Transcript
Cotton, Cotton, Cotton
1827 · 1840s
Georgia Courier That we have cultivated cotton, cotton, cotton, and bought every thing else, has long enough been our opprobrium.
Opprobrium means disgrace. A Georgia newspaper was embarrassed by cotton. It told Southerners to build mills and grow their own food. Outside, the wagons kept rolling.
The South kept planting. By the late 1830s, four of every five bales Britain imported came from Southern fields.
Every bale carried marks: whose plantation, how many pounds, which port.
The marks left one thing out. Most of this cotton was planted, picked and pressed by enslaved people.
Most white Southern families owned no enslaved people.
Most white Southern families owned no enslaved people. Yet by 1837 the South’s leaders were calling slavery “a positive good.” Why?
To find out, follow the land.
The Sticky Seed
1793–1840
To follow the land, start somewhere else: Manchester, England.
Its mills had machines that spun thread by the mile, and looms to weave it into cloth. All they lacked was someone to grow the cotton.
Silky Sea Island cotton grew only on the Georgia and Carolina coast. Upland cotton grew almost anywhere inland. But picking its clinging seeds out by hand took all day.
Eli Whitney's 1793 gin pulled cotton through a grate too narrow for seeds. Now upland cotton paid. Whitney got the patent. Planters built their own copies.
Upland cotton needs a long season, about two hundred days without frost. Look how much of the South that is.
In 1800 the South grew about seventy thousand bales. By 1840, well over a million.
The biggest share sailed for Liverpool. Much of the rest went to France and New England. Cloth and credit came back.
By the late 1830s, cotton was more than half the value of all U.S. exports. Southerners would later call that power King Cotton.
Southern businessmen put their money where the profits were: cotton, land and enslaved people. Rice, sugar and tobacco still mattered. Cotton outweighed all of them together.
There was a catch. Cotton, like tobacco, wore out the soil.
Alabama Fever
1814–1840
Planters grew the same crops on the same fields, year after year. The soil gave out. Rain cut gullies into the bare clay.
Virginia's Edmund Ruffin tried to rescue his soil with fossil seashells. Most planters found it easier to move.
In 1845 a South Carolina manufacturer asked a question.
William Gregg …follow the footsteps of our forefathers, and still further exhaust our soil by the exclusive cultivation of cotton?
Then: what would stop planters moving southwest with their capital? By capital, Gregg meant people.
Out west lay fresh land, and buyers packed the federal land sales. Back in North Carolina, a young lawyer reported the damage.
James Graham The Alabama Feaver rages here with great violence and has carried off vast numbers of our Citizens.
He meant they'd moved.
Planters came with the people they enslaved, walking behind the wagons. Alabama's population more than quadrupled in twenty years.
None of this land was empty. It belonged to the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee nations. Treaty by treaty, from Fort Jackson in 1814 to New Echota in 1835, the United States took it.
Here is the South from 1800 to 1840, on one table. Each sheet is one kind of evidence.
Booker T. Washington, born enslaved, explained the Black Belt's name.
Booker T. Washington The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers.
Worn-out land pushed. Rich land pulled. Rivers carried the bales, and treaties took the land. What the new fields needed next was people.
Sold South
1808–1848
On January 1, 1808, the first day the Constitution allowed, Congress banned bringing enslaved people in from abroad. The new cotton fields would be filled mostly from inside the country.
Enslavers on tired land in Virginia and Maryland could sell people to the Deep South for high prices. Historians call what followed the Second Middle Passage.
Traders bought people in Richmond, Alexandria and Baltimore, and sold them in Natchez and New Orleans.
The biggest firm, Franklin and Armfield, worked from Alexandria, then part of the District of Columbia. In the mid-1830s it sent a thousand to fifteen hundred people south every year.
Ships carried people south by sea. The law required a list, so some of their names survive.
Others walked. In Maryland, around 1805, a Georgia trader bought Charles Ball and marched him south.
Charles Ball A strong iron collar was closely fitted by means of a padlock round each of our necks.
Charles Ball A chain of iron, about a hundred feet in length, was passed through the hasp of each padlock…
Charles Ball I asked if I could not be allowed to go to see my wife and children… but was told that I would be able to get another wife in Georgia.
At the end of the road stood markets like the Forks of the Road, outside Natchez. Traders dressed people in new clothes for the sale.
Every sale left someone behind. Charles Ball escaped and walked home to Maryland. Very few of the people sold south ever did.
Who the South Was
1830s–1840s
Kentucky pork and corn, for plantations that planted cotton first.
Enslaved men loaded the boats, many of them hired out by their owners.
A farm family with three bales. Most white Southerners lived like this.
Up on the bluff, the planters, and the factors who sold their cotton.
In 1850, about two white Southern families in three owned no one. Fewer than four in a hundred were planters. Yet about half of all enslaved people lived on their land.
Most were yeoman farmers: corn and hogs first, a few bales for cash. They owned their land. The men voted. Many distrusted planters.
Why back slavery, if you owned no one? Many hoped to buy land and people someday. Many ginned and sold through a planter, or were his kin.
Men who owned no one rode the slave patrols. And the law put every white man above every Black person. Those are reasons, not excuses.
In the mountains, where cotton wouldn't grow, few owned anyone, and many resented planters.
About 215,000 free Black people lived in the South in 1840, and new laws kept cutting back their rights.
Gentlemen lived by a code of honor. In 1827 two men dueled here, missed twice and shook hands. Then their friends started shooting. Two men died.
The South built few factories and few big cities. Richmond's Tredegar ironworks used enslaved workers too. Many Southern railroads simply carried cotton to a port.
Joseph Holt Ingraham To sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, "ad infinitum," is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough-going cotton planter; his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit.
The money went into more land and more people. The South's leaders bet the whole region on King Cotton.
A Positive Good
1820–1845
Many Southern leaders once called slavery a necessary evil: a wrong they said was too dangerous to end.
Thomas Jefferson we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.
Not every defender sounded alike. Florida slaveholder Zephaniah Kingsley wrote in 1829:
Zephaniah Kingsley The idea of slavery, when associated with cruelty and injustice, is revolting to every philanthropic mind…
He argued for free people of color’s rights. When Florida’s laws turned on them, he moved his family to Haiti.
In August 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, led a revolt in Southampton County, Virginia. Rebels killed fifty-five white people. White militias and mobs then killed dozens of Black people without trial.
That winter, Jefferson’s grandson asked Virginia’s legislature to end slavery gradually, and to send the freed people away. After two weeks of debate, the House voted that acting now was “inexpedient.”
Professor Thomas Dew answered in print: no such plan could work. Soon, other leaders said much more.
Southern leaders shut the argument out. In 1835 a Charleston crowd burned abolitionist pamphlets. In 1836 the House gagged every antislavery petition.
In 1837, John C. Calhoun told the Senate:
John C. Calhoun I hold that… the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.
His claim, plainly: slavery civilized the enslaved, cared for them, and was good for both races. Frederick Douglass, enslaved in Maryland, answered in 1845:
Frederick Douglass It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.
By 1845, the country’s biggest Protestant churches had split over slavery. Southern Methodists and Baptists formed their own.
West of the River
1845–1848
By 1848 cotton had crossed the Sabine into Texas. A war with Mexico had just added a vast new West.
In 1846 Congressman David Wilmot tried to ban slavery from all of it. Whether slavery would follow cotton west was the question that split the country.
Because by 1848 nearly everything the South had rested on cotton, and cotton rested on slavery.
So why did the South's leaders call slavery a positive good? Because by 1848 nearly everything the South had rested on cotton, and cotton rested on slavery.
A Georgia paper once begged the South to grow something else. The South bet everything on cotton, and on the people it forced to grow it.