King Cotton

King Cotton was a slogan used in the U.S. by southerners in 1860-61 to support secession by arguing cotton exports would make an independent Confederacy economically prosperous, and--more important--would force Britain and France to support the Confederacy because their industrial economy depended on textiles, which depended on cotton.

History

Southern slave-based plantations generated three-fourths of the world's cotton supply. In particular, after the invention of the cotton gin the production of cotton soared throughout the deep South, especially South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. North of these states little cotton was grown, because it needs a frost-free climate.

The rapid growth of cotton production was a response to international demand. The first European (and New England) factories produced textiles, turning cotton (and to a lesser extent wool and linen) into thread and cloth. Cotton production from 720,000 bales in 1830, to 2.85 million bales in 1850, to nearly 5 million in 1860. By the time of the American Civil War, cotton accounted for almost 60% of American exports, representing a total value of nearly $200 million a year. Cotton’s central place in the national economy and its international importance led Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina to make a famous boast in 1858:

Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet... What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?... England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not to make war on cotton. No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.}}

Southerners knew their survival depended on the sympathy of Europe to offset the Union's vastly greater industrial power. They believed that cotton was so essential to the European powers that they would intervene in any civil war.

When war broke out the Confederate people, acting spontaneously without government directed, decided to hold their cotton at home, watching prices soar and economic crisis hit Britain and New England. European states did not intervene because that meant was with the powerful U.S., loss of the American market, loss of American grains, loss of Canada, and loss of much of the British and French merchant marine, all in the slim promise of getting more cotton. In spring 1861 warehouses in Europe were bulging with surplus cotton--which soared in price. So the cotton interests made their profits without a war. The Union imposed a blockade, closing all Confederate ports to normal traffic, so the South was unable to move 95% of its cotton. (Some was slipped out by blockade runner, or through Mexico.) As the Union armies moved into cotton regions in 1862, the U.S. purchased all the cotton available, and sent it to the mills. Production of cotton increased sharply in India and Egypt.

The result was King Cotton was a delusion that misled the South into a hopeless war.

References

• Frank Lawrence Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign relations of the Confederate States of America (1931)
• Surdam, David G. "King Cotton: Monarch or Pretender? The State of the Market for Raw Cotton on the Eve of the American Civil War." Economic History Review 1998 51(1): 113-132. Issn: 0013-0117 Fulltext: in Swetswise, Ingenta, Jstor and Ebsco

External links

• Cotton King Cartoon
• King Cotton

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