by Sven Beckert
The cotton rush indeed sparked even more fanciful scenarios among political economists, manufacturers, and merchants who hoped that this or that region of the world would fill the gap left by the war, testifying to the chaotic and experimental nature of this response to the Civil War. The Manchester Guardian repeatedly trumpeted the cotton prospects of various parts of Africa, India, Australia, and the Middle East. “L’Afrique est le vrai pays du coton,” pronounced one French observer optimistically in 1864. “Queensland,” argued the Australian Queensland Guardian in 1861, “must be cottonized.” To the chagrin of cotton manufacturers and gullible investors, not all such plans worked out during the war years. The quantity of African, Argentinean, and Central Asian cotton sold on the world market remained small and the obstacles in those regions remained too great for private capital, even in concert with desperate European governments, to overcome.39
Nonetheless, during the American Civil War, merchants, manufacturers, and statesmen glimpsed the future shape of the empire of cotton. They engaged, as Samuel B. Ruggles explained to the New York Chamber of Commerce, in a “great effort for the commercial emancipation of the civilized nations of the earth.”40 Because of them, Indian, Egyptian, and Brazilian cotton became a major presence on Western markets. Their experience during the cotton famine, moreover, had opened bold new vistas of colonial adventure and state involvement in commodity markets. While private investment and lobbying of the state had characterized the antebellum efforts of cotton merchants and manufacturers, the cotton famine sharply raised the dependence of these cotton capitalists on the state and on their own political sophistication. Colonialism had become a matter of urgent self-interest, as capitalists grasped how vulnerable their global networks and huge capital investments were to local disruption and how unstable slavery had become.
Yet the question of the future role of American cotton in the global economy remained. Would it return to market? And if so, would slaves still be growing it?
“The biggest commercial catastrophe in the world.” French engineer Charles Joseph Minard maps the impact of the Civil War on the global cotton industry. (illustration credit 9.3)
Some cotton manufacturers and merchants in Europe went as far as to hope for a permanent separation of the Union to enable the continued growing of cotton by slaves in an internationally recognized Confederacy. They believed that the cotton empire depended for the foreseeable future on slavery. In France, the procureur général reported widespread sentiments among mill owners in the textile region of Alsace that “from a commercial point of view, the separation would be a boon for us due to the ease that the South was willing to give the European Trade.” The procureur général of Colmar observed in 1862 that public opinion more and more favors the “prompt recognition of the Confederacy.” Le Havre merchants were nearly as vocal in their support for the cause of the Confederacy, the Courier du Havre being at the forefront of such sentiments. Many of the propertied in Great Britain similarly opposed the northern cause, motivated by antidemocratic attitudes and a preference for a divided and weakened power in North America, yet concerns about cotton certainly came into their calculations as well: When John Arthur Roebuck advocated in the House of Commons for the recognition of the Confederacy, he did not tire of mentioning the fate of Lancashire textile workers and their need for cotton. Tellingly, Liverpool, the world’s largest cotton port, was the most pro-Confederate place in the world outside the Confederacy itself. Liverpool merchants helped bring out cotton from ports blockaded by the Union navy, built warships for the Confederacy, and supplied the South with military equipment and credit. The Liverpool Southern Club, as well as the Central Association for the Recognition of the Confederate States, agitated for permanent separation. Even the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce entertained the benefits of an independent Confederacy. Liverpool’s mercantile community believed, as the Browns’ Liverpool partner Francis Alexander Hamilton wrote in August 1861, that “no earthly power could reunite the two sections,” and that a Union victory was “an utter impossibility.”41
Liverpool was not alone. In Manchester, the Southern Club and the Manchester Southern Independence Association agitated for the South. In 1862, thousands of participants, some of them workers, staged rallies in British cotton towns, demanding government recognition of the Confederacy. Even though many workers supported the Union as its struggle became increasingly identified with the struggle for free labor, elite sentiment tended to favor the Confederacy with the president of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce expressing his expectation that “permanent secession of the Southern States was inevitable.”42
“Well, yes! it is certain that ‘Cotton’ is more useful to me than ‘Wool!!’ ” Northerners fear that Britain will abandon its neutrality to secure cotton, 1862 or 1863. (illustration credit 9.4)
Such sentiments, while not universal among cotton manufacturers and merchants, had the potential to influence the position of governments, especially of Britain and France, toward the American war. The Union, which had an overwhelming interest in maintaining the neutrality of European governments, took the threat seriously. The Confederacy, for its part, saw gaining international recognition as its single most important foreign policy goal. Of course there were good reasons not to intervene: Britain had to consider the fate of its Canadian provinces, and its growing dependence on wheat and corn imports from the northern United States, while continental powers such as France, Russia, and Prussia had an interest in maintaining a strong United States to balance British economic and military power. But European mediation of the conflict and even European recognition of the Confederacy always remained a possibility, its advocates almost invariably touting the advantages of an independent Confederacy as a source of cotton.43
Social upheaval, including demonstrations, riots, and strikes (more than fifty in France alone) in the cotton manufacturing regions increased the anxiety of state bureaucrats and capitalists. Before becoming prime minister of Great Britain, William Gladstone, among others, cited this fear of social upheaval in Lancashire as a reason for European intervention in the American conflict. In 1862, in a public speech, Gladstone drew a dire picture of the social and financial impact of the cotton famine, though lauding the patience of England’s workers, comparing the importance of the cotton famine to the other two calamities that had befallen the British Empire, the Irish famine and the Indian mutiny.44
Cotton interests constantly pressured the Lincoln administration to keep the needs of European cotton consumers in mind. The diplomatic correspondence between the British Foreign Office and the British embassy in Washington, D.C., suggests that Foreign Minister Earl Russell along with the French government exerted considerable pressure on the Union administration. “I went to the State department on the 25th [of July 1863] and spoke to Mr. Seward about the cotton,” reported the British ambassador to Washington, Lord Lyons, to London. “I told him that we had waited with the greatest patience while the military operations were going on upon the Mississippi, but that now the River was open, and the time has come at which we had been promised an ample supply. What was he prepared to do to redeem his promises?” Lincoln was well aware of the importance of cotton in the conflict. In his first annual message on December 3, 1861, he argued that “the principal lever relied on by the insurgents for exciting foreign nations to hostility against us…is the embarrassment of commerce.” And by mid-1862, as the cabinet discussed Lincoln’s plan for emancipation of slaves in rebel states, Seward argued successfully against such “immediate promulgation” and “strongly in favor of cotton and foreign governments.” Seward feared that announcement of emancipation would lead to European recognition of the Confederacy. His ears close to the ground, he recognized the potentially revolutionary implications of the American struggle to global capitalism and urged caution.45
American diplomats too were frequently reminded of Europe’s urgent need for cotton. When William Thayer, the American consul to Alexandria, Egypt, traveled to L
ondon in the summer of 1862, he reported to Seward that recognition was very much on the mind of British policy elites. That same year, the American minister to Brussels, Henry Sanford, was confronted by the French secretary of state, who cautioned that “We are nearly out of cotton, and cotton we must have.” When in the spring of 1862 Louis Napoleon conversed with William L. Dayton, the U.S. minister in Paris, he hoped “that something will be done by your government to relieve the difficulties here, growing out of the want of cotton.” Pressured by widespread demands among cotton industrialists, the French government engaged in diplomatic efforts to end the American conflict, so that, as Mulhouse cotton manufacturer Gustave Imbert-Koechlin pronounced, “peace may reign between the two American states.” Confederate diplomats in Europe, encouraged by such complaints, knew that Europe’s need for southern cotton was the strongest arrow in their diplomatic arsenal and launched it with increasing desperation as the tide of war turned against the South.46
Securing raw materials globally, reminding Lincoln of the need for cotton: Lord Lyons, as photographed by Mathew Brady (illustration credit 9.5)
Union diplomats desperately tried to counteract such sentiments by making concerted efforts to communicate to the European public directly. Charles Francis Adams advised his son in 1861 that it would be useful if he would author a pamphlet about the cotton question. “Two things are necessary to the production of cotton—an abundance of labor and a cotton soil,” he wrote. “Look into the question of soil first,” he advised, arguing that a whole range of places around the globe had the necessary environmental conditions to grow cotton. In some parts of the world, he added, labor was abundant as well, such as in India and Egypt, while in other parts of the world “there is no labor and here the cooly question rises.” Adams saw an opportunity in the war to allow other cotton producers to emerge, and to undo permanently the South’s near monopoly. “The importance of this struggle [for the blockade and for new sources of cotton] cannot be overestimated.” On “the consequent cotton pressure throughout the world hangs the destruction of American slavery.”47
Indeed, the best way to make the war against the Confederacy palatable to powerful cotton interests in Europe was to demonstrate that inexpensive cotton could be secured elsewhere. And the U.S. government indeed did its best to encourage production in other parts of the world, for example by moving vast quantities of cottonseed abroad. Washington, wrote Seward in April 1862, had “an obvious duty…to examine the capacities of other countries for cotton culture and stimulate it as much as possible, and thus to counteract the destructive designs of the factious monopolists at home.” Egypt, with its long-staple crop, was of particular importance in these calculations since it could replace American exports with a high-quality substitute, unlike Indian cotton. Throughout the war years, Thayer met regularly with the viceroy to discuss cotton production and eventually hired a confidant of the viceroy, Ayoub Bey Trabulsi, to examine “the cottons of Egypt.” Thanks to such contacts, Thayer was able to report by November 1862 that “the Vice Roy has exerted his influence to aid in the increased cultivation…he has…advised all the large proprietors hereafter to sow one fourth of their land with cotton. As the advice of His Highness is practically equivalent to a command, the proprietors have commenced…to expedite the great agricultural revolution now in progress.”48
Seward projected confidence that such efforts would succeed and especially emphasized the unforeseen effects of global cotton production on the South’s bid for independence. “The insurrectionary cotton States will be blind to their own welfare if they do not see how their prosperity and all their hopes are passing away, when they find Egypt, Asia Minor and India supplying the world with cotton, and California furnishing the gold for its purchase.”49
And indeed, these overtures of American policy makers did help to defuse tensions between Washington and European capitals. In the spring of 1862, Baring Brothers Liverpool expressed the view that war between the United States and Great Britain was less likely “provided we get a large import from India.” Charles Wood argued in August 1862 that “our only domestic trouble,…the distress in Lancashire,…may be much mitigated, if any reasonable quantity worth speaking of can come from India beyond what she sent last year.” By 1863, widespread cotton imports from India had alleviated the cotton crisis in France. Indeed by early 1864 the procureurs généraux of various cotton manufacturing districts could report that cotton imports from India and Egypt had relieved pressure on manufacturers, as factories started slowly to produce again and, as a result, “the struggle…lost a great deal of interest in our département.”50 As Seward put it a few years after the war, in 1872, when he came to the Indian city of Agra—the site of the Taj Mahal—to visit a cotton gin there, “From the tomb of the Mogul monarch Of India, Akbar, we passed to the tomb of the pretended monarch of America, King Cotton.”51
Once significant amounts of cotton arrived from sources other than the United States, the political pressure on European governments from cotton interests declined. Edward Atkinson, the Boston cotton manufacturer, was relieved that the “supposed dependence of Europe upon the Cotton States has proved to be an utter fallacy,” and thought it possible that soon “Europe will become absolutely independent of this country for her supply.” By 1863, even those whose livelihood depended on cotton, and who had once been advocates of the cause of the southern states, began to envision a diverse supply network of raw cotton without reliance on slaves.52
Some even began to see the obstinacy of the South, in its demands for independence and its attachment to slavery, as the real cause of disruption to the world economy. After all, cotton merchants and manufacturers, unlike southern planters and their government, were not invested in a particular source of cotton—the American South—nor in a particular system of labor to produce it—slavery. All they required was a secure and predictable supply of inexpensive cotton in the qualities they desired.
Yet it was one thing to respond to short-term supply disruptions resulting from a blockade, and another to imagine an empire of cotton without slavery. Based on their readings of the history of the cotton empire during the previous eighty years, many merchants and manufacturers feared that the potential disruption of the “deep relationship between slavery and cotton production” might, as the Bremer Handelsblatt put it, “destroy one of the essential conditions of the mass production” of cotton textiles.53
As early as 1861, when Union general John C. Frémont emancipated slaves in Missouri, The Economist worried that such a “fearful measure” might spread to other slaveholding states, “inflict[ing] utter ruin and universal desolation on those fertile territories.” The Cotton Supply Reporter went as far as to evoke “the horrors of a second St. Domingue,” should the war become a war for emancipation, and predicted that in such a case the United States’ “marvelous cotton-producing industry must suddenly collapse.” It was not surprising that people with such beliefs would come to see the fall of Richmond as of such consequence, according to the hyperventilating Bremer Handelsblatt, that even the “richest imagination was too poor to envisage its implications.”54
Considering these fears, it was the more remarkable that 4 million slaves in the United States—among them the world’s most important cotton growers—gained their freedom during or immediately after the war. Encouraged by their perception of their masters’ weakness in the face of a national government bent on subduing the rebels, slaves embarked upon an agrarian insurrection. By deserting plantations, withdrawing their labor power, giving intelligence to federal troops, and eventually taking up arms as Union soldiers, American slaves pressed to make a sectional war into a war of emancipation. And they succeeded. Never before and never thereafter did cotton growers revolt with similar success, their strength fortuitously amplified by a deep and irreconcilable split within the nation’s elite.55
The Impact of the American Civil War on the Global Cotton Industry, 1861–1865
With slavery unlikely to
be resurrected in face of such unprecedented revolt, cotton capitalists searched for new ways to mobilize cotton-growing labor. They could not find much reassurance in past cotton-growing experiences in other regions of the world. At prevailing antebellum world market prices, few cultivators in India, Brazil, or Africa, had produced much cotton for European markets, despite the best efforts of some manufacturers. Peasants had tenaciously clung to subsistence farming, and the fraction who did cultivate cotton for markets sold it to nearby spinners, not to Liverpool or Le Havre merchants. Even in the United States itself, as slaves gained their freedom during the war, many of them quickly abandoned the industrial rhythm of the plantation and instead tried to focus on subsistence agriculture.56