The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (review)

In the 1850s, cotton was king and slavery its queen dowager. More than two-thirds of the world’s supply of raw cotton was planted and harvested by African Americans in the lower South of the United States, and cotton constituted about 50 percent of American exports. “A profound statesman,” wrote Cincinnati publisher David Christy, King Cotton “knows what measures will best sustain his throne” and would do just about anything “to defeat all schemes of emancipation” (4).

According to Schoen, cotton planters and the politicians who represented their interests are not best understood as agrarian traditionalists, reacting defensively amid a “crisis of fear” against a “mighty capitalist and modernizing North” (199). Many of them, in fact, did not see free trade and manufacturing as incompatible, and endorsed a communications and transportation infrastructure, so long as it were funded by private capital and state revenues. Sustained by rising cotton prices and a growing European market, Schoen claims, their march toward secession was not motivated by a rejection of economic realism “but an overabundance of faith in it” (10). Although they miscalculated, disunionists had good reason to believe that European powers shared their faith in cotton for global trade. Hence, they cast aside their anti-slavery sentiments to support the Confederate cause.

Drawing on an impressive array of primary sources, including printed speeches, periodicals, pamphlets, newspapers, and personal correspondence, The Fragile Fabric of Union (despite its leaden prose) is a useful corrective to accounts that emphasize dependency and isolation in southern economics and politics. Nonetheless, Schoen’s argument is not entirely persuasive. He acknowledges, for example, that without the Panic of 1839, cotton producers might not have succeeded in diversifying the economy of the South. After all, he writes, the disproportionate investment in land and slaves that historians and economists have seen as a drag on commercial and industrial development “remained in place.” By building canals and railroads, moreover, the North already had a lock on trade with the Midwest. Thus, even if enlightened elites called them strengths, the economic institutions of the South actually posed systemic problems.

Nor does Schoen pay sufficient attention to the role—and motivation—of southerners unconnected with the cotton trade in the perpetuation of slavery and the onset of the Civil War. How did they balance interest and ideology in deciding “to end one experiment with federalism and begin another” (5)? Even if, as Schoen indicates, the cotton trade was essential at first to the re-conceptualization of “the peculiar institution” as necessary, natural, and good, did not slavery emerge as an abstract ideal—and an independent variable—by the middle of the nineteenth century?

Some southerners may not have been as “inextricably materialist” as Schoen deems them. But in this provocative book, he forces historians who have not done so already to discount “Lost Cause” lore and pay greater attention to southerners who thought they could use their monopoly in raw cotton as leverage to advance the interests of their region in the larger world.