by Philip Leigh
Despite numerous complaints from military officers, Lincoln allowed the trade to continue until the end of the war. In response to objections from General Edward Canby, the president answered that higher cotton prices caused by scarcity enabled the Confederacy to acquire as much specie as prior to the war by exporting only a small fraction of the antebellum tonnage. He reasoned it was better to let Northern commercial interests buy and transship the cotton to Europe than to permit the Rebels to do it directly. He closed his letter to Canby with a specious argument borrowed from New England textile baron Edward Atkinson: “[It is] better to give [the enemy] guns for [cotton], than to let him, as now, get both guns and ammunition, for it.” In assessing the president's explanation, historian James McPherson wrote, “Lincoln's rationalization did not satisfy [Canby], nor does it fully satisfy the historian.”12
Yet owing to his roots as a Whig capitalist, Lincoln had faith that the profit motive could work to the advantage of reunion. He believed that commerce was the glue that held the Union together. The more intersectional trade, the stronger the binding ties. “If pecuniary greed can be made to aid us in such effort,” he said, “let us be thankful that so much good can be got out of pecuniary greed.”13
He was consistently more lenient toward trade with the enemy than was either Congress or the military. When in the first year Congress gave him an act to restrict trade, he waited five weeks before implementing it because he wanted to craft procedures that would enable intersectional commerce to continue. When New York industrialist August Belmont opined in 1862 that cotton trade could weaken the Confederacy, Lincoln replied that he had been in agreement for some time. Even near the end of the war, he pocket vetoed a nearly unanimously passed bill intended to block nearly all trade. The president most frequently defended his permissive interbelligerent trade policy “for its bearing on our finances,” by which he meant the conservation of Treasury gold reserves.14
Although the profit motive might serve as a glue to hold the country together, the privileged access required to exercise it in the cotton market was a tar baby to which each corrupting incident adhered. Historian William C. Harris concluded:
Lincoln's trade policy may have contributed to Northern financial stability…but the abuses and corruption…including his granting of permits to Illinois associates, contributed to the decline of values that he held dear…. When it became clear in 1864 that the commerce had become a lucrative operation for dishonest and unpatriotic entrepreneurs and was helping to keep the rebellion alive, Lincoln…should have acted vigorously to end the trade. He did not. The erosion of moral standards…would become increasingly apparent during the postwar period. Some blame for this condition…should attach to Lincoln.15
The corruption that accompanied interbelligerent trade was scandalous. Government officials and even military officers were bribed to shut their eyes. In January 1863, Charles Dana, who was a special investigating agent for War Secretary Stanton, wrote from Memphis “the mania for…cotton has…corrupted and demoralized the army.”16 Five months later, Lincoln himself admitted to Illinois friend William Kellogg, “The officers of the army in numerous instances are believed to connive and share in the profits.”17 Historian Ludwell Johnson wrote that “cotton permits were sold on the streets of New York; soldiers were bribed; traders were blackmailed; Treasury agents were disgraced.”18
Secretary Chase's agent in New Orleans repeatedly wrote he could not check “unwarranted” trade because it profited General Butler's elder brother, Andrew.19 Lincoln was besieged by many politicians and business leaders seeking privileges and promoting schemes for cotton buying, including Ohio governor William Dennison, Illinois senator Orville Browning, former Whig associate James Singleton, Illinois attorney William Weldon, and New York political boss Thurlow Weed, among others.20
General Ulysses Grant's brother-in-law, Samuel Casey, was given a special permit signed by Lincoln to travel multiple times behind enemy lines to buy cotton and transport it back to the Union side. The Confederate government owned the cotton Casey sought, and he contracted to pay for it with British pounds even though US Treasury regulations at the time prohibited the use of anything but greenbacks. Lincoln's friend William Butler was a member of the Casey partnership.21
Bribery and misconduct were also rife on the Confederate side of intersectional trade. For example, cavalry officers might be bribed to prevent them from burning cotton that planters wanted to sell to Northern traders. Similarly, pickets were sometimes bribed to allow cotton to be transported beyond Confederate military lines. However, such actions were less detrimental to the Confederate cause than the reciprocal conduct on the Northern side was to the Union.22 That is because Southerners principally exchanged noncontraband items such as cotton, tobacco, and turpentine, whereas the Northerners traded supplies that enabled the Rebel armies to remain in the field, including weapons, munitions, medicine, and salt, among many others. In contrast, cotton sold to Northerners was typically consumed by the New England textile mills, which, beyond providing some clothing (uniforms were made mostly of wool rather than cotton) and tents, did little to sustain the Union armies. Nonetheless, intersectional trade had a demoralizing effect among Confederate citizens because it made a few wealthy, while the war impoverished nearly all others. One Southerner enriched by such trade was Richard King, who founded the famous King Ranch in Texas. He made a fortune on wartime Rio Grande trade and was granted a pardon after the war, like most ordinary Southerners.
There are at least two reasons that knowledge of Civil War trading with the enemy should be more widely understood. First, it is a neglected part of the whole story. Second, it prompts inquiry into the rarely investigated reasons why the North fought, as opposed to inquiry into why the cotton states seceded.
Contemporary historians almost unanimously deny that the war resulted from a general disagreement over states' rights. They correctly note that the chief right the cotton states wanted to protect was the right to slavery. But most fail to appreciate that it was the widely anticipated economic consequences of disunion that motivated influential politicians and businessmen in the North to “save the Union.” The willingness to trade gold, weapons, munitions, and other contraband to the South in order to avoid such consequences underscores the importance that Lincoln attached to the North's need for intersectional trade. Although not without a humanitarian benefit to destitute Southerners, the bilateral commerce was mostly a bogus “need” for Northerners that unnecessarily protracted the war and lengthened the casualty lists.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Robert A. Jones, Confederate Corsair (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2000), 110.
2. Robert W. Delaney, “Matamoras: Port for Texas during the Civil War,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 58 (July 1954–April 1955): 480.
3. James W. Daddysman, The Matamoros Trade (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), 108–113, 143.
4. John Mason Hart, “Stillman, Charles,” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, accessed July 29, 2013, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fst57; John Mason Hart, “Stillman, James,” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fstbp; Daddysman, Matamoros Trade, 157–158.
5. Chester G. Hearn, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 196.
6. M. A. DeWolfe Howe, ed., Home Letters of General Sherman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), 232.
7. Robert F. Futrell, “Federal Trade with the Confederate States: 1861–1865” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1950), 83–102.
8. Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: Bantam, 1969), 191.
9. Chicago Daily Times, December 10, 1860, “The Editorials of Secession Project,” American Historical Association, accessed July 29, 2013, http://historians.org/projects/secessioneditorials/Editorials/ChicagoTimes_12_10_60.htm.
10.
Abraham Lincoln, presidential inaugural address, March 4, 1861, Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.inaugural.senate.gov/swearing-in/address/address-by-abraham-lincoln-1865.
11. Gene Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 82.
12. Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 24–25.
13. Futrell, “Federal Trade,” 24.
14. Ludwell Johnson, “Trading with the Union: The Evolution of Confederate Policy,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78, no. 3 (July 1970): 310–311.
15. Phil Leigh, “Trading with the Enemy,” New York Times Opinionator, October 28, 2012, accessed July 29, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/trading-with-the-enemy/.
16. Ludwell Johnson, North against South: The American Iliad 1848–1877 (Columbia, SC: Foundation for American Education, 1995, orig. publ. as Division and Reunion: 1848–1877, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), 117.
17. William Brooksher, War along the Bayous (Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 1998), 3; William H. Nulty, Confederate Florida: The Road to Olustee (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 60.
18. Delaney, “Matamoros,” 473–487.
19. Futrell, “Federal Trade,” 78–84, 194–204.
20. Jones, Confederate Corsair, 110.
21. Stanley Lebergott, “Why the South Lost: Commercial Purpose in the Confederacy, 1861–1865,” Journal of American History 70, no.1 (June 1983): 72–73.
22. Andrew J. Smith, Starving the South (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011), 125–126.
23. Ludwell H. Johnson, “Contraband Trade during the Last Year of the Civil War,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 91, no. 4 (March 1963): 642.
24. Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith's Confederacy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972), 155–207.
25. Ludwell Johnson, “Northern Profit and Profiteers: The Cotton Rings of 1864–1865,” Civil War History 12, no. 2 (June 1966): 103.
26. James Ford Rhodes, The History of the Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 359.
27. Johnson, “Northern Profit,” 101–115.
28. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 622.
29. Merton E. Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse with the Confederacy in the Mississippi Valley, 1861–1865,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 5, no. 4 (March 1919): 388.
CHAPTER ONE: THE WORLD COTTON ECONOMY
1. Lauriston F. Bullard, “Lincoln's Conquest of New England,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 2, no. 2 (June 1942): 53.
2. Charles Francis Adams Jr., Richard Henry Dana (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), 127.
3. Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 1911), 67.
4. Dattel, Cotton and Race, 36.
5. Ibid.
6. Frank Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 8–9.
7. Dattel, Cotton and Race, 31–35.
8. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 2–4.
9. David Cohn, The Life and Times of King Cotton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 17–18, 26; Dattel, Cotton and Race, 27–39.
10. Dattel, Cotton and Race, 82.
11. John Lockwood and Charles Lockwood, “First South Carolina. Then New York?,” New York Times Opinionator, January 6, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/first-south-carolina-then-new-york/?_r=0.
12. Dattel, Cotton and Race, 40–42.
13. Ibid., 39–50.
14. Ibid., 67.
15. Ibid., 61–85.
16. Orville Burton and Patricia Bonnin, “The Confederacy,” Macmillan Information Now Encyclopedia, http://www.civilwarhome.com/kingcotton.htm.
17. Ronald Bailey, “Slavery Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the USA: The Textile Industry in New England,” Social Science History 14, no. 3, 388–389.
18. Ibid., 389–390.
19. Thomas H. O'Connor, Lords of the Loom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968), 9–18.
20. Stephen Yafa, Cotton (New York: Penguin, 2005), 105.
21. Bailey, “Slavery Trade,” 395–396.
22. Ibid., 402–403.
23. O'Connor, Lords of the Loom, 50–55.
24. Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity (New York: Ballantine, 2005), 10–11.
25. Ibid.,12.
26. Ibid., 3.
27. Ibid.,15–23.
28. O'Connor, Lords of the Loom, 56–102.
29. Ibid., 104–141.
30. Cohn, Life and Times, 124.
31. Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 346.
32. Cohn, Life and Times, 131.
33. Thomas H. O'Connor, “Lincoln and the Cotton Trade,” Civil War History 7, no. 1 (March 1961): 32; David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 196.
CHAPTER TWO: OFFICIAL POLICY
1. Ludwell Johnson, “Trading with the Union: The Evolution of Confederate Policy,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78, no. 3 (July 1970): 310–311.
2. Stephen R. Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 12.
3. Futrell, “Federal Trade,” 36.
4. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority, 61–62.
5. Clement Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy (New York: Free Press, 1954), 139–141.
6. Johnson, “Trading with the Union,” 308–325; Edward Pollard, The Lost Cause (Baltimore: E. B. Treat, 1883), 489.
7. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Confederate Commissary General (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1996), 211.
8. Ibid., 187–189.
9. Ibid., 201–203.
10. Futrell, “Federal Trade,” 88–90.
11. Dattel, Cotton and Race, 172.
12. Cohn, Life and Times, 125.
13. Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction (New York: De Capo, 1995), 235.
14. Congress of the Confederate States of America, Statutes at Large, ch. 25, An Act to Prohibit Dealing in the Paper Currency of the Enemy, February 6, 1864.
15. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Confederate Act to Authorize the Exportation of Produce and Merchandise, accessed December 23, 2013, http://www.gilderlehrman.org/colletions/590534e9-fb05-44c7-a976-099992402122?back=/mweb/search%3Fpage%3D4%2526needle%3DTobacco%2520and%2520Smoking%253B%2526fields%3D_t301001410.
16. Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse,” 377–378.
17. O'Connor, “Lincoln and the Cotton Trade,” 24.
18. Edward Bates, Diary of Edward Bates (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), 265.
19. Orville Browning, Diary of Orville Hickman Browning (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1925), 563–564.
20. Thomas Boaz, Guns for Cotton (Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 1996), 2–3.
21. O'Connor, “Lincoln and the Cotton Trade,” 20–21.
22. Dattel, Cotton and Race, 82.
23. William C. Harris, Lincoln's Last Months (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 177.
24. Futrell, “Federal Trade,” 76.
25. Ibid., 128.
26. O'Connor, “Lincoln and the Cotton Trade,” 26.
27. James Ford Rhodes, The History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home Rule, vol. 5 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899), 282.
28. John Niven, Salmon P. Chase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 364–366, 374.
29. Futrell, “Federal Trade,” 70.
30. Ludwell Johnson, Red River Campaign (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993), 53.
31. Rhodes, History of the United States, 5:301.
32. Albert Bushnell Hart, Salmon Portland Chase (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), 228–229.<
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33. Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse,” 385–388.
34. Ibid., 388–389.
35. McPherson, Battle Cry, 353, 356, 499, 500.
36. A. Sellew Roberts, “The Federal Government and Confederate Cotton,” American Historical Review 32, no. 2 (January 1927): 267–268.
37. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 200–201.
38. Dean B. Mahin, One War at a Time (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1999), 45–46.
39. Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2010), 821–822.
40. Mahin, One War, 45–46.
41. Ibid., 48.
42. Burton Hendrick, Statesmen of the Lost Cause (New York: Literary Guild, 1939), 274–275.
CHAPTER THREE: THE PORT ROYAL EXPERIMENT
1. Edward Atkinson, Cheap Cotton by Free Labor (Boston: H. W. Dutton, 1861), 1–5.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Akiko Ochiai, Harvesting Freedom (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 53.
4. Pollard, Lost Cause, 194.
5. Ochiai, Harvesting Freedom, 53–57, 60.
6. Rose, Rehearsal,105–108.
7. Akiko Ochiai, “The Port Royal Experiment Revisited,” New England Quarterly 74, no. 1 (March 2001): 96.
8. Rose, Rehearsal, 205.
9. Ibid., 143.
10. Futrell, “Federal Trade,” 155.
11. Ibid., 143–157.
12. Rose, Rehearsal, 204.
13. Ochiai, Harvesting Freedom, 87.
14. Ibid., 67–69.
15. Ibid., 69–70.
16. Ibid., 90, 97, 101.
17. Ibid., 95.
18. Ibid., 99.
19. Ochiai, “Port Royal Experiment,” 97–99; Eric Foner, Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 53.
20. Ochiai, “Port Royal Experiment,” 106, 109.
21. Ibid., 114.
22. Michael Shapiro, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” New York Times Opinionator, September 6, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/rehearsal-for-reconstruction/.