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

5. An Unnatural Union: King Cotton and Lower South Secession, 1849– 1860

The debate over slavery’s expansion, along with concerns over its political and economic security in the Union, propelled the Cotton States toward secession. Early advocates of secession urged that the drastic step needed to be taken at the first sign of defeat: California’s entrance as a free state. That event led William Trescot to declare in 1850 that a “political revolution” had been inaugurated and “the only safety of the South is the establishment of a political centre within itself; in simpler words, the formation of an independent nation.”1 Others in the Deep South agreed, as southern rights associations sprang up throughout the Lower South, many threatening secession unless Congress protected southern interests. In the spirit of John C. Calhoun and at the behest of Governor John Quitman, the Mississippi legislature called for a southern convention to ensure the return of fugitive slaves and to guarantee slaveholders’ access to new lands. Observers braced for a possible secessionist triumph when delegates elected vocal South Carolina secessionist, Robert Barnwell Rhett, president. This first secession crisis , and particularly Trescot’s arguments, disseminated as a pamphlet entitled “The Position and Course of the South,” provide insights into Cotton South secessionist thought and a template, albeit a premature one, for future action. It chapter five An Unnatural Union King Cotton and Lower South Secession, 1849–1860 198 The Fragile Fabric of Union exhibited some of the defensiveness and irrationality historians have typically attributed to alleged “fire-eaters.” Yet early secessionists also used domestic and international developments to provide a surprisingly pragmatic, and materialdriven , argument for southern independence. In explaining the origins of domestic conflict, Trescot prioritized allegedly universal laws of political economy, proposing that slavery had given the struggle between labor and capital (modernity’s “vital principle of political organization”) an ominous sectional tone. “At the North,” he explained, “labour and capital are equal; at the South, labour is inferior to capital. At the North labour and capital strive; the one, to get all it can; the other, to give as little as it may—they are enemies . At the South, labour is dependent on capital, and having ceased to be rivals, they have ceased to be enemies.” Race-based slavery had permanently subordinated the South’s primary labor force and thus, according to Trescot, muted class conflict and left slaveholding capitalists to dominate southern politics. By contrast , northern working-class whites composed the Democratic Party’s rank and file, especially in eastern cities and western farms. “Can a more violent contrast be imagined?” he retorted. “Free labour hates slave labour—capital, at the mercy of labour, is jealous of capital owning labour—where are their points of sympathy ?” There were none, Trescot concluded: “The North and the South are irreconceivably hostile . . . their social and political systems cannot co-exist . . . the one in the nature of things wages internecine war against the other.” Contrasting social systems impacted almost every aspect of politics, creating “competing systems of representation and taxation” and even divergent foreign policies.2 Proponents for secession drew richly from international developments and converted earlier free traders’ calls for U.S. and British global cooperation into an imagined alliance between the South and Europe. As events suggested that the North was “in fact, a foreign power,” Trescot placed almost infinite faith in cotton ’s power to ensure cooperation from allegedly more natural allies abroad. Quoting a September 1850 London Times article that highlighted the significance of the cotton trade, Trescot noted that Britain’s trade “with America transcends all others.” “Does it not follow,” he arrogantly claimed, “that the industrial economy and the system of foreign relations of the nation, so far as based on commercial principles, should spring from, and be controlled by the cotton growing States?” A southern Confederacy, “cultivated by a slave population—supplying the staple of the world’s manufacture, and ranged in imposing strength around the Gulf of Mexico, so as to command the trade of the Isthmus connection,” would have “a close alliance with the few great manufacturing nations” and possess an An Unnatural Union 199 “unchangeable resolution to leave the interior affairs of other nations to their own discussion.” Trescot predicted that “the most selfish interests of the foreign world” would prompt “a speedy recognition of [the South’s] national independence ” while perpetuating selfish northern merchants’ and manufacturers’ “active diplomatic rivalry with Great Britain.”3 “Out of the union,” another South Carolinian...