King cotton by Gene Dattel America’s sordid racial story begins with 1860. A consumer revolution was born. At the involuntary immigration and slavery. Race- beginning of this period, approximately 77 based bondage was enshrined in the country’s percent of all European garments were made legal system at the Constitutional Conven- of wool; on the eve of the Civil War, cotton tion of 1787. At that time, according to Ed- claimed 73 percent of the market. Enormous mund Morgan, Yale’s renowned colonial hygienic benefits accrued, as well. The appetite historian, slavery was considered a “moral for raw cotton was enormous. anachronism.” The delegates could not have The second key event came about thanks insisted on the abolition of slavery, noted to Eli Whitney, who, failing to get a job after Morgan: “To have done so would have ended graduating from Yale, went to Georgia as a the convention.” The young struggling re- tutor on a cotton plantation. Within a couple public faced an ugly choice—a nation with of weeks, in 1793, he had crafted a device which slavery, or no nation at all. separated cottonseed from the lint which was Two trading states, Connecticut and South woven into cloth. A production bottleneck Carolina, provided the support that enabled had been solved. Now, instead of only being the approval of the Constitution. Connecti- able to “clean” one pound of cotton a day, a cut’s anti-slavery representatives viewed the single man could clean fifty. This labor-saving institution as being on the road to extinction. device, in turn, generated an enormous labor Slavery was “dying out anyway,” Connecticut’s shortage—which would be filled by a growing constitutional delegate Roger Sherman said, slave population—as the demand for cotton and would “by degrees disappear.” “Slavery in labor skyrocketed. time,” opined his colleague Oliver Ellsworth, The Founding Fathers were blindsided by “will not be a speck on the horizon.” Sherman, an economic force—the world demand for cot- the grandfather of the Civil War general Wil- ton—and a king was born. “Cotton alone, of liam Tecumseh Sherman, helped broker the all the products of our soil or industry, stirs the constitutional compromises that protected emotions . it is the melancholy distinction what some Southerners denominated “our of cotton to be the very stuff of high drama peculiar institution,” slavery. and tragedy, of bloody civil war and the unut- What happened to this prophecy of extinc- terable woe of human slavery,” wrote David L. tion? Slavery would have died without the co- Cohn in his 1956 biography of cotton royalty. incidence of two events. A series of innovations Anne O’Hare McCormick had earlier in 1931 in the British cotton textile industry by the late characterized cotton as “map-maker, trouble- eighteenth century fostered mass production. maker, and history-maker.” Correspondingly, the price of a textile garment The destiny of black America would be dropped by over 90 percent between 1787 and inextricably bound to cotton for sixty years 16 The New Criterion October 2014 King cotton by Gene Dattel before the Civil War and one hundred years Folklore even has Abraham Lincoln credit- afterwards. Cotton and black labor would ing Stowe as the “little woman who wrote only finally decouple in the 1960s with the the book that started this great war!” Stowe advent of the mechanical cotton picker and knew very well and wrote clearly that cotton effective herbicides and pesticides. At that was the sole buttress for slavery. If “something point, the remaining cotton field laborers should bring down the price of cotton once faced displacement. and forever, and make the whole slave property a . [burden] in the market,” she wrote, the Economics, not social convention, deter- support for slavery would disappear. mined the African-American experience. With- The economic facts are compelling. Cot- out an economic base, race-based slavery could ton production increased from virtually noth- not exist. Cotton production was easily grafted ing in 1787 to over four and a half million onto the plantation system that was already in (450-pound) bales per year on the eve of the place. Other forms of slave-related agriculture Civil War. The slave population grew from were small, without significant export poten- 700,000 to approximately four million—the tial, and their growth had stagnated. The use majority of whom were directly or indirectly of slaves for industrial labor has been highly involved with cotton production. The price exaggerated and wildly speculative. The Tre- of a slave directly correlated with the price of degar Iron Works in Richmond, a widely cited cotton. The price of a slave rose when trans- example of slave labor in factories, employed ported closer to the cotton-growing regions eighty slaves out of a total 800 employees. of the Deep South. Importantly, slavery only Furthermore, it was not competitive with mills spread where cotton could be grown. either in the North or England. Grandiose Slave-produced cotton was not a regional Southern rhetoric of territorial expansion for affair. The “indispensable” product knit the slavery has erroneously been given unwar- country together. New York City rose to ranted credence. commercial and financial preeminence on Many designate slavery as “foundational” to the cotton trade even before the Erie Canal America. In reality, slavery was itself perched became operative. New York dominated the on a wobbly foundation: the vacillating price financing, trading, and insurance aspects of of cotton, and the roller-coaster economy of the cotton trade. New York, cities in New the South. Historians mistakenly number England, and Philadelphia found a ready the asset value of slaves between $1 billion market for their manufacturing goods in the and $4 billion during the antebellum period. cotton South. Once cotton left the planta- This astounding number, they say, dwarfs the tion, it became sanitized of the injustices that worth of other antebellum sectors—industry, had produced it—quotidian balance sheets, railroads, etc. But this computation is deeply receipts, and bills of lading obscured the taint flawed. Slavery had no sustaining worth inde- of slavery. pendent of cotton in the nineteenth century. The Nobel Prize–winning economic his- The inflated aggregate asset value of slavery torian Douglass North described the crucial may be dramatic, but it is devoid of substance. role of cotton: “Between 1814 and 1860, the The price of a slave was derivative of the price growth of the American economy was stimu- of cotton. If the price of cotton fell, so did the lated to a great extent by the expansion of one price of a slave and the aggregate asset value product—cotton. American exports of cotton would drown in an ocean of illiquidity. The provided a major share of the world supply financing of slavery depended on a revenue and contributed more than half the value of stream from cotton. the nation’s total exports. Cotton was the By depicting the horrors of slavery, Har- most important proximate cause of [American riet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin economic] expansion [before the Civil War].” (1852) became the most politically influential Cotton was a global affair. Great Britain, the American story of the nineteenth century. most powerful nation in the world, was the The New Criterion October 2014 17 King cotton by Gene Dattel main purchaser of slave-produced American famine occurred until 1862 after the Union vic- cotton before the Civil War. Of the 22 million tory at Antietam. Military victory nullified the inhabitants of Great Britain, 20 percent were potency of the cotton embargo. Inexplicably, directly or indirectly involved with cotton tex- the South ignored the extensive supply of cot- tile production. Her exports were dominated ton in the marketplace. by cotton. Britain was dependent on Ameri- It is intriguing to speculate about the con- can cotton before and after the Civil War. As sequences of the cotton asset bubble in the such, the power of cotton in the nineteenth absence of the Civil War. Had the cotton asset century was comparable to that of oil in the bubble burst, a resounding catastrophe would twentieth century. have ensued for the credit-ridden Southern In the first half of the nineteenth century, economy. As a result, the institution of slav- cotton was primarily responsible for the ery might have morphed into a new financial enslavement of four million blacks. Slave- system that resembled the sharecropping ar- produced cotton connected the country’s re- rangement after the Civil War. gions, provided the export surplus the young country needed to gain its financial “sea legs,” The attitude of white Northerners during the brought commercial ascendancy to New York nineteenth century towards African Ameri- City, was the driving force for territorial ex- cans provides both a very clear guide and a pansion in the Old Southwest, and fostered determining factor to the fate of blacks after trade between Europe and the United States. emancipation. We should not only ask what From 1803 until 1937, cotton was America’s white Northerners thought about slavery, but leading export, a reign that will likely never what they thought about black people. be surpassed. Historians choose either to ignore or to The South, intoxicated with the power of underestimate vastly the role of the white cotton, embarked on a war to secede from North in assigning free blacks second-class the United States. In effect, slave-produced citizenship. As such, historians have manu- cotton—not slavery itself—caused the Ameri- factured a fairy tale in which the South is the can Civil War. No one would have taken the sole scapegoat for America’s racial dilemma.