Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

This was, of course, a spectacular misjudgment. The United States was superbly suited for cotton production. The climate and soil of a wide swath of the American South met the conditions under which the cotton plant thrived, with the right amount of rain, the right patterns of rainfall, and the right number of days without frost. Perceptive observers noticed that potential: In a bout of optimism, James Madison had predicted as early as 1786, only a year after the unexpected American cotton sailed into Liverpool harbor, that the United States would turn into a major cotton-growing country, while George Washington believed that “the increase of that new material (cotton)…must be of almost infinite consequence to the prosperity of the United States.” Philadelphian Tench Coxe, himself a substantial landowner in the South, made a more subtle but nonetheless powerful case for America’s cotton-growing potential. In 1794, observing the rapid expansion of cotton manufacturers in Great Britain and rising prices of West Indian cotton in the wake of the uprising in Saint-Domingue, he urged that “this article must be worth the attention of the southern planters.” He was encouraged by British industrialists such as Stockport cotton manufacturer John Milne, who embarked in the late 1780s on the long journey across the Atlantic to persuade North Americans to grow cotton.3

  As predicted by these self-interested observers, cotton production would soon dominate vast swaths of the United States. Indeed, the crop would become so intrinsic to American enterprise that the earlier reality—the dominance of cotton from the Ottoman Empire, the West Indies, and Brazil—has largely been lost. It turned out that Peel, Yates & Co. had anticipated one of the nineteenth century’s most consequential dynamics.4

  The rapid expansion of cotton in the United States was partly possible because planters used the experience that their colonial ancestors had accumulated in the cultivation of the white gold. As early as 1607, settlers in Jamestown had grown cotton; by the end of the seventeenth century, travelers had introduced cottonseeds from Cyprus and Izmir to American soil. Throughout the eighteenth century, farmers continued to gather knowledge about cotton cultivation from the West Indies and the Mediterranean and planted cottonseeds from these regions, primarily for domestic consumption. During the upheavals of the American struggle for independence, planters grew larger quantities to substitute for the now absent imports of cloth from Britain, and to keep at work slaves whose usual crops—namely tobacco and rice—suddenly lacked a market. South Carolinian planter Ralph Izard, for example, eagerly gave orders in 1775 “for a considerable quantity of cotton to be planted for clothing my negroes.”5

  Quick expansion was made easier because substantial similarities existed between the growing of tobacco and cotton; knowledge accumulated in the cultivation of the former could be used to grow the latter. Moreover, some of the infrastructure that had facilitated the moving of tobacco to world markets could be rededicated to cotton. And during the revolutionary upheavals of the eighteenth century, planters and slaves moved back and forth between the West Indies and North America, bringing with them further knowledge about cotton planting. In 1788, for example, the owners of a slave from Saint Croix advertised him for sale in the United States as “well acquainted with the culture of cotton.” The slave-cotton paradigm invented in the West Indies now spread to the North American mainland.6

  In 1786, American planters also began to notice the rising prices for cotton engendered by the rapid expansion of mechanized cotton textile production in the United Kingdom. That year, planters grew the first long-staple Sea Island cotton, named after the location of their plantations on islands just off the coast of Georgia, with seeds they had brought from the Bahamas. Unlike the local cottons, this cotton had a long, silky fiber, which made it exceedingly well suited for finer yarns and cloths, much in demand by Manchester manufacturers. Though accounts vary, it is possible that a Frank Levett was the first to take this momentous step. Levett, a native of the great cotton mart of Izmir, had left the rebelling American colonies for the Bahamas, but eventually returned to Georgia, retook possession of his land, and then began a major effort at cotton growing. Others followed his model and the planting of Sea Island cotton spread up and down the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Exports from South Carolina, for example, ballooned from less than 10,000 pounds in 1790 to 6.4 million pounds in 1800.7

  Production received a decisive boost in 1791 when rebellion eliminated cotton rival Saint-Domingue, Europe’s most important source of cotton, sending prices upward and scattering the entire class of French cotton planters: Some went to Cuba and other islands; many came to the United States. Jean Montalet, for example, one of many of Saint-Domingue’s former cotton planters, sought refuge on the mainland, and upon his arrival in South Carolina converted a rice plantation to the growing of cotton. Revolution thus in one stroke both brought needed growing expertise to the United States and increased the financial incentive for American planters to grow cotton. But the slaves’ uprising on the plantations of Saint-Domingue also ingrained a sense among manufacturers, planters, and statesmen of the inherent instability of the system of cotton slavery and land expropriations that they were about to expand in North America.8

  While Sea Island cotton production expanded rapidly, it soon reached its limit, as the variety failed at any substantial distance from the coast. Farther inland, a different strain of cotton thrived, so-called upland cotton, shorter in staple length, with the fiber tightly attached to its seed. It was difficult to remove the seeds with the help of existing gins, but with demand increasing and prices high, planters had their slaves work it up in a slow and tedious process by roller gins modeled after Indian churkas.9

  Yet even with slave labor, the result was not adequate. Planters yearned for a device that would more quickly separate seed from fiber. In 1793, Eli Whitney, only a few months after arriving in Savannah from his college days at Yale, built the first working model of a new kind of cotton gin that was able to rapidly remove the seeds of upland cotton. Overnight, his machine increased ginning productivity by a factor of fifty. News of the innovation spread quickly; farmers everywhere built copies of the gin. Like the jenny and the water frame, Eli’s gin overcame yet another bottleneck in the production of cotton textiles. As a result, in what can only be described as a “cotton rush,” land on which cotton grew allegedly trebled in price after the invention of the gin, and “the annual income of those who plant it is double to what it was before the introduction of cotton.”10

  Armed with this new technology, cotton production spread rapidly after 1793 into the interior of South Carolina and Georgia. As a result, in 1795 significant amounts of U.S. cotton arrived in Liverpool for the first time; none, as best we know, was seized by customs. As settlers streamed into the region, many of them migrants from the upper South, the countryside was turned upside down—from a thinly inhabited region of native people and farmers who focused on subsistence crops and tobacco to one in the thrall of cotton.11

  To enable such expanded production, planters brought with them thousands of slaves. In the 1790s, the slave population of the state of Georgia nearly doubled, to sixty thousand. In South Carolina, the number of slaves in the upcountry cotton growing districts grew from twenty-one thousand in 1790 to seventy thousand twenty years later, including fifteen thousand slaves newly brought from Africa. As cotton plantations spread, the proportion of slaves in four typical South Carolina upcountry counties increased from 18.4 percent in 1790 to 39.5 percent in 1820 and to 61.1 percent in 1860. All the way to the Civil War, cotton and slavery would expand in lockstep, as Great Britain and the United States had become the twin hubs of the emerging empire of cotton.12

  The only substantial problem was the land, as the same patch could not be used for more than a few years without either planting legumes on it or applying expensive guano to it. As one Putnam County, Georgia, planter lamented, “We appear to have but one rule—that is, to make as much cotton as we can, and wear out as much land as we can…lands that once produced one thousand pounds of cotton to the acre
, will not now bring more than four hundred pounds.” Yet even soil exhaustion did not slow the cotton barons; they simply moved farther west and farther south. Newly emptied lands, portable slave labor, and the new ginning technology allowed cotton to be easily transferred to new territories. After 1815, cotton planters moved westward into the rich lands of upland South Carolina and Georgia. Their migration to Alabama and Louisiana, and eventually to Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, was choreographed to the movement of cotton prices. While the price of cotton gradually declined over the first half of the nineteenth century, sharp price upswings—such as in the first half of the 1810s, between 1832 and 1837, and again after the mid-1840s—produced expansionist bursts. In 1811, one-sixteenth of all cotton grown in the United States came from states and territories west of South Carolina and Georgia, by 1820 that share had reached one-third, and in 1860 three-fourths. New cotton fields sprouted in the sediment-rich lands along the banks of the Mississippi, the upcountry of Alabama, and the black prairie of Arkansas. So rapid was this move westward that by the end of the 1830s, Mississippi already produced more cotton than any other southern state.13

  Moving westward: Production of cotton by U.S. states, 1790–1860 (illustration credit 5.2)

  The entry of the United States into the empire of cotton was so forceful that cotton cultivation in the American South quickly began to reshape the global cotton market. In 1790, three years before Whitney’s invention, the United States had produced 1.5 million pounds of cotton; in 1800 that number grew to 36.5 million pounds, and in 1820 to 167.5 million pounds. Exports to Great Britain increased by a factor of ninety-three between 1791 and 1800, only to multiply another seven times by 1820. By 1802 the United States was already the single most important supplier of cotton to the British market, and by 1857 it would produce about as much cotton as China. American upland cotton, which Whitney’s gin worked up so efficiently, was exceedingly well suited to the requirements of British manufacturers: While the gin damaged the fiber, the cotton remained suitable for the production of cheaper, coarser yarns and fabrics in high demand among the lower classes in Europe and elsewhere. But for American supplies, the miracle of the mass production of yarn and cloth, and the ability of new consumers to buy these cheap goods, would have foundered on old realities of the traditional cotton market. The much-vaunted consumer revolution in textiles stemmed from a dramatic transformation in the structure of plantation slavery.14

  The rise of the United States to dominance in world cotton markets was a radical reversal of fortunes. But why did it happen? As Tench Coxe pointed out in 1817, climate and soil alone did not explain the cotton-producing potential of the United States, because, as he put it, the white gold “can be cultivated in an immense district of the productive zones of the earth.”15 What distinguished the United States from virtually every other cotton-growing area in the world was planters’ command of nearly unlimited supplies of land, labor, and capital, and their unparalleled political power. In the Ottoman Empire and India, as we know, powerful indigenous rulers controlled the land, and deeply entrenched social groups struggled over its use. In the West Indies and Brazil, sugar planters competed for land, labor, and power. The United States, and its plentiful land, faced no such encumbrances.

  Ever since the first European settlers stepped off their boats, they had pushed inland. The land’s native inhabitants had to reckon with what these boats brought—first germs, later steel. In the late eighteenth century, Native Americans still controlled substantial territories only a few hundred miles inland from the coastal provinces, yet they were unable to stop the white settlers’ steady encroachment. The settlers eventually won a bloody and centuries-long war, succeeding in turning the land of Native Americans into land that was legally “empty.” This was a land whose social structures had been catastrophically weakened or eliminated, a land without most of its people and thus without the entanglements of history. In terms of unencumbered land, the South had no rival in the cotton-growing world.

  With the support of southern politicians, the federal government aggressively secured new territories by acquiring land from foreign powers and from forced cessions by Native Americans. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the territory of the United States, in 1819 the United States acquired Florida from Spain, and in 1845 it annexed Texas. All of these acquisitions contained lands superbly suited to cotton agriculture. Indeed, by 1850, 67 percent of U.S. cotton grew on land that had not been part of the United States half a century earlier. The fledging U.S. government had inaugurated the military-cotton complex.

  Cotton production in the United States, in millions of pounds, 1790–1859 (illustration credit 5.3)

  That territorial expansion, the “great land rush” as geographer John C. Weaver has called this moment more broadly, was tightly linked to the territorial ambitions of planting, manufacturing, and finance capitalists. Cotton planters constantly pushed the boundaries, seeking fresh lands to grow cotton, often moving ahead of the federal government. The frontier space they created was characterized by the near absence of government oversight: The state’s monopoly on violence was still a distant dream.16 But these frontier planters at the rough edges of the empire of cotton had well-dressed and well-spoken company. British banker Thomas Baring, one of the world’s greatest cotton merchants, for example, was instrumental in the expansion of the empire of cotton when he financed the purchase of the Louisiana lands, negotiating and selling the bonds that sealed the deal with the French government. Before doing so, Baring asked for approval from the British government for such a vast expansion of the United States, through Henry Addington, the British prime minister. So important was the meeting to Baring that he scribbled in small letters in his notepad:

  Sunday, June 19: saw Mr. Addington at Richmond Park, communicated to him the particulars of the business, & answered every question. I asked distinctly if he approved the treaty & our conduct. He said that he thought it would have been wise for this country to pay a million sterling for the transfer of Louisiana from France to America, & that he saw nothing in our conduct but to approve. He appears to consider Louisiana in the hands of America as an additional means for the vent of our manufacturers & Co. in preference to France, besides other motives which we did not discuss, directly of a political nature.17

  The thrust south and west was far more than just planters searching for fresh land. Expansion served many interests: of a rapidly consolidating state, of western farmers hoping for an outlet to the sea, of manufacturers’ need for raw materials, and of British economic and political desires. As industrial capitalism expanded, the zone of war capitalism continued to push outward.

  But international treaties alone were not sufficient. To make the land useful to planters, this newly consolidated territory needed to be removed from the control of its native inhabitants. Already in the early 1800s, the Creeks, under duress, had given up claims to land in Georgia that was then converted into cotton farms. A decade later the Creeks suffered further defeats and were forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, ceding 23 million acres of land in what is today Alabama and Georgia. In the years after 1814, the federal government signed further treaties with the Creeks, Chickasaw, and Choctaws, gaining control over millions of acres of land in the South, including Andrew Jackson’s 1818 treaty with the Chickasaw nation that opened western Tennessee to cotton cultivation and the 1819 treaty with the Choctaw nation that gave 5 million acres of land in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta to the United States in exchange for vastly inferior lands in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Alabama congressman David Hubbard invited the New York and Mississippi Land Company in 1835 to purchase lands from which the Chickasaw had been expelled, which were then turned into cotton lands: “If on my return I should meet with any thing from you in the shape of a distinct proposition to take hold of the public lands in the Chickasaw Nation, I shall then be ready to act immediately, according to the magnitude of your scheme & shall shape my course so as to meet fully the views of
your capitalists in my future operation.” The company bought approximately twenty-five thousand acres. In 1838, federal troops began removing the Cherokee nation from their ancestral homeland in Georgia, which was to be turned into cotton plantations. Farther south, in Florida, extraordinarily rich cotton lands were expropriated from the Seminoles between 1835 and 1842, the longest war in U.S. history until the Vietnam War. It is no wonder that Mississippi planters, argues one historian, had “an obsessive concern with well-organized and trained militias, adequate weaponry, and a responsive federal army.”18

  Native Americans understood the underlying foundations of the expanding military-cotton complex: Upon removal in 1836, the chief of the Cherokees, John Ross, in a letter to Congress decried that “our property may be plundered before our eyes; violence may be committed on our persons; even our lives may be taken away, and there is none to regard our complaints. We are denationalized; we are disenfranchised. We are deprived of membership in the human family!” The coercion and violence required to mobilize slave labor was matched only by the demands of an expansionist war against indigenous people. Nothing of this kind had even been dreamed of in Anatolia or Gujarat.19

  If the project of continental consolidation provided access to new cotton lands, it also secured major rivers needed to carry the cotton. America’s remarkably cheap transportation costs were not preordained, but the direct result of the expansion of its national territory. Most significant here was the Mississippi, whose surge of cotton freight turned New Orleans, at the river’s mouth, into the key American cotton port. But other rivers—the Red River in Louisiana and the Tombigbee and Mobile in Alabama—mattered as well. The first steamboats appeared on the Mississippi in 1817, reducing transport costs, and by the 1830s, railroads connected the new hinterland to river and seaports. The most modern technologies thus made the most brutal exploitation of human labor possible.20