Notes
Notes Introduction 1. David Christy, Cotton is King: Or the Culture of Cotton, and its Relation to Agriculture , Manufactures and Commerce and also to the Free Colored People of the United States, and to those who hold that Slavery is in itself sinful, 2nd ed. (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856), quotes from 62–63, 264–65; Edward B. Bryan, Letters to the Southern People Concerning the Acts of Congress and the Treaties with Great Britain, in relation to the African Slave Trade (Charleston: Press of Walker, Evans & Co., 1858), esp. 20. Quite appropriately E. N. Elliot’s assemblage of proslavery pieces placed a slightly revised version of Christy’s piece at the front: Cotton is King and Proslavery Arguments (Augusta: Pritchard, Abbott, & Loomis, 1860). 2. According to official values, in 1820 cotton yarn and manufactures were valued at £22,532,000 of the £38,400,000 in overseas trade. B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 180, 282, 295; Stuart Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790–1860: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), table 1.D. Cotton’s global significance is expanded on in the geographically and chronologically capacious book by Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy, The Fibre That Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Sven Beckert’s two recent articles: “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December 2004): 1405– 38, and “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (September 2005): 498–526. 3. Historians of the South have been particularly drawn toward overly deterministic understandings of economics and politics, many of them informed by systems theory, including Immanual Wallerstein’s classic, The Modern System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). See Eugene and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Even Harold Woodman’s pathbreaking and invaluable examination of the cotton factorage system falls back into dependency as its major interpretive conclusion: King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968). Themes of dependency in Lower South thought are explored most forcefully in Joseph Persky, The Burden of Dependency: Colonial Themes in Southern 272 Notes to Pages 4–5 Economic Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Concerns about dependency (first on Britain and then on the North) did play an important role in shaping Lower South agendas, just as British manufacturers expressed similar concerns about overdependence on the South. Yet, especially within an age of commerce, participants stressed the positive as well as the potential negative effects of what many cotton planters saw as “mutual dependence.” In any event, it would be inappropriate to assume that concerns over dependence paralyzed southern thought or action. A failure to appropriately integrate the Lower South into modern developments and a minimization of southern planters’ agency during the antebellum period has set interpretations of secession on a course to see it as a defensive reaction to modern developments assumed to have threatened the South’s traditional society. For more on this see the essay on sources. 4. Though cotton’s role in shaping national and diplomatic agendas remains woefully understudied, some recent work has appreciated the agency of cotton planters at the local and state level, especially in the early national period. See, for example, the work of Joyce Chaplin: “Creating a Cotton South,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 2 (May 1991): 171–200, and An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1993). A few studies have taken cotton as a serious factor in shaping isolated national policy decisions: Thomas Hietala’s, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Roger Kennedy’s Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Gavin Wright’s...
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