 | Flush Times and Fever Dreams 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. Joshua D. Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Alabama and director of the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South. He is the author of Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 and editor of Reforming America, 1815-1860: A Norton Documents Reader. Patrick Rael is a professor of history at Bowdoin College and one of the general editors of the Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 series. His books include Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North and African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North. Rael is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer, 2010-2015. |
