Read of the Day
By Gabriel Winant’s long-form book review of Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. A brief excerpt:
People, too, suffered the violence of abstraction. Over the first half of the 19th century, up to a million slaves were transported into the Cotton Kingdom from the older slave states (the origin of the saying “sold down the river”). Shipped in barges, or marched southwest in chains, slaves were ripped out of their social worlds, alienated from the learned skills and bodily traits that had enabled them to survive in Virginia or Kentucky. The masters tried to un-people these slaves, to reconstruct them in a form dehumanized enough that they could be moved from place to place and fitted into the production process just like any other commodity. To do so, as Johnson explains in one of many resonant examples, they kept their slaves awake. Sleep deprivation was a technique of power, “implemented,” Johnson writes, “as an offshoot of bizarre anthropological theory.” Johnson goes on to quote a contemporary source, which held that it was “common opinion among the people that the Negro requires less sleep than the white man.” Sleep deprivation was one of any number of techniques “by which human life was turned into cotton: the torturous conversion of labor to capital, and of living people to corpses.” Slaves were physically reconditioned for cotton-field work and for the noxious health conditions of the lower South—a process masters called “seasoning.” Planters exchanged tips in trade journals for tormenting the bodies of slaves until they were properly fitted to the cotton production system. Slaveholders didn’t just tell slaves what to do; they managed their bodies—“a recoordination of nerves and muscles, eyes and hands, which extended their dominion beyond the skin of its subjects, into the very fabric of their form.”
The simplification of bodies and the simplification of nature went together. A well-controlled labor force did the work of clearing and maintaining the physical geography of the Cotton Kingdom. In turn, a controlled landscape allowed for controlled labor. The planter’s power extended, in a sense, only as far as he could see; he or his overseer—note the word—thus removed all visual obstructions and patrolled the fields on horseback, the cotton rows serving as “a visual grid they could use to measure their slaves’ labor.” In turn, a slave’s most reliable strategy was to go “off the grid,” to hide out in the swamps and forests. (Recall: “skulking around.”) Going to ground like this, more often than making a dash for the Mason-Dixon Line, was what it meant to run away. Constant, brutal violence maintained the grid’s disciplinary force. The Cotton Kingdom, by consequence, was less “a fixed bastion of slaveholding power than an excruciating becoming: a landscape being fiercely cleared in a counterinsurgency campaign to which there could be no end.”
Very interesting discussion of Eugene Genovese as well.