The New York Times is running a Disunion blog on the events of the Civil War. It has the great virtue of focusing on contemporary sources from the time, an approach which makes any neo-Confederate/Lost Cause version of the Civil War and slavery very difficult to justify. Gene Dattel in When Cotton Was King 03/26/2011 takes on one of the favorite neo-Confederate arguments, the claim that slavery would have faded out on its own without the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and 14th Amendments. This false claim in the Lost Cause narrative of American history would become a model for the pro-segregation argument of more recent decades, that segregation would have faded out on its own, probably faster than actually occurred. And that all those Outside Agitators and mean Yankees messing around with the South just preserved it longer! Dattel, author of Cotton and Race in the Making of America (), explains that no fading away of slavery was on the horizon at the time the Civil War began:
But nothing about the cotton economy of 1861 pointed that way. On the eve of the Civil War there was no perceived threat to the existence of slavery; on the contrary, production levels had never been higher, and despite occasional drops in price, cotton was proving a reliably stable profit engine. Indeed, slave-produced cotton had become a formidable political and still-growing economic force: as early as 1838, a partner of Nicholas Biddle, America’s finance king, paid homage to cotton as a weapon: "Cotton ... will be much more effective in bring ... [England] to terms than all the disciplined troops America could bring into the field." In 1858 James Henry Hammond, a senator from South Carolina, asked, "Would any sane nation make war on cotton? ... No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King." The ubiquitous faith in cotton made slavery seem impregnable. [My emphasis]
One correction: there certainly was a "perceived threat to the existence of slavery" at the time. Southern leaders and the planter elite had become downright paranoid at the time about the imminent threat they perceived from Northern abolitionism and the Republican Party. Several factors combined to make those Southerners wildly exaggerate the threat in their own minds. But the fact that they may have had inaequate reality-testing skills doesn't change the fact that they clearly perceived a threat to slavery from the Republicans and from the Republican President. Taken out of context, like the factoids used by neo-Confederates typically are, this could be integrated into a Lost Cause argument, e.g., "no one in the South thought slavery was under immediate threat so why would they secede from the Union over that?"
As a logical argument, it wouldn't fit well. But screaming contradictions never both fanatics - when it's a contradiction in their own position. Having said that, Dattel gives a clear description of how the invention of the cotton gin and its widespread implementation combined with a drop in prices for cotton clothing affected the institution of slavery. It was common, even in the South, at the time of the American Revolution to assume that slavery was a temporary institution, though slaveowners for the most part weren't putting time limits on it. In the new states of the newly-founded nation where slavery was a minor factor, slavery was outlawed in the late 18th and early 19th century with literal time limits put on it. But thanks to technology, massive Southern capital investment in slaves and the frantic reaction of white Southerners to slave revolts in Haiti and the United States, by the 1830s slaveowning ideology in the South was shifting to justify slavery as a virtuous permanent institution. That was the position that the Confederate States of America wrote into the Rebel Constitution.
In 1787, there was virtually no cotton grown in America. Two things, however, quickly changed that. Eli Whitney's cotton gin allowed cotton production to go from a process limited by manual labor to an industrial machine, allowing a person to "clean" 50 pounds, rather than one pound, of cotton a day. And of course, the cotton gin didn’t remove manual labor from the process; it just shifted it. In fact, this labor-saving device extended slavery by creating a labor shortage in the cotton fields.
The mass production of cotton was accompanied by a dramatic 90 percent drop in the price of a cotton textile garment. This in turn led to a consumer revolution whose raw material was slave-produced cotton – 80 percent of which was produced in the South. As a result, American cotton production exploded from almost nothing in 1787 to over 4.5 million bales, at 500 lbs. a bale, by 1860. On the eve of the war, cotton comprised almost 60 percent of America’s exports.
Slavery expanded accordingly. The number of slaves increased from 700,000 in 1787 to over 4 million on the eve of the American Civil War; approximately 70 percent were involved in some way with cotton production. [my emphasis]
The Disunion blog will presumably also be affected by the Times' latest suicide attempt, limiting the number of articles that non-subscribers can access in a month. But I understand that even over your monthly quota, you will still be able to access blog entries from links. So if you subscribe to Disunion on Facebook, you will get notices of all their entries and can go to them via Facebook. Brilliant business plan: instead of having people click to the entire blog and view ads besides several posts at one page loading, you have them go to Facebook where they view several ads there, and then come to a single blog entry on your site. What could go wrong with that?
Tags: american civil war, slavery, us civil war
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