a trip to the town of Randolph, and Henning said his son Richard intended to follow him. If all went according to plan, in the course of his travels Murrell would reveal the location of John Hennings slaves, simultaneously exposing his perfidy and enabling the elder Henning to recover his property. Randolph, though, was on the Mississippi River, more than fifty miles from the Henning plantation. John Henning did not want his son to undertake such a long and potentially dangerous mission alone in the middle of winter, so he proposed to Stewart that he join the expedition. Saying yes changed Stewarts life.

THE EARLY 1830S WERE stirring times for many Americans like Virgil Stewart, who lived in a country enjoying material prosperity and expansive growth the likes of which had not been seen since the years right after the end of the War of 1812. As technological advances, infrastructural improvements, and manufacturing innovations converged with the sale of large swaths of expropriated Indian land, a dramatically increased money supply, and government policies that enabled rapidly proliferating state and local banks to unleash a deluge of paper notes and liberal loans, Americans chased unprecedented opportunities in flourishing cities and on burgeoning frontiers. By the middle of the decade, the contours of the economic landscape in the United States were unmistakable. These were flush times, and the sense that nearly anyone might dip into a virtually limitless pool of money and acquire credit with few questions asked made for a heady atmosphere. Countless Americans dreamed that anything was possible for those willing to hustle.