The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North

6. “All Cotton Became Tainted with Treason”: The Cotton Trade and Corruption in the Occupied South

6 “All Cotton Became Tainted with Treason” The Cotton Trade and Corruption in the Occupied South _ This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation throughout the world . . . hath made a shameful conquest of itself. Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life, How happy then were my ensuing death! —Richard II One final scandal, which culminated in the Civil War’s closing months, demonstrated that Northerners had not given up their intense fear of corruption in all its insidious guises. This scandal centered on the cotton trade in the occupied South. Americans during the Civil War era suspected “King Cotton” of possessing vast persuasive, and potentially corrupting, powers—and not entirely without reason. While the renewal of commercial ties between Northern investors and Southern planters under the supervision of the central government struck some liberalminded Republicans, like President Lincoln, as beneficial and desirable, it seemed otherwise to critics, belonging to both parties, in Congress, the army, the press, and even within the administration. From the Department of the Gulf in 1862, to the spring 1864 Red River campaign, and then to the capture of Savannah later that same year, Northerners both within the administration and without came to fear that greedy, unpatriotic speculators were profiting off of the suspect crop so central to the South’s slave society—and in so doing, undermining the war effort and the moral health “All Cotton Became Tainted with Treason” 155 of the republic. These fears culminated in an 1865 congressional investigation into the administration’s management of the cotton trade, whose blistering findings, along with strong opposition to Lincoln’s policy by several of his chief subordinates, forced a belated end to the practice, at least theoretically. Cotton seemed inherently dangerous and corrupting to many Northerners , who saw the crop as being virtually synonymous with slavery in the Old South. Following the Northerner Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton cultivation had exploded in the South to became by far the country’s most profitable and important export crop. Slave labor, overwhelmingly used for cultivating the crop, consequently became firmly rooted at the center of the Southern economy. During the 1860s it was therefore commonplace for supporters of the Union to blame “King Cotton” for the sectional crisis, and for the Civil War itself. Further,cottonandslaveryseemedtohavecombinedtocreateaSouthern society that was dangerously un-republican. As an April 1861 article in the Atlantic Monthly asserted: “It is the inevitable tendency of the Cotton dynasty to be opposed to general intelligence. It is opposed to that, then, withoutwhicharepubliccannothopetosucceed. . . . KingCotton . . . has led almost one-half of the Republic to completely ignore, if not to reject, the one principle absolutely essential to that Republic’s continued existence .” Cotton itself had set the South on the path to tyranny, and the nation on the road to ruin. The crop seemed sinister, if not malicious, in light of the social and political consequences of its spread. “With every form of government that man can invent, some vice or corruption creeps in with the very institution, which grows up along with and at last destroys it,” the author warned. “For love of cotton, the very intelligence of the community, the lifeblood of their polity, is disregarded and forgotten.” Cotton, he and many others feared, had proved to be the corrupter and potential destroyer of American political institutions, and even American liberty. In the minds of worried Northerners, cotton had become inseparably intertwined with the supposed Southern backwardness, arrogance, and exploitativeness that they disdained and distrusted. It is hardly surprising , then, that the already suspect crop proved central to one of the most persistent scandals in the wartime North.1 The scandal over trading in cotton with the enemy had its roots earlier in the conflict. The trade in cotton that began in Ben Butler’s Department of the Gulf in 1862 had greatly increased as Confederate resistance dwin- Traitors and Trollops 156 dled.Merchantsandentrepreneurswithpresidentialpermissionfoundthe opportunitytoenrichthemselvesthroughthesuddenlyrenewedavailability of hoarded Southern cotton irresistible. Although trade beyond Union lines was illegal, and even within occupied regions, technically subject to Treasury Department supervision, it persisted along the vast, indistinct, ever-shifting, and difficult to police boundary between the two “nations” at war throughout the conflict. With the war playing havoc with the supply of cotton, by 1864 and 1865 prices had soared to the highest rates of the entire nineteenth century, making these suspected...