COTTON

Few commodities transformed modern local, national, and even global economies more dramatically than did cotton during the early national period. Its profitability in global markets fueled industrial expansion in Europe and eventually the United States, propelled expansion into the Old Southwest of the United States, demonstrated the continued productivity of slavery, and shaped politics within and outside of the South.

early growth

Cotton had been grown and used for cloth in Asia and the New World prior to the European encounter with either. In the early eighteenth century, East Indian–produced cotton calicos became increasingly important within the British Atlantic economy, despite imperial efforts to protect the centuries-old English woolen and Irish linen industries. In the eighteenth century, English colonists in the West Indies and Lower South began growing the crop in small amounts in order to make homespun cloth. Such production became both symbolically and materially important during the imperial crisis, as Patriots protested British policies, and during the American Revolution, when war limited access to European cloth.

By 1800, U.S. raw cotton exceeded domestic consumption and had entered a rapidly expanding market among British textile manufacturers. Demand grew in the late eighteenth century in part because cotton clothes could be more easily dyed and cleaned than wool or linen. Inventions such as the spinning jenny, water frame, and Crompton's mule increased manufacturers' ability to meet this demand. Britain's failure to develop colonial sources of raw cotton led British merchants and manufacturers to turn to the coastal regions of the Lower South. There, planters facing sagging indigo and rice markets turned to long-staple Sea Island cotton as a way of getting out of debt. The long, high-quality fibers of Sea Island cotton fetched good prices but could not be grown inland. Experimentation with different seeds and hybridization created shorter-staple crops better suited for up-country soils and climates.

Growing cotton proved only one of the challenges facing planters and the laborers—mostly slaves—who cultivated it. Before the cotton was processed, slaves had to handpick numerous seeds out of the sticky fibers. To avoid this time-consuming task, planters and slaves looked for ways to build and improve machines that could gin seeds out without damaging the plants' threads. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented the most important of these gins, which was soon pirated and improved as the new technology proliferated throughout the Lower South. In addition to this invention, cotton production spawned a host of related technologies, including bagging and balling machines and in the late 1820s a railroad project designed to transport cotton goods to Charleston, South Carolina.

cotton, slavery, and westward expansion

Though yeomen farmers grew small quantities of southern cotton, slavery marched westward along with cotton cultivation. High cotton prices provided both the demand for and the capital necessary to purchase more slaves. This fact led South Carolinians (at the behest of backcountry farmers) to reopen the international slave trade in 1803. After Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808, a robust domestic slave trade transported tens of thousands of surplus slaves from the Upper South to work the fertile cotton fields of western Georgia, Alabama, middle Tennessee, and the Mississippi Valley, usually in small gangs. In addition to adding to the slave population of the Lower South, cotton's continued profitability challenged the common assumption that slavery would ultimately prove unprofitable and that diffusion westward would lead to its natural death. Instead, the sons and daughters of eastern planters, with fixed capital in slaves and often facing soil exhaustion, simply uprooted their entire labor force and headed west for cheaper lands. By the early 1830s the southwestern states of Alabama and Mississippi surpassed Georgia and South Carolina as the largest producers of raw cotton. Considerable diversity existed in the Lower South, but the centrality of cotton for local and state economies guaranteed general regional support for slavery, commercial agriculture, and free trade.

cotton and the national economy

Cotton planters were not the only Americans to benefit from the cotton trade. As it grew in the early nineteenth century, northern merchant houses, creditors, factors, and ship owners became the chief intermediaries financing and transporting the crop to Liverpool and other overseas markets. By the 1820s, New York—aided by a strong financial sector and the United States' first steamship line—became the central cog in a complex trade that imported finished goods to America, distributed them inland and along the eastern seaboard, and then carried raw cotton to Europe for manufacturing. Restrictions on the participation of foreign vessels in the coastal trade gave U.S. merchants and shippers (mostly from the Northeast) a virtual monopoly on this trade. By 1820 cotton composed 40 percent of the value of all American exports, a percentage that grew to 50 percent by 1830 and 60 percent by 1840.

As early as the 1790s, economist Tench Coxe proposed that the growth and manufacturing of raw cotton could make the United States a leading manufacturing nation and help unite different regions. Though some small New England textile mills did exist at that time, not until after the War of 1812 did American textiles become an important sector of the American economy. The Panic of 1819 ruined many of the new businesses created by the war, but cotton manufacturers continued to grow steadily in northeastern cities, shifting production out of homes and skilled small shops into increasingly mechanized factories. Rather than harmonizing the nation's interests, however, the growth of textile firms, which demanded high protective tariffs, conflicted with the commitment of southern cotton planters to overseas markets. Annually, over two-thirds (in some years 90 percent) of U.S. cotton was exported, leading southerners to prioritize free trade abroad over the creation of domestic manufacturing through methods that restricted trade.

Despite some economic diversification in the late antebellum period, the South's continued commitment to cotton production and commercial agriculture dramatically shaped that region's economic development, likely retarding urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. The debates surrounding the rise of King Cotton and the slave power necessary to perpetuate it continued to tear the political fabric of the nation.

See alsoSlavery: Slave Trade, Domestic; Slavery: Overview; Textiles Manufacturing .

bibliography

Bruchey, Stuart, ed. and comp. Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790–1860: Sources and Readings. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Schoen, Brian D. "The Fragile Fabric of Union: The Cotton South, Federal Politics and the Atlantic World, 1783–1861." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2004.

Woodman, Harold D. King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Wright, Gavin. The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1978.

Brian Schoen