Cotton as King
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996
From: Bob Bonner
Subject: Cotton as King
Your posting about this anniversary of James Henry Hammond's "Cotton is King" speech prompts me to offer some ideas and to elicit help from any list members who may be able to help me work through some very tentative thoughts.
In teaching the civil war this semester, I am trying to make sense of this attitude of Southern invicibility, especially in terms of global power, that was to have such disasterous results in Confederate diplomacy. I have tried to keep an eye out for the genesis of this faith in the omnipotence of the chief Southern staple which seemed to be fairly pervasive by 1861. Genovese notes in _The Slaveholders' Dilemma_ (99) that Hammond proclaimed in 1849 that neither Cotton, nor manufactures, nor commerce (as DeBow, via Carlyle had claimed) were King, but Knowledge, and especially the press, were sovereign. But then came David Christy's fascinating _Cotton is King_ in 1855 which lamented world dependence on slave-grown produce and, in promoting a colonization agenda, scolded the abolitionists for not realizing the true sources of slaveholder power.
The success with which slaveholders like Hammond appropriated this hardly complimentary phrase as a "positive good" strikes me as a remarkable, and little studied, development. It also marks, I think, a decisive stage in Southern assertiveness, one that was perhaps a necessary pre-requisite for a whole-hearted belief not only in the rightness, but in the feasibility, of secession and a Southern nation. For Hammond makes clear in his speech that the power of cotton has vanquished that old nemesis, the Bank of England, whose defeat should discourage others from "making war on it." Finally, I think it also betrays a quintessential Victorian search for absolutes amidst dizzying social, religious, and political change (hence the need for DBow to find a "King" in commerce, and for Hammond to earlier look to Knowledge as sovereign.)
This faith in the global power of cotton grew alongside an increasingly profitable export trade, it seems clear, but how exactly it became politicized and embraced by Hammond and others seems more complex. If anyone has any ideas about this process, I would appreciate hearing from them.
Bob Bonner
Yale University
bonnerb@minerva.cis.yale.edu
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996
From: David Carlton
Subject: Further thoughts on King Cotton
A quick thought, which may or may not be relevant:
The identification of the "wealth of nations" with control of material resources, is of course, a very old strain in economic thinking, and one against which competing notions such as the labor theory of value has always had incomplete success in displacing. Even in our time the (temporary) rise of OPEC in the 1970s sparked a rise in this sort of thinking: the notion that an underdeveloped, underpopulated country could nonetheless wield enormous clout by virtue of its monopolistic control of a basic raw material. OPEC was unable to sustain its 1970s power, in large part because the modern world economy is far too supple to be pinned down for long by such monopoly power, but it such claims of power were surely far more plausible in 1858, when "value added" by manufacturing and commerce were proportionately far less than now, and when the ability to deal with supply restrictions through substitution much less (There really *was* a "cotton famine" in Britain during the War). Furthermore, Hammond's speech was delivered in the wake of the Panic of 1857, which had shaken the "developed" world but which, southerners liked to boast, had affected their economy but little (the latter point a bit of an exaggeration); thus, there was a distinct "current events" flavor to Hammond's speech. Finally, Christie's alarmist book (there were analogues in the 1970s, of course) certainly suggested a weapon for the southern states to brandish, at a time when, with the increasing sectionalization of the party system, their political options were dramatically shrinking. Seen in this light, the appeal to cotton may have relected an increasing realization that, as David Potter, Michael Holt and William Cooper (in different ways) have argued, the American political system was no longer able to contain the slavery issue as it had largely successfully done through the first half of the nineteenth century. No longer able to appeal to party loyalty, or to American patriotism, to protect slavery, Hammond resorted to the baldest sort of bullying--a tactic that only added to evidence, in northern eyes, of a "slave power conspiracy" to ruin whatever it could not rule.
David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History
Vanderbilt University
P.O. Box 1523, Sta. B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
carltodl@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu
(615) 322-3326
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