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

3. Protecting Slavery and Free Trade: The Political Economy of Cotton, 1818– 1833

In the midst of attacks against slavery in 1856, South Carolina historian and commentator Louisa McCord exclaimed that though “men and prejudices have gone against us . . . the noble science, not perhaps too justly named Political Economy will and must be our judge.” McCord’s confidence that political economy would justify the Slave South has seemed unfathomable to subsequent scholars who see slavery as both unjustifiable and economically backward. Such a verdict remained far less clear in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in a region rapidly becoming the chief supplier for the world’s most profitable business. Many, perhaps most, commentators in the Deep South shared McCord’s faith in the “science whose object is the weal[th] of nations.”1 Though Cotton State planters and politicians were certainly not the first or only to embrace political economy, and particularly laissez-faire axioms, few in the western world repeated them as often as they did. Their rhetoric emerged in 1819–1820 out of a direct and pragmatic response to “restrictionist” policies against the movement of labor, capital, and trade. The conviction that followed drew inspiration from changing international circumstances and growing trends in Atlantic intellectual circles, as war-weary chapter three Protecting Slavery and Free Trade The Political Economy of Cotton, 1818–1833 Protecting Slavery and Free Trade 101 Europeans and many Americans turned away from bloody battlefields and toward the creation of a more peaceful and profitable global system. The “modern discipline par excellence” provided children of the Enlightenment something that the subjective vagaries of moral philosophy, romanticism, and theology could not: supposedly objective laws that explained individual and collective action.2 Few politicians understood the intricate arguments of Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, or David Ricardo, but as casual readers they freely quoted simplified versions to garner support for their positions. Most believers shared a commitment to Adam Smith’s understanding of political economy, defined by him as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” intended “to enrich both the people and the sovereign.”3 Groups within the United States could not agree, however, on what precisely that meant. Adjusting to peace in Europe and the new opportunities presented by successful revolutions in Latin America proved exceedingly divisive for U.S. citizens, who disagreed over the past’s meaning and the future’s direction. The fierce debates over the subject elevated the apparent divergence of economic interests and even raised the specter of disunion. Political histories of this era have tended to relegate the tariff debate to mere background for the purportedly more important stories, seen by some as the crisis over slavery sparked by the Missouri controversy, and by others as the looming bank war and capitalism’s final triumph over democratic agrarians.4 This deemphasis, especially when coupled with a lack of awareness of international political economy, has led many histories to see cries against active protection— particularly from South Carolinians—as insincere or part of a shadow war against forcesthreateningslavery.Slaveryandlaissez-faireidealswere,ofcourse,enmeshed but in more subtle, complicated, and less all-consuming ways than have been previously suggested. Cotton South opponents of protection predicated their position on the assumption that (barring a cataclysmic event) slavery and the commercial agrarianism it supported would and should remain a permanent fixture in their locales. They also saw freer trade as necessary for slavery’s continued profitability, and thus some perceived protection as an indirect effort to undermine slavery. Protecting slavery and foreign commerce led most cotton planters, merchants , and politicians to seek a passive national economic policy, even as they continued to expand local estate regulations deemed necessary to safeguard slavery.5 Nor were many troubled by the theoretical contradiction between free trade arguments for the unrestricted flow of labor and capital and the system of slavery they sought to perpetuate. When forced to pragmatically confront the potential 102 The Fragile Fabric of Union challenge that freer trade presented to slavery—in the form of free black sailors involved in trade—local and state officials compromised but did not discard their intellectual commitment to free trade. Instead, they racialized it, contending that classical economic theory applied only to whites and not to allegedly lazy slaves or incendiary black Jacobins. Sporadically enforced “Negro Seaman’s Acts” sought to preserve slavery by curtailing the number of free blacks entering into port while still allowing “safe” commerce to enter. Though further flattening white understandings of African...