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

2. Calculating the Cost of Union: Nationalism and Sectionalism in a Republican Era, 1796– 1818

Even as the ligaments of an Anglo-American cotton trade were forming, geopolitical developments on both sides of the Atlantic threatened to rip them apart. The resumption of warfare between Britain and France in 1803 exposed the United States by placing it in a precarious position between its chief trading partner and its old ally. Again their neutral status initially enabled Mid-Atlantic and New England merchants to prosper by carrying West Indian produce back to Europe after a brief stopover in American ports. Just as in the 1790s, however, such profits coupled with wartime concerns eventually led European belligerents to turn on the United States. Impressments of American sailors and attacks on American cargo multiplied. Britain’s naval supremacy, especially after the Royal Navy’s destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, enabled that nation to target American carriers and ensure that supplies were funneled to British rather than continental ports. Napoleon responded in kind, seizing any American ships he could to ensure that they did not aid his enemy’s war effort. How would America respond to these overt challenges to its sovereignty and perceived rights? How would those Americans from cotton-growing regions react? chapter two Calculating the Cost of Union Nationalism and Sectionalism in a Republican Era, 1796–1818 62 The Fragile Fabric of Union The challenges were familiar, but the party facing them had changed. In 1800, a diverse political coalition of the Federalist administration’s opponents helped usher Thomas Jefferson into the presidency. Calling for a more decentralized government that would empower the states, provide equal protection for the nation’s different interests, and thwart the supposed conspiracy of “Anglomen,” Virginialed Republicans took control of the executive and legislative branches. This loosely knit alliance, which included leading members of the emerging Cotton South, would be responsible for redressing Americans’ grievances abroad. Like their Federalist predecessors, they sought neutrality, but a deep Anglophobia prevented them from signing a treaty which might have eased tensions. Instead they chose commercial and eventually military warfare, choices that dramatically but divergently affected the nation’s various interests. By so doing they transformed discussions about retaliation into debates over the nature of the nation’s political economy. Merchants, artisans, farmers, and planters, all claiming to stand with Jefferson, discussed their particular place within the nation and became hyperaware of how real and hypothetical commercial policies affected their own interests . The arduous and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find a peaceful solution that could both protect America’s diverse interests and redress violations of American rights tested Republicans’ vision of a decentralized economic union of equals. Cotton growers found themselves in a particularly precarious position during this extended national debate, the results of which promised to affect dramatically their region’s access to European markets. Like most Americans, they viewed French and especially British abuses against American sailors and ships as affronts to American sovereignty. Concern for the nation’s international reputation and support for their merchant allies necessitated a response of one sort or another. Their own relatively peripheral geographic and political place within the Union and the Republican Party did not allow them to dictate policy, so most were inclined to defer to the Virginia-led party and the neomercantilist measures it had long embraced. The cotton trade’s rising national and international importance , however, ensured that it would feature prominently in Republican efforts at commercial warfare. Yet, any response targeting Britain would seriously threaten, perhaps even paralyze, the still-young Anglo-American cotton trade deemed so central to the Lower South’s economic growth. Navigating these various economic and political commitments forced groups in the Cotton South to perceive economic coercion and ultimately warfare against Great Britain as an affirmation of their patriotism and a sacrifice for the nation and Republicanism. Calculating the Cost of Union 63 That many northern merchants neither desired nor appreciated southern-led measures allegedly undertaken for northerners’ protection only increased intersectional frustrations. Eventually, the triumphal nationalism spawned by the war effort subsumed these deep tensions within the Jeffersonian Republican Party. Nevertheless, the process by which Americans had been led into a “Second War of Independence” revealed much about cotton’s place within the nation and the world and would cast a long shadow on subsequent debates. The Cotton South and a Republican Coalition of “Equals” By the late 1790s frustration over Federalist policies had led disparate and...